Why encourage creativity in school given most employers don't reward it?

Humans can be more than their place in the workforce. And we should be.

When asked for advice from school students Kurt Vonnegut responded

“ November 5, 2006

Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:

I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.

Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

God bless you all!

Kurt Vonnegut”

https://news.lettersofnote.com/p/make-your-soul-grow?s=r

This is about the most “begging the question” Ask HN I’ve ever seen.

What evidence is there that most employers don’t reward creativity? Most of my employers have.

There are whole industries devoted to creative endeavors!

Employed work is not everything.

There is life around paid work and we may enjoy / need creativity there, for entertainment, to change the world or everything in between.

(though there are many situations where being creative is useful nay instrumental in paid work too)

If anything, children are often very creative and (early) school also acts as a way to shut down some of this creativity, teaching you to (not) behave / think like this or like this. For the better or worse. A big chunk of elementary and high school is about following instructions properly.

Creativity in the workplace and in the marketplace is actually rewarded, provided it's directed toward problem solving and need fulfillment.

Undirected creativity may or may not be rewarded, depending upon current whims or future shifts in problems or needs.

It's easier to teach undirected creativity -- anything goes. It can even be useful, but it's not necessarily useful, because undirected its output may never meet a need.

As the phrasing of your question falsely presupposes that employers don't reward creativity at all, the answer to you personally might be to find a new position or a new employer. Much work that must be done is clearcut and heavily procedural. Many like this sort of work for its definitiveness; others prefer the responsibility of having to apply directed creativity. Both have a place, but neither's existence condemns educational attempts at encouraging creativity as futile.

The purpose of school isn't to create employees. If it was about creating workers then yes, just show them whatever makes money. It's an impoverished view of education that somehow has gained traction in our world, and it needs to be explained why it is impoverished.

Kids need to be educated because knowing a bunch of stuff about the world is the greatest gift we can give them, and it needs to be given while they are still young enough to appreciate it. You can't live a full life without knowing a fair amount about all there is to know, and you can't experience things without having some context.

Knowing only things that are economically useful will still leave you in a place where you wonder how the world works, and wondering why there's a hole in your soul.

In my ~20-year career I have never once been in a workplace setting where creativity wasn't valued. This is especially true of "technological creativity" (finding a new way of solving a complex technical problem, or better yet - finding some way to NOT have to solve the problem in the first place). But it is also true of "product / business creativity", "marketing creativity", etc. That does not mean that all ideas have equal merit. A new-grad hire may think their creative ideas aren't valued, but that is just because they don't yet truly know all the problem constraints - in a few years' time their creativity will shine.

I also had a situation a couple of times very early in my career, where as an intern I proposed some truly novel approaches, and was told that yes, they're potentially very good, but very risky and never tried before, and that I'm only there for X months and won't be around to deal with the consequences if they fail, so they're not going to do it - but I was told that if I was a full-timer, the decision may have been different.

Here's an equally odd question: Why encourage physical activity in school given that most employers don't reward it?

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Why encourage ANYTHING that employers don't reward? I hope this question doesn't really need to be answered.

This is kind of an odd question since creativity is actually highly rewarded in my job and I'm not even in a creative role.

I mean, if your boss says "people aren't buying our product" or "how can we fit this code into half the space" or "we need something that gets our customers attention" all of those require creativity.

I think OP is looking at it way to narrowly.

Wait, schools are rewarding creativity? When did they start doing that?

This is an interesting question because it begs itself in a sort of sad way.

It basically says, why do something if it doesn't directly equate to value in the market, which is kind of sad.

The answer, simply, is because hopefully the value of life isn't easily boiled down to that....but a bigger answer is because it just isn't true.

If you are an entry level at some kind of stem profession, be it programming or science research or whatever then you typically get the grunt work of data processing and executing boilerplate code building.

Once you move up though that isn't true anymore. You typically have to solve some outlandish problems for people and often times problems that are vaguely described to you and this requires creativity.

Good luck scaling a system built in 2007 to support 5 million clients without just a pinch of creativity.

At first I would agree. Then I agreed with most comments saying that life is much more than work. But in the end it's probably more complicated than one or the other.

In school we are taught that everything we will do is for work. In most education system (except few countries) we are never given the opportunity to discover stuff just for the sake of it, or express our passions freely.

Everything we do is graded and our performance is judged in every topics we learn. Creativity is only rewarded at the beginning of our life (<7 years old) then it's about learning skills to have a job.

You can have side projects, side activities, but they are barely looked upon; unless it can become a job (professional: sport, music, etc...).

Even considered purely for the employment/salary purposes, the first year or two after joining the workforce does not define their future. As people work on different projects there are often plenty of opportunities. Those opportunities for a creative solution might not appear every day, or every month, but those who can seize those tend to benefit, employment-wise.

But even more important, to me, is that people who can think broadly are more resilient during crises: wars, emigrations (and in general being thrown into unfamiliar environments), societal upheavals. And as much as I hope not to see those, they are still hovering around. Just my 2c.

What schools were you privileged to attend, that encouraged creativity? The main lessons seem to me to be "Comply and Accept," to prepare kids for a career of exploitation.

One time, over a sales meeting at a school district office, a competitor quipped that it's not fair how some schools get all the easy students, and some schools get all the challenging ones, when any other business can return defective materials.

We skooled them, right there in that meeting: Students are clients, not products.

But I think it illustrates the pervasive attitude toward education by people who are not educators.

EDIT: American K-12 public schools.

It's not that employers don't reward creativity quite the opposite most do. The real problem is employers do not like this unbridled creativity that is not tempered with experience.

One of the things that schools try to push on people is the idea that there is no dumb question and also the idea that all opinions are of equal weight. This kind of thinking is complete an utter Fantasyland.

There are great many dumb questions and generally they come from people who've been taught that they can simply ask a question instead of doing any kind of investigation on their own to acquire knowledge or experience and then using the question to fill in the gaps. Additionally there's a lot of bad opinions that are made because of failure to understand the environment which something is in. Some fresh students that enters the workforce has tons of foolish questions and a lot of opinions born of ignorance and I think the workforce is squashing their creativity. Is very much like when you have children and they turn into teenagers and suddenly believe that they know more than the parents. This idea of your old therefore you don't understand is the height of ignorance that they display.

More students need to be taught that they need to listen to the wisdom around them, before they begin to implement "creativity". This may be something that takes years before they are ready to properly participate with creative solutions depending on how fast they can actually pick up in a stimulate information.

1) I never found school to encourage creativity at all. Very much the opposite. YMMV.

2) My job, software engineering, is inherently creative.

3) Outside my immediate role, I have seen creativity discouraged or even punished (though the bosses always claim that creativity is important) but I have also seem it rewarded. It varies a lot.

4) When I worked in corporate research, they paid bonuses for patentable (and patented) ideas. I exploited that quite a bit and got a lot of satisfaction out of it.

5) One of my great joys in life is using my creativity OUTSIDE WORK. My job is not my life.

6) And even at work, I have seen people who created their own jobs by doing something new and different. This was a win for both the company and the (highly creative) employee.

7) Rethink your question. It's assumptions are too narrow.

The schools aren't broken. (Or, at least, that is not an aspect of them that is broken.) Employers are. If we want to fix this house, we have to take out the rot.

People with hobbies unrelated to their work are supposedly less susceptible to burnout, so it's in the workforce's best interest for its members to have relaxing, non-remunerative interests and skills.

Also, creativity can be valued by employers. Most won't care about artistic accomplishment, but strong lateral thinking can make a knowledge worker's output stand out and be uniquely effective.

Almost all of my patents were creative endeavors. Most were spawned while day dreaming in corporate “all hands” meetings. My mind’s retreat from the horror of bureaucratic self aggrandizing spawns the exploration of new ideas.

What a dystopian question. The hidden question behind this question is isn't the purpose of school to prepare students for employment? And the answer to that hidden question is most emphatically NO!

Why believe that education exists solely or primarily to serve the needs of employers?

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

Public school is not for training workers, it is for training well-informed citizens who can make voting decisions.

Training workers has been, and should continue to be, the job of employers.

show us proof that most employers don't reward creativity. Then, my answer is: search for those who do. Or better: exercise creativity not because of rewards

It offsets the disappointment of being a parent that hopes their child can have a meaningful life beyond being a worker drone.

Creativity was encouraged at your school?

I don't want employers to run the world. Creativity is essential.

Dealying midlife crises