The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

2 The arts, creativity and the wholecurriculum32 Reasons Industrialists and politicians lay great stress and invest muchfor the energy, time and money on the promotion of creative workchapter and creative thinking. 1 These can and should be promotedthroughout the whole school curriculum. We hold that thearts have a central role in this. In this chapter we want toclarify what we mean by creativity. Although this ideaoften features in talk about education, it has become one ofthose terms which can mean all things to all people. Nevertheless,it cannot be doubted that for many people — andmany head teachers among them — there is such a thing ascreative work and creative thinking and getting children toproduce it is a matter of the highest educational importance.We do not, however, share the view of some past advocatesof the arts, that this amounts to a need to encourage 'freeexpression'; that any response is acceptable from pupilsbecause it is their response; that anything produced is worthwhilesimply because it has been produced. We believe itwould mark a distinct advance in educational concern withcreativity if it were generally recognised that:a creativity is not a special faculty with which somechildren are endowed and others are not but that itis a form of intelligence and as such can be developedand trained like any other mode of thinkingb creativity is something which requires discipline, previousexperience and a firm grounding in knowledgeWhat then do we mean by creativity and how does it applyto the arts?33 A type of The term 'creativity' belongs to that cluster of ideas forintelligence which we use the generic term 'intelligence'. 2 When wetalk of a creative thinker, we generally have in mind some-29