Giving Compass' Take:

• Lamenting an education system that it is too often stilted and stale, TEDEd discusses three ways to foster more creativity in children at an early age. 

• While there's a lot of talk about STEM funding, it's important to look at how various education programs encourage students to think outside the box. How can teachers and parents help achieve this?

• Here are 5 ways teachers can nurture creativity in their students. 

Our children spend many of their waking hours in the classroom. It’s where their aspirations are nurtured and where they get their first sense of what their society expects of them. When run correctly, it’s a place where imagination is cultivated. But that cultivation doesn’t always happen.

Human brains digest the world to produce novelty — but too many classrooms offer little to be digested, instead proffering a diet of regurgitation. That diet threatens to leave our society hungry for future innovators. We’re stuck in an educational system born during the Industrial Revolution, in which the curriculum was regularized, children listened to chalkboard lectures, and school bells replicated the factory bells that signaled a change of shift.

That model doesn’t prepare our students well for an advancing world, one in which jobs are rapidly redefined and the prizes go to those who can generate novel opportunities. The real job of classrooms is to train our students to remake the raw materials of the world and generate new ideas. Fortunately, it’s not difficult to implement; it doesn’t require tearing up existing lesson plans. Instead, here are some guiding principles to help turn any classroom into an environment that promotes creative thinking.

  1. Use the past as a launching pad to imagine the future.
  2. Explore many, many options.
  3. Encourage creative risk-taking.

Read more about each of these ways to help children be more creative by Anthony Brandt at TEDEd.