ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
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One thing that is valid is that it is much easier to train people to take tests than to provide environments that reflect the complex processes that creative learning involve. Brains are evolved to learn in a complex day-to-day living environment where many things function together and affect each other. There was a time when we needed to be taught to pick out small processes in that environment and understand them and their impact on our survival, then enhance our fitness through that understanding. Creativity helps us do this. We should be able to teach complex things in this kind of bristly context, but testing and teaching to the test is too simplistic and poorly reflects the kind of context in which people live. 

Levi-Strauss deeply valued the human characteristic of making creative use of what is in your environment. There is a fundamental quality of humanness in creativity and that if we teach nothing else, it should be how to creatively use what is at hand to make new things, explore new ideas, and solve problems. I guess it is really about, as Levi Strauss also posited, asking the right questions. Learning is messy, the human mind is messy. Do we really want simple minds that are tuned for taking tests? I don't think so. 

Stephen Miles Uzzo, PhD.
VP, Science & Technology
New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street
Flushing Meadows Corona Park, NY 11368 USA
V +1.718 595.9177
F +1.718.699.5227








On Oct 13, 2011, at 10:34 PM, Martin Weiss wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> One other idea is that school suppresses creativity by making children
> conform to restrictive curricula and testing. Not sure how valid this is,
> though.
> 
> We (Margaret Evans, Jon Lane and Martin Weiss) found in testing children who
> visited the exhibition Charlie and Kiwi's Evolutionary Adventure that they
> (ages 7-10yo) could appreciate the evidence in the form of the fossil
> Archaeopteryx for the evolution of birds from dinosaurs. They could explain
> that it was good evidence. Fossils (in the form of bones) are very important
> to children. Natural History museums attract children with dinosaur "bones"
> (fossils) but don't often explain what the significance of the fossils are
> for evolution (they are the evidence for evolution).
> 
> Martin
> 
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 9:18 PM, Beryl Rosenthal <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:


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