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Unsupervised 'play' is far too dangerous for little snowflake. Think of the lawsuits.

Well, I don't really think the article tells us enough to come to any conclusions. Obviously, the population of America in 2010 is very different from the population in 1960. I'd like to see the demographics amplified. What is the socio-economic background of the creative? What parts of the country do they come from? Where and how have they been educated? What is the correlation to race/class? What kind of family relationships do they have? How does parental participation influence creativity?

I'm not getting the feeling there's a lot of helpful information here.

Ha! Are you using the data from one type of standardized test (CQ) to criticize the validity of other standardized tests?

Perhaps we need to just teach to the test (CQ). That will certainly make kids more creative.

Also, am I the only one who is confused on how you can use a standardized test to measure something like creativity? How can you objectively measure something that is so subjective?

How's the test structured? What's the researcher's definition of creativity? What are they measuring? Creativity is a very subjective concept as it is.

Just because someone creates a test doesn't mean it measures what they think it measures. We've been through all this with intelligence tests.

There's slightly more to it than that I fear.

One of the most important things I learned in art classes were in how to visualize things to produce better realism. This was important so that things that I would later imagine became more realistic and better developed. This all developed a more structured imagination which enabled more complexity of imagination and creativity.

The problem with today's young minds as I see it is a decrease in ability to concentrate and build complex things from more simple things. The famed "short attention span" often called "AD/HD" or the like are, in my view, the simple lack of a practiced mind. Kids don't play with building toys as much as they once did -- they play with action figures re-enacting scenes from their favorite movies. More, there is a decrease in the actual participation of adults in play! That is a HUGE factor.

When my older boys were between 7 and 10, they told me "we like you because you are always tricking us." And I was. I was testing their minds and perception with tricks and jokes of various sorts. Some times they would figure it out on their own, other times I had to provide clues and hints. Whatever the case, their minds were challenged and they enjoyed it. Fast forward to present day, I have a 19 year old entering the nuclear sciences field and a 17 year old in advanced college courses while in high school. They are both extremely fun and creative individuals with strong logic, reasoning and math skills along with interests in music and graphic arts. These boys can literally do anything they want in life as their skill set is adaptable and versatile. This was no accident... and strangely, they are also quite happy when compared to the common "achiever" who is pressured by parents for excellent grades and the like.

My boys targeted mastery and personal fulfilment as their paths. The common "achiever" tends to "study for the test" and fills in the blocks for achievement set before them by curricular academics. My boys aren't #1 in their peer groups though... they aren't any of those latin titles/ranks. Those are most often for the achievers to struggle and fight for. Instead, they are simply the best they can be while being happy and satisfied with themselves which is all I ever wanted for them.

What is lacking as much as things no longer available in school, is parental participation. And what is more unfortunate is that this has been a problem in my own generation and now two generations of parents lack the experience of good parent teaching themselves and have no clue nor inclination to provide that experience for their children. Our society of instant gratification and bubblegum pop culture has dug a hole that it won't easily climb out of until the next renaissance which isn't likely to happen again any time soon.

What gets me is that I didn't actually have the ideal family experience growing up. I had divorced parents. I had split custody juggling me around. I had a mother who more or less personified the parent who didn't care to teach her son anything (I once humiliated myself by assuming than an "address" was something girls wore and told my teacher that I didn't have one because I was a boy!) and a father who only had every-other-weekend to teach me the things he thought I should know and frankly, I wasn't all that interested in learning from him. He managed to teach me things anyway when I wasn't noticing and he taught me the nature of numbers... negative and positive, wholes and decimals/fractions... all in a matter of about 30 minutes in front of an oscilloscope. No exaggeration and no joke. That was when the lights came on in my head and frankly, I believe that's all a kid needs -- something to turn the lights on.

We do have a problem in our schools, but the biggest problem is with our parents. Many people reading me here today are parents. Are you challenging your kids? Are you "tricking" them with riddles and jokes? Are you showing them why wheels are amazing inventions? Do t

Let me clarify: in my house, creativity is highly encouraged. We work with my daughter every night (though not in a "structured" way that feels like work). She's a wonderful child who loves music and theater, is reading about 4 grades above her "level", and is on par in math.

The problem is that the regimented way in which some things are taught can lead to problems in learning. After a very poorly presented math year in first grade, we spent most of last year trying to "undo" the damage. She's terrified of subtraction (first grade), and yet multiplication and fractions (second grade) are "fun." It took us most of first grade to figure out that the teacher didn't like math, so she tried not to teach it - just timed workbooks and tests.

I do think that more than half of the problems in school stem from problems at home. It seems that very few (one in ten, one in eight?) families actually work with their children in a meaningful way. The rest are left to drift, or are actively discouraged from academic pursuits. After long days at work, the parents are tired and don't really want the burden of teaching anything. Sad, really.

John Taylor Gatto's writings are essentially the ravings of a crackpot. Clear refutations of his thesis that compulsory public schooling is evil include:

• Countries that are beating the pants of the US in education (and demonstrating continued creativity) have even great enshrinement of public education in law, with homeschooling or parochial schooling virtually unheard of.
• Gatto's vision of a pre-public education US where everyone was free and freethinking, determined to protect liberty at all costs, is essentially National Romantic hyperbole, and ignores the torrent of histories published over the last several decades which show that the US has always been dominated by oppressive elites and monied interests in spite of its claim to equal opportunity.
• Gatto claims that US public education teaches people to accept their own social class and stay there, but again, there are countries that show greater class mobility than the US and have an even greater enshrinement of public education.

Hey now, I got pretty creative in Counter-Strike. I creatively invented all kinds of words like donghugger and cuntwaffle.

Pot smoking among school kids went down by the early '80s. I'd cite statistics, but those are all suspect, being produced to support claims for the effectiveness of government programs (in a word, "creative"). Still, there can be no doubt by any serious cultural critic that creativity in Western Civilization peaked in the '60s, along with peak use of creativity-enhancing drugs. Because that creativity was perceived as - and may have been - politically dangerous, it and the drug use which enhances it have been discouraged since.

The controls were put in place mainly to shield the schools from litigation. Schools don't have BP-style resources, so every dollar counts. Let's face it, the average family can't afford to send their kids to school (it's about $10k/student for public, somewhete between $17k-20k for private), so there's not going to be any new influx of cash in schools.

Some of the controls (I got out of HS in 87) were to prevent vandalism/waste - like making the copier off limits to students, though my best friend in HS and I were the only two, save the principal, who could fix minor problems with it. Much of it stems from very rare, isolated cases of injury/loss/death during school hours while the students were not accounted for. There is no wrath like a parent who has lost a child. When you have to have a perfect safety record with several thousand unpredictable teens 180 days out of the year, things get a little crazy.

We're not afraid of them, per se, but afraid something will happen to them. A college student gets drunk and falls out of a 4th story window to her death, so the college welds all of the windows shut. An appropriate response? To the parents who no longer have a daughter it would have prevented her death. Won't you think of the children?