Imagine: How Creativity Works

by Jonah Lehrer

  In a series of essays on Elizabethan literature, T. S. Eliot tried to make sense of the astonishing outpouring of creativity in Elizabethan England. While most critics celebrated the “mythology of Shakespeare” — the man was an outlier who defi ed all explanation — Eliot focused on the world beyond the writer. He argued that it wasn’t an accident that so many famous poets lived in sixteenth-century London, or that the greatest playwright of all time wrote for the same queen as Marlowe and Jonson. Instead, Eliot believed, these artists were lucky to live in a culture that made it relatively easy to make art. They had been schooled in the traditions of the past but were able to steal from their peers; they knew Latin but wrote in the vernacular; they celebrated complexity in their plays but still managed to sell plenty of tickets. As a result, these Elizabethan writers were able to fulfi ll their literary potential, transforming a promising time into an age of excess genius. “The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,” Eliot wrote. “But less talent was wasted.”

  3.

  The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) is perched on the edge of the Mississippi. Although the public high school is only a few blocks from the souvenir shops of the French Quarter, there are no tourists here, just shotgun homes, hipster coffee shops, and corner bars. The campus itself is flanked by a freight rail yard and blocks of abandoned factories. This is a neighborhood shadowed by the past tense: that was a praline warehouse; there was the rice mill; this is where they arrested Homer Plessy. If you follow the train tracks to St. Claude and then cross the canal to the east, you end up in the Lower Ninth Ward. The homes there still have high-water marks from the hurricane. (After Katrina, the NOCCA campus was used as a staging ground by the Louisiana National Guard for nearly nine months.)

  The buses start to arrive at one in the afternoon. The students come to this art school from everywhere; NOCCA draws from the poor parishes of the city and the wealthy suburbs, from the swampy towns of Lake Pontchartrain and the tract homes of Jefferson Parish. Some kids drive all the way from Baton Rouge, ninety miles west. Although the teenagers spend their mornings at “regular school” — their dismissive name for any place that isn’t NOCCA — they spend their afternoons here, working on their art.

  The students are part of a grand tradition. Since its founding in 1973, NOCCA has graduated an impressive list of artists, including Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Wendell Pierce, Terence Blanchard, Anthony Mackie, Harry Connick Jr., and Trombone Shorty. In 2010, the school sent 98 percent of its seniors to college. While most of these students attended local universities, such as Tulane and LSU, NOCCA graduates were also accepted at NYU, UCLA, Juilliard, Northwestern, Oberlin, and the Cooper Union. More than 80 percent of these students received some sort of financial-aid package, with the average student receiving more than $99,000. This means that, although NOCCA costs less than $5 million a year to run, it consistently generates more than $12 million in scholarships per graduating class.

  Kyle Wedberg, the CEO of NOCCA, leads me on a tour of the campus. It’s a hot spring day, but Wedberg is dressed in a neatly pressed suit. He tells me about the students as we make our way around them, dodging tuba players, a huddle of kids writing sonnets, and an outdoor dance rehearsal. “Many of these kids come from failing schools,” Wedberg says. “Many of them have rough family stories or have to work a night job after they’re done here. These are not the students who typically get full rides at good colleges. And yet, after a few years at NOCCA, they’re ready to go anywhere.”

  How does NOCCA do it? The process begins with the freshman auditions. Each department holds its own tryouts, requiring applicants to demonstrate their talent. Most of the time, their talent is raw — there are trumpet players who taught themselves how to play and actors who have never taken an acting class. But that doesn’t really matter: the teachers are looking for potential, not polish.

  Once accepted into NOCCA, the students enter into what seems, at first glance, an antiquated model of education. The school is defi ned by its master-apprentice approach: the students learn by doing. (Every teacher at NOCCA is also a working artist.) The kids arrive at the school in the early afternoon and then, after scarfing down the free apples and granola bars handed out in the courtyard, head straight to class. What’s interesting is what does not happen next. The students don’t sit in their chairs and listen to a long lecture. (Many rooms at NOCCA don’t even have chairs.) They don’t retrieve hefty textbooks or begin series of tedious exercises designed to raise their scores on a standardized test. As it turns out, the students don’t do any of the things that defi ne the typical high-school experience.

  Instead, the students spend their time creating: they walk over to their instruments and sketchbooks and costumes and get to work. The campus vibrates with all this imaginative activity; the riffs of jazz echo in the courtyard, and the hallways are flecked with oil paint. The sculpture room smells like wet clay, and the trash cans outside the writing studio are filled to the brim with crumpled sheets of paper. “We’re a hundred and twenty years behind the times in all the right ways,” Wedberg says. “At some point, vocational education became a dirty word. It became unfashionable to teach kids by having them do stuff, by having them make things. Instead, schooling became all about giving kids facts and tests. Now, I’ve got nothing against facts and tests, but memorization is not the only kind of thinking we should be encouraging.” Wedberg pauses, mops the sweat on his brow with his tie, and then leans in as if he is about to confess a secret. “When we obsess over tests, when we teach the way we’re teaching now, we send the wrong message to our students,” he tells me. “We’re basically telling them that creativity is a bad idea. That it’s a waste of time. That it’s less important than fi lling in the right bubble. And I can’t imagine a worse message than that.”

  Consider a recent survey of several dozen elementary-school teachers conducted by psychologists at Skidmore College. When asked whether they wanted creative kids in their classroom, every teacher said yes. But when the same teachers were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures, the traits most closely aligned with creative thinking (such as being “freely expressive”) were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. Those daydreamers and improvisers might have been imaginative, but they were harder to teach and they underperformed on standardized tests. As a result, they were routinely dismissed and discouraged. The researchers summarized their sad data: “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”

  The point is that the typical school isn’t designed for self-expression; the creative process is often regarded as a classroom failure. “Everyone agrees that creativity is a key skill for the twenty-first century,” Wedberg says. “But we’re not teaching our kids this skill. We’ve become so obsessed with rote learning, with making sure that kids memorize the year of some old battle. But in this day and age that’s the least valuable kind of learning. That’s the stuff you can look up on your phone! If our graduates are going to succeed in the real world, then they have to be able to make stuff. We’re a vocational school, but the vocation we care about is creativity.”

  While NOCCA encourages teenagers to exercise their imagination, recent evidence suggests that it’s important to begin this process as early as possible. In one study, researchers compared the mental development of four-year-olds enrolled in a preschool that emphasized unstructured play with those in a more typical preschool in which kids were taught phonetics and counting skills. After a year in the classroom, the students in the play-based school scored better on a variety of crucial cognitive skills, including self-control, the allocation of attention, and working memory. (All of these skills have been consistently linked to academic and real-world achievement.) According to the researchers, the advantage of play is that it’s often deeply serious — kids are most focused when they’re hav
ing fun. In fact, the results from the controlled study were so compelling that the experiment was halted early — it seemed unethical to keep kids in the typical preschool when the play curriculum was so much more effective. As the authors noted, “Unstructured play is often thought frivolous, but it appears to be essential.”

  Wedberg knows that most NOCCA graduates won’t become professional artists. That boy obsessed with the saxophone might become a salesman, and that girl who only wants to tap-dance might become a designer. Nevertheless, these students will still leave the school with an essential talent, which is the ability to develop his or her own talent. Because they spend five hours every day working on their own creations, they learn what it takes to get good at something, to struggle and fail and try again. They figure out how to dissect difficult problems and cope with criticism. (One of the defi ning features of every NOCCA class is the crit session, in which students constructively criticize one another’s work.) The students will learn how to manage their own time and persevere in the face of difficulty. “Every kid leaves here with an ability to push themselves,” Wedberg says. “We show kids what it takes to make something great.”

  This is perhaps the most important aspect of NOCCA’s project-based curriculum: it exposes students to the brute reality of the creative process. (Remember Milton Glaser’s motto: Art Is Work.) It doesn’t matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry — if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work is done. Woody Allen famously declared that “eighty percent of success is showing up.” NOCCA teaches kids how to show up again and again.

  In recent years, psychologists have studied the relationship between persistence and creative achievement. They’ve discovered that the ability to stick with it — the technical name for this trait is grit — is one of the most important predictors of success.

  “I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of the psychological trait. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.” Duckworth has found that levels of grit predict success at the National Spelling Bee, graduation from the Special Forces boot camp, and even teacher effectiveness in the Teach for America program. (In many instances, grit explains a greater percentage of individual variation than intelligence and IQ scores.) “What grit allows you to do is to take advantage of your potential,” Duckworth says. “Because even the smartest, most talented people still need to practice. If you’re a violin player, grit is what gets you to keep on practicing, even when the practice isn’t very fun. If you’re a novelist, grit allows you to finally finish that first novel. And then it lets you keep on working on the novel until it’s actually good.” The vocational approach at NOCCA helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less. While most people assume that art schools are somehow lacking in rigor — “They think we just let the students screw around,” says one NOCCA administrator — the irony is that these schools do a much better job of endowing their apprentices with the most essential mental skills. In one painting class, I watched as a teacher dissected the work of a level 1 student. (At NOCCA, kids are grouped by skill level, not age or grade.) “This is an interesting idea,” she said while reviewing the brightly colored still life. “But you didn’t execute. I can tell that you rushed a little bit — your brushstrokes are all over the place. This could have been very good. But you needed to put in more work.” And so the fifteen-year-old is given yet another lesson in grit. He is reminded, once again, that creativity is damn hard.

  NOCCA isn’t for everyone, of course. Some students aren’t interested in making art or performing onstage. Some teenagers don’t want to stay at school until dark or commute for hours on the bus. Nevertheless, the guiding principles of NOCCA — that creativity can be taught, and that our kids are reservoirs of untapped talent — deserve to be widely implemented. Although school reform typically focuses on the bottom quartile of students, we shouldn’t let this concern for those at risk of dropping out blind us to the importance of encouraging excellence. “Our goal here is to create a pocket of brilliance,” Wedberg says. “Most of our students would do fine if they were stuck in a regular school. They’d get decent grades. They’d probably even go to some kind of college. But we shouldn’t be satisfied with that. We should insist that they live up to their potential. Because it’s not enough to be good when you can be great.”

  And it’s not just art schools that are creating pockets of brilliance. High Tech High, a San Diego charter school, was founded in 2000 by a group of local tech executives frustrated by a lack of skilled workers. The school renovated an abandoned navy facility, transforming the cavernous concrete warehouses into a series of loft-like classrooms. Like NOCCA, High Tech High emphasizes learning by doing — every student is required to complete numerous projects that take up much of his or her school day. (Instead of playing with paint and guitars, the kids play with scrap metal and programming code.) “People act like we’ve got this radical concept of education,” says Larry Rosenstock, the fast-talking CEO of the school. “But it’s actually been around for a long time. [John] Dewey said it best: ‘Understanding derives from activity.’ Kids don’t learn when they’re consuming information, when someone is talking down to them. They learn when they’re producing stuff.

  That’s how you get them to work hard without realizing they’re working.” Past projects at High Tech High have included the construction of a human-powered submarine and a robot capable of accurately kicking a soccer ball forty-five feet. Last year, a High Tech High art class spent several weeks retrofitting an old cigarette vending machine — it cost two hundred dollars on eBay — so that it could sell student paintings. The machine is now set up in the lobby.

  While High Tech High was initially criticized for its emphasis on these projects — some argued that students needed more classroom instruction — their academic results are indisputable. Every single High Tech High graduate has been admitted to college, and more than 85 percent of these students have graduated from four-year institutions. Furthermore, nearly a third of these graduates are first-generation college students. (High Tech High admits students using a random lottery system, drawing freshmen from all over the San Diego area.) “Our kids are growing up in a world of constant change,” Rosenstock says. “There is no test for the future that we can teach to. What we do know, however, is that being able to make new things is still going to be the way to succeed.

  Creativity is a skill that never goes out of style.” What schools like NOCCA and High Tech High demonstrate is that the imagination is too important to be ignored. When children are allowed to create, they’re able to develop the sophisticated talents that are required for success in the real world. Instead of learning how to pass a standardized test, they learn how to cope with complexity and connect ideas, how to bridge disciplines and improve their fi rst drafts. These mental talents can’t be taught in an afternoon — there is no textbook for ingenuity, no lesson plan for divergent thinking. Rather, they must be discovered: the child has to learn by doing.

  This was demonstrated in a recent study led by MIT psychologist Laura Schulz. The experiment consisted of giving four-year-olds a new toy outfitted with four tubes. What made the toy interesting is that each tube did something different. One tube, for instance, generated a squeaking sound, while another tube turned into a tiny mirror.

  The first group of students were shown the toy by a scientist who declared that she’d just found it on the floor. As she revealed the toy to the kids, she “accidentally” pulled one of the tubes and made it squeak. Her response was sheer surprise: “Huh! Did you see that? Let me tr
y to do that again!” The second group got a very different presentation. Instead of feigning surprise, the scientist acted like a typical teacher. She told the students that she’d gotten a new toy and that she wanted to show them how it worked. Then she deliberately made the toy squeak.

  After the demonstration, both groups of children were given the toy to play with. Not surprisingly, all of the children pulled on the first tube and laughed at the squeak. But then something interesting happened. While the children from the second group quickly got bored with the toy, those in the first group kept on playing with it. Instead of being satisfied with the squeaks, they explored the other tubes and discovered all sorts of hidden surprises. According to the psychologists, the different reactions were caused by the act of teaching. When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.

  That’s why the best schools ensure that unstructured play —what happens when the child creates and explores on his or her own — is an essential part of the classroom experience. It doesn’t matter if the student is writing a poem or soldering a computer circuit or scribbling with crayons — she needs to feel for herself the thrill and struggle of making something new. Because even if these students at NOCCA and High Tech High don’t end up pursuing their art or majoring in computer science, they will never forget what they learned as teenage artists and engineers.