Ian asked:

I was recently reading a piece suggesting that 'creativity is an adult achievement and that talk
suggesting children can be creative was simply a kind of nonsense'. I am very tempted by the
opposite conclusion: not that adults cannot be creative — they clearly can — but that it is easier for
young children to be creative than we adults, unconstrained as they are by convention etc. anyone
have any thoughts on the issue?

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Assessing easiness isn't very easy! This would especially be the case if the nature of creativity
changes through the life span, which it seemingly does. Jean Piaget, the child psychologist,
concluding through research with children that fictional inventiveness begins between the ages of 2
and 7. So, this is just the beginning of inventiveness and at this stage creativity would hardly be at its
peak. Piaget's finding was that abstract thought develops from the age of 11 onwards. The abilities of
the mind develop and change greatly through childhood and adults have quite different capacities.

Kendall Walton in his book Mimesis as Make-Believeargues that art, or representational fiction, is an
extension of childhood play. The urge to make-believe with mud-pies and playing with dolls gets
transformed into the ability to create and/or appreciate art. It is a continuous development. It might be
easier to create games as a child than to appreciate art as an adult, but it is difficult to assess
because the nature of the creation is so different and the adult has more scope for emotional
satisfaction, such as in sport rather than art. Also in some individuals there is probably is more of
need for make-believe. Make-believe is comforting.

If Walton is right there isn't conventional constraint on creativity, but a natural development. As adults
we would just rather write a novel or read one than play with dolls or play cops and robbers. Child's
play is alien to most adults and doesn't satisfy any need at all.

What is interesting here is why it is that some people are artistically creative and others are mere
appreciators. I have no idea why this is so, but it does seem that the more you appreciate a certain
form of art, the more you are likely to produce one of its kind.

Since the impulse to creativity is the opposite of the impulse to destruction, creativity is a good outlet
of energy we naturally have. I don't think there are conventional constraints but believe that play and
art are both comforting and consoling. I'm sure Iris Murdoch once said that art should not be
consoling. And very great art, perhaps, should not be. But if art and creativity function as extension of
childhood play I don't see why it shouldn't be so.

Rachel Browne

If you get away for the moment from the sophisticated psychospeak of professionals in these areas
and concentrate just on the concept of creativity (it would help if you had first hand experience of
bringing up children, the more the better), then you would see at once that the activities of children
are misnamed as 'creativity'. They are playand pretence,of which however it may be said that they
represent minds gearing up for creativity.What many researchers miss here is a distinction quite
elementary: that 'creativity' is a concept which relates to (a) making something new out of something
that already exists and placing it into a bounded conceptual environment with the effect of conferring
a new and integral semantic on it, or (b) making something ('inventing') by the discovery of
connections and relations among existing things (including ideas) which had not been noticed before.

Now it must immediately be conceded that a great deal of grown-up's activities are also nothing more
than play and pretence. One of the fashions of today is to call certain activities 'creative' for no better
reason than they resemble in some ways the actual creative activity of actually creative people. There
is a lot of wishful thinking in this, and one must wonder sometimes whether all this undisciplined
pseudocreativity has any purpose at all. For instance, to encourage adolescents at school or mature
age students to write 'poems' and fictions might have some didactic or paedagogic value, but hardly
measures up to sponsoring creativity except in that very loose sense in which it is used in such
situations. The fly in the ointment is not, essentially, the dispute over whether children are creative, or
whether humans as a whole are creative, but what kind of conceptuality we associate with that term.

I might leave this thought for you to ponder on your own. Creativity is a potential,and on the whole
(viewed over the whole evolutionary passage of homo sapiens) a clear distinguishing mark that sets
us off, as a species, from other species. But this is no excuse for bludgeoning the concept to death
with cardboard swords or trifling around with it by pushing it in front of everyone's nose as something
you must do for 'self-expression'. That way, the more likely thing to happen is a complete watering
down of creativity to just mucking around with the idle notion that every activity which does not
directly serve our needs has creative potential and then you might wish to give a good reason for
disallowing the term to gambling. The point is, that from a philosophical perspective, creativity is the
single most important criterion to confer hopeon us and a belief in the future of mankind on this
planet, in spite of the catastrophic mess which we are pleased to call our 'management' of the habitat.
But just as little as one swallow makes a summer, so a stanza or a splotch of paint or the playing of
children do not comprisecreativity. But like the swallow, they are harbingers.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney