The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

one who is intelligent but who exhibits a certain kind ofintelligence upon which we place great value. Why is this?We can best answer this by listing here some of the principalcharacteristics or conditions of creative activity. We identifyseven of these.34 Features First, creative work or activity obviously implies making orof creative producing something. To count as creative, however, someworkthing more than merely making or producing (like 'creatinghavoc') must be involved. Second, the work must be thepersonal achievement of the person we are calling creative.We do not normally consider forgers, plagiarists or copiersof other people's work to be creative. Third, creative workmust be, in some way, novel, original, different or distinctivefrom anything previously created in that sphere. This canbe as true of things appearing in the world for the first timeas of new combinations of existing elements. It can also bean extension or elaboration of what exists or is knownalready. For example, the actor creates, using the worksand structures of a playwright; a performing musician creates,using the work of a composer and so on. At all events,creative work must, in some way, break new ground. Fourth,we would only apply the term 'creative work' to the productsof conscious and deliberate activity rather than to those ofchance, luck or serendipity.These are our first four conditions of creative activity.We will consider the rest as we go on. We must note herethat these are also some of the characteristics looked for increative thinking by early researchers in their analysis ofcertain mental qualities or activities.35 Creative In the previous chapter we noted -that some educators andand philosophers have long recognised the existence of differentdivergent modes of intelligence. Psychologists too had seen that there isthinkers another kind of intelligence distinct from the one which wasmeant to be measured by such IQ tests as the StanfordBinet, the WISC or the Moray House. 3 Completing such testsrests on an ability to give the right set of answers to setquestions relying largely on deductive reason and operatingwithin conventional structures of ideas. This requires a typeof thinking sometimes called 'convergent'. 4The other type of intelligence was divergent, nonconventionaland open-ended. Rather than the ability tooperate within the set patterns and structures of conventionalthinking, it showed ingenuity, inventiveness, unconventionalityand the ability to innovate and to solve problems. Theobvious question was, how do we recognise and assess thisability?30