"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
-Pablo Picasso
Susan Robertson was right when she described, in an article for Ideas to Go, that "We all seem to have an instinctive sense that kids are more creative than adults. We don't question it; we all intuitively know it's true and we view it as a natural state for children. And it is."
This is a good thing. But what happens in those eighteen years to create stifled adults? According to an article in Newsweek, "With intelligence [IQ], there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect--each generation, scores go up about 10 points. With creativity [CQ], a reverse trend has just been identified... American creativity scores are falling" (Bronson and Merryman).
We need creativity. Environmental issues, international affairs, medical technologies and almost anything else depend on the creativity and out-of-the-box thinking of a human mind. Robots can only go so far. So isn't it important to protect and harvest the creativity we're born with? I would think so, but it doesn't seem to work that way in a 21st-century system.
Children themselves are goldmines, even outside of the fact that they're founts of creativity. Kids are primarily unbiased on social issues. Sure, they may hear what their parents say, but they don't necessarily care. So if we presented them with a problem--without using the political terms that their parents or teachers may speak negatively about--they just might be able to come up with a solution.
Louis Braille was blinded at three, and invented the Braille system as a teenager. Earmuffs were designed by a kid named Chester Greenwood. An eleven-year-old girl invented Crayon Holders after being frustrated with breaking crayons in her art class. The trampoline was invented by a teenager in 1930.
Kids have a lot to offer, and I believe that we often don't give them enough credit.
There are, of course, practical issues to the idea of having children attempt to solve societal problems: kids aren't educated enough to understand technical issues or acute enough to consider complex obstacles surrounding their otherwise brilliant answer. They may not realize that it's impossible to travel through time, but it's quite possible they'll have the imagination to bring history to life unlike how we've seen it before.
Instead of congressmen collaborating with top educators to create new-and-improved public education standards, why aren't we asking the students?
If nothing else, I think we all realize that we depend on kids to be the next generation. It's up to them to use the tools we give them in order to make tomorrow even better. It's up to them to protect and nurture what we've learned, in order to advance even further. It's up to them to continue the human race.
So shouldn't we take them seriously? I'm not saying that we don't value them already, but we are inclined to occasionally think of them as annoying or inconvenient. We're often frustrated by them. But, without kids, we would just be reinventing the wheel.
"The creative adult is the child who survived."
-Albert Einstein