Creative education

Creative education is when students are encouraged to problem solve when faced with a challenge and can be used in all subjects. Instead of being taught to reiterate what was learned, students learn to develop their ability to find various solutions to a problem. Coming up with various out-of-the box solutions is known as divergent thinking and there is no one way of cultivating this skill - largely due to the newness of the concept and the limited scientific information on creativity.

The increasing interest in creative education is due to the need for more critical thinkers in business and politics to be able to solve complex problems. As the world becomes more interconnected, it is no longer possible to make linear discisions in business and in politics. Current leaders are looking for people who can bring about new ideas to solve pressing issues.

Creative education also creates a more engaging, personalized learning experience which typically improves the performance of each student. When students have more say in their education, they become more engaged which helps facilitate learning. Plus, the goal of creative education is to challenge each student and encourage differentness. Instead of "standardizing" how students approach a problem, different responses would be encouraged. This, in turn, allows more than one type of learner to exist within a classroom.

In Csikszentmihalyi's five-step process to elicit creative thinking, incubation is a necessary step. Meaning, the use of unconscious thought is needed to solve complex problems. A problem such as 2+2 is a linear thought process that can performed in the consciousness. Trying to solve the equation for gravity requires more complex connections in the brain which has been seen to require the unconscious thought process. In application to education, this may include requiring more recess time to facilitate the creative thought process. However, there is limited research on how exactly the creative thought process works and how it can be elicited.

In relevance to education, there is research that emphasizes that students and teachers need more freedom to allow a more creative education process to take place. Students who can participate in their education show more creativity but for this type of education to work, teachers must also have more control over the curriculum. This may look like the teacher determining the curriculum for the entire year or determining how much time each students needs to spend on each subject. Instead of the decision making starting from the top-down (state to schools), the decision making starts from the ground-up (teacher to schools). This isn't suggesting there shouldn't be some national guideline but the idea is to place more trust in the teachers as they are on-the-grounds, engaging with each student.

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Wikipedia