Thought and creation in contemporary education

How could this knowledge be made trustworthy?

Heidegger describes the chosen alternative, soon after criticizing it as the establishment of superior values, meant to be the real measure of things, to which reality is to be submitted on a step-by-step basis, and the establishment of a method that validates this verification, forming a trustworthy knowledge – a ‘modus for the acquisition of truth’ (Heidegger, 1990: 99). Such a method dominated the provision of essential fundamentals which make feasible the advent of scientific and technological development.

The production of knowledge by science is organized through methodical and regular research. The experiment, in modern times, is a methodical practice. It is not casual, but based on a hypothesis that investigates a predicted order. According to this perspective, knowledge about the world can be limitlessly enlarged, by relating every new fact to a previously established reference, through experimentation. The new and unknown fact becomes focused, but always refers to a well-known ‘truth’. Through explanations, the unknown is reduced to the already known, which is then confirmed. The new is, therefore, no longer new.

Still, according to Heidegger (1962), the utmost fundamental, preceding every other in the understanding of events – the principle of reason – postulates that everything is for a reason, or, in a different formulation, nothing can be without a reason. Phenomena are fluid and ephemeral. Research objects, however, are not.

[…] thinking the world, means to accumulate power over things, by means of knowing the rules which govern the behaviour of phenomena. One can here anticipate what shall later be understood as object: something that is not before us to be contemplated, but to be dominated by a clever submission which, in fact, reveals itself as the uncovering of nature’s behaviour by the precise inventory of its regularities.

On the other hand, the transformations that are experienced nowadays highlight that it has become increasingly difficult to deduce the future based on the past. The presented modus of production (and, consequently, of transmission) of knowledge has shown its pertinence and efficacy paving the way for the amazing scientific and technological development enjoyed today. Yet important questions have been raised and need to be addressed by society; above all, through education.

The world of living things is a web of inseparable connections. It understands phenomena in the natural environment and is composed of flow and change, in unstoppable and ever-changing effects. As it contains the investigating subject and trespasses geographical boundaries, it demands contextualization. ‘Truths’ must be agreed upon in shared consensus.

Western societies, however, have incorporated values in their cultures values derived from a traditional science that reduces phenomena to their basic components, isolating them in specific situations (laboratory). ‘Intelligence is mistaken by the idea of a single and unchangeable order, administered by science and technique’ (Novaes, 2008: 9).

This procedure, which controls and intends to eliminate randomness, must be protected from all human idiosyncrasies. Results should be obtained through explanations (reasons to be), creating conditions for prediction, and conducive towards a desirable and univocal truth, equally valid for all.

Today a scientific and technological development where facts and events predominate can be witnessed, yet all becomes ephemeral and transitory.

We suspect that the knowledge and power created by reason and technical rationality, which resulted in techno-science – this new reality of knowledge – make harder the work of spirit.[…] Nowadays, when mutation replaces crisis, the spirit feels adrift.

When we briefly recall relevant studies on the theme, which constitute an important part of the contemporary discourse, classic theoreticians since the 1950s caring for a ‘democratization’ of creativity, detaching it from geniality and transforming it as an attribute of common citizens are found, such as Alex Osborn ([1953] 1988). For them, to be creative was, to a small or large degree, a possibility for any person. Some individuals, as human history attests, spontaneously take ownership of this feature. Others depend on training if they are to develop their creative potential to its utmost level.

In the post-war world, societies were already facing speedy changes, and to be creative became a necessity. Maslow (1971) considered creativity to be a fundamental attribute to the maintenance of mental health in times which were, according to his thought, different from all previous times. Advances were fast in terms of technology, inventions and mutations in the world scenario. Changes were apparently configuring new modes of relation between man and a world in constant movement.

‘We need a different human being’, said Maslow (1971: 58), referring to a human being capable of living with unstoppable mobility, who should be taught how to adapt to change and feel at ease with it.

Among the contributions were also statements that the creative process is crafted by a series of features – both individual and environmental – which could be dissembled for the purpose of training. Such qualities, flowing together at the moment of the creative act, are invested by phenomena from two sources: on the one hand, the individual owning skills and specific personality features; on the other hand, an accepting environment in which judgements are temporarily suspended and personal resources can be explored.

Notably, two trends appear in such studies: a group defending directive training, which associates all research on creativity to the possibility of it being taught, and a humanistic group. Both positions consider creativity to be a way of being which realizes itself in everyday life, and as an innate potential, cultivated in a facilitating environment, charged with effort by means of a positive attitude. Both groups share the same principles of equality among individuals, equal opportunities of access to creativity training, and a basic faith in the capacity and will of the subject to actualize his or her own potential. On one side, authentic defenders of directive techniques as a stimulus to the development of creative potential can be found. They are, besides himself, followers of Alex Osborn, the creator of brainstorming, whose principles guided most creativity training programs. On the other hand, there is the humanistic thinking in psychology essentially non-directive in its formulations, represented in the study of creativity mainly by Rollo May (1975) and Abraham Maslow (1971).

One of the central difficulties of studying creativity is the attempt to define the scope of its concept. The fact that it is considered universal creates the problem of discriminating in a subtle manner who can be considered creative and, beyond that, what is, in fact, creative.

When one assumes that creating is a universal gift, the naive observation indicates different manifestations of creative behavior, in various degrees. The common assumption, though, is that true creation may manifest itself in a high number of people (preferably all humanity) through highly innovative products.

This is where a debate begins about such criteria: how can we say what is new, and to whom? Some authors tend to consider ‘new’ solely as what has never been done before by anyone. Others, on the contrary, consider that the new is so, by definition, only to whoever has produced it.

The problem of defining who is creative is strongly attached to the difficulty to define what is creative. Departing from the fact that, since the 1950s, a more ‘democratic’ view on creativity, we observe that it has changed from an attribute of few creative geniuses to a universal human attribute which all possess, complicating its definition even further.

As a way to solve this deadlock, researchers turned to an easy part of the process to be observed – the final product – going ahead with a procedure that seems to be generalized: to recover the creator’s personality characteristics and environmental conditions to which he or she was exposed, in order to reproduce them.

Being safe results in the products that are considered the most easily identifiable part of the creative process. At least, there is a near-universal consensus over some of them.

In the arena of developing criteria for the evaluation of degrees of creativity, (…) the evaluation of the product is much more important and acceptable, for a number of reasons, than the evaluation of the process. One of the reasons is that the product is more tangible.

Another possible formulation to define the creative process states that creation is a process that unfolds over a period of time, seeking solutions for a specific problem. This position acknowledges the effort to circumscribe with precision the actual problem, making it possible to break it into parts, approaching one at a time, and reaching the highest possible number of combinations in the search for a solution – it is, necessarily, a time-consuming process, at times consuming entire lives!

According to its defenders, in order for that to occur, a full understanding of the existing knowledge on the theme, as well as of the relevant techniques involved, be it the case of a work of art or a scientific project, is paramount.

Some of those statements have, however, been systematically questioned since the latter half of the last century.

Creativity: gratuity and quiescence

The above issues appear in a complementary way, and announce the possibility to elect as organizational criteria for the human experience references that extrapolate the mere utilitarian exercise of thought to which we have been conditioned.

The most relevant philosophers in the field of phenomenology – Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty – passionately defended the need to find ways to knowledge, without falling into the reification of the world that is typical of metaphysical thinking and traditional science. In that sense, they take up the artistic way as a paradigm for another kind of relation of man with the world, understood in phenomenology as inseparable.

According to these authors, the artistic way develops itself in favor of splitting with the linear approaches to phenomena, which we have been deeply used to, unveiling other possibilities of creation and expression.

When Heidegger affirms in Principle of Reason (1962) that all that is is for a reason, he also establishes a corollary: all for which one cannot establish reasons is to be considered as if it did not exist. Opposing this principle, the non-utilitarian creation, based on the artistic making and its gratuity, induces a different form of relation between the man and the world, as a counterpoint to science (here understood in its traditional form). Artistic creation and making are seen as the most intimate spot of contact between the human being and the lived experience, which is the central point of any knowledge.

To Merleau-Ponty (2004: 13), ‘science manipulates things and renounces to inhabit them’. It reduces things to concepts, losing their particularities, so that they can therefore be manipulated. Artistic creation, on the contrary, is defined by its absence of functionality. Merleau-Ponty (2004: 15) described poetically the attitude of the artist:

[the painter] is there, strong or weak in life (we recall Pablo Picasso as the example of strength and Vincent Van Gogh of fragility), but inarguably sovereign in his rumination of the world, without any other ‘technique’ but whatever his own eyes and hands offer to the strength of seeing and to the strength of painting, obstinate to extract from this world, where historical scandals and glories resonate, paintings which will add very little to the hatred and hopes of mankind.

Still, according to Heidegger, by another type of what he calls ‘listening’, the listening of quiescence, in silence, which allows that things come to us from the emptiness out of which they were born, no longer placing before us articulable meanings, but possible meanings, only just announced. Recalling the primordial sense of logos (reason) as gathering and presentation of phenomena, he suggests an alternative to the contemporary quest for information as a (delusional) resource to re-establish a sense of safety lost by the threatening changes promoted by technique. Doing so, he recovers the possibility to let ourselves be affected by the phenomena that are foreign to us in the same way as we face the gratuitous beauty of something or someone, with no explanation or reason for being. We are faced with the experience of needlessness of rational criteria, to safely support and evaluate our observations.

Words such as decentering and estrangement define features considered to be attributes of creative people. They suggest the alternation (not very clearly delimited) between an active stance and the search for a possibility to simply let things happen.

Creativity in education: the contribution from Marion Milner ²

Marion Milner was a British psychoanalyst born in 1900. Her studies on creativity and education have called the authors’ attention, not only because they are positioned midway between the two mentioned perspectives, but, most relevantly, by the way in which she approached those themes throughout her life. Interested in science since her childhood, she nurtured the dream of being a naturalist, and, from 11 years of age, she wrote diaries which became her most valuable resource for an investigation, marked by human experience, as opposed to traditional experimentalism. Her interest in education, on the other hand, began at age 18 when she needed to work to support her family so she began teaching a boy.

The titles from some of her books say much about the originality of her line of investigation, based always on experience. A Life of One’s Own ([1934] 2011) was written to answer a question posed while she attended a course of study: what was her objective in life? On Not Being Able to Paint ([1950] 2010) is a reflection about her own process of creation, an introspective piece of work that searches for reasons behind learning difficulties in children.

One of her first influences was the work of Elton Mayo, from Harvard University, who studied the importance of reverie ³ in monotone jobs. Mayo spoke about direct and indirect thinking. ‘According to Mayo, the first type sought to establish truths; the second sought to establish relations’ (Milner, 1991: 15). Mayo recognized a way of thinking which happened not only through words, but also through images. This recognition guided his understanding of the human psyche throughout his life. Milner was hired in 1933 to work on research on the educational system of an institution for young ladies, where she once again met the issue of learning difficulties. She then wrote The Human Problem in Schools. She abandoned that research because of its required objectivity.

Departing from drawings and free associations out of her own analytic process, as well as the evacuation of schools in times of war, she dedicated herself to study how ‘a good drawing can be the genuine expression of a state of the soul’ (Milner, 1991: 18). She utilized a method of sketching where she left her hands to run free on the paper to produce images when a specific feeling or memory was crystallized. After that, she focused on reproducing at will images from the external world, letting her hands and eyes freely guide the work.

The results from such investigations originated On Not Being Able to Paint, in which she discussed issues of perspective and visual outline, limits and boundaries between the self and the external world. This experience revealed that effort was needed to make contours clear, defining each thing in its place, and a fear from limitlessness, as we are emotionally inclined to imprison objects in themselves by the use of outline. ‘The outline represented the world of facts, of solid, palpable objects. Hanging to them would surely protect a person from the world, the world of imagination’ (Milner, 1991: 20).

Following her unusual line of investigation, she tried to analyze and understand a 17-year-old music prodigy who could no longer play or study. She departed from William Blake’s Illustrations for the Book of Job (1826). As she thought through images, she was capable of linking what she saw in the illustrations to what she had studied for five years: the problem of the educational system in schools, which excluded psychic creativity.

To her, the 21 illustrations portrayed the process undergone by man when he doubts his creative capacity and his strength to work and to love. Blake shows the human path toward great achievements through his inborn creativity, as well as the situations which block creativity, namely resulting from a belief that the conscious thought is the totality of what exists.

She was interested in finding ‘how the capacity for mental plasticity is established in the individual, permitting creative living’ (Carvalho, 1998: 11), supporting Winnicott’s idea that a healthy life is related to creative living.

Creativity is opposed to rationality, because the man-made effort to organize the world through techniques and logic pulls one apart from imagination and creativity; yet, only through creativity can meaning in what is meaningless can be found. This issue is fundamental to the human condition.

To Milner, creating is part of this condition and this capacity is present, from early days, in the child, who feels pleasure and satisfaction in producing things with his own body. The human being needs to be creative, and the creative process produces the necessary anxiety for the process of learning. However, when the individual cannot manifest this inborn creativity, anxieties may form and become the basis of that person’s defensive organizations (Safra, 2010: lecture 11).

Milner also brought essential contributions to the thinking about education, stating that the educational methods that were widely applied in schools not only blocked creativity, but also did not hold the doubt – which is the essential place where learning can truly happen. Approving and celebrating the fact of knowing, the school penalizes the not knowing, keeping children from accessing their psychic reality through doubt and uncertainty, which, in order to be fertile, need to be sustained.

The great mistake in education would be its foundation on logical thinking. As children could not express their inborn creativity, they would experience the school as something foreign to themselves. Learning difficulties would be a protest against this form of violence. The school did not take into account that the individual can learn only from someone he or she loves, and that the teacher must be sufficiently available for the student to realize that he or she will be accompanied through the process of learning.

Knowledge occurs by the measure in which the human being recreates the world through creativity. The contemporary school, however, presents to the individual something that is foreign and meaningless, as if pushing one into a mold. Gifted people are considered creative and learn easily, so at times they experience the school as tedious and remote to their interests.

Marion Milner helps us to understand this way of being. To her, the issue of creativity is fundamental, since whenever we cannot cope with it we can run into great trouble to adapt, experiencing unrelenting feelings of anxiety and of not belonging. Each person, in his or her own way, can find a channel of expression – some are socially well adapted, whereas others are searching for a true self, but all try to leave their personal mark in this world and produce something meaningful to themselves and to the significant others around them.

Creativity workshops and the freedom to create

Having reflected upon relations between thinking and creation, signaling varied ways of understanding these two elements out of opposed contexts. We will now discuss the practice of creativity workshops for gifted children, which support educators in finding some freer access to their own processes of understanding and creation. Creativity workshops are a model of psychological practice based on the use of expressive resources with an artistic nature. Begun in 1990 on a program for gifted children, ⁴ they were soon extended to education and psychology graduates, and they have been formally researched since 1995 (Cupertino, 2001). Presently, they are offered in a variety of contexts and situations in a group context, utilizing expressive resources such as collage, drawing, painting, ceramics, molding dough, expressive movement, expressive sound and music.

Creativity workshops are spaces open to creation, so they should offer, before anything, a ‘condition of knowing through a gap between what is known and what is, unexpectedly, presented to us’ (Cupertino, 2001: 197). This is a necessary condition for the discovery of new ways of being, as well as new possibilities for ways of coping with the myriad situations presented to each person in daily life.

The creative, in that sense, is closely related to Heidegger’s idea of freedom: not the freedom to take one or another specific direction, but the freedom to choose between options (which could be known, but also newly envisaged). This is the freedom to risk following new pathways, as one faces old and new situations.

In the case of children’s education, we think again about Milner (1991), who in 1942 wrote her first article, ‘The infantile capacity for doubt’, where she concluded that the state of doubt generates the individual’s capacity to accept emptiness, or the ‘not knowing’. This acceptance of emptiness is one condition for the germination characteristic of creativity, as envisaged by Milner.

Observations in the workshops indicate that the way in which children initially connect themselves with their projects mimics their usual form of contact with the world: some will imagine things before they try to build them; others will find, through concrete contact with the materials, inspiration for the conception of form and, later, for a concept to justify it with a function; and others work in small groups, having some initial difficulty to generate their own ideas. Invariably, children look to the leading adult for a validation of his or her participation. They seem to have an instant and intuitive comprehension of what aspects of their production the adult, in fact, validates.

Being in a school environment, children are expected to freely create and experiment and present, at the end of the process, a satisfactory product (according to the evaluation criteria of the school environment). However, when we conduct the workshops, we are there to nourish a facilitating environment for experiences of freedom, which relates much more closely to the process than to the final product. Our fight for freedom is similar to the child’s, since we are located in an environment that tends to measure the quality of our interventions through the presentation of the final product.

When we get started on this work with children, we are inevitably surprised: not to lead a schoolchild in the traditional way is one terribly challenging task. When we refuse the usual didactic role, we consequently lose most of the validated criteria to judge quality, as well as the clarity of goals and objectives. By suspending our interference in the contact between the child and the materials, we find uncomfortable feelings of uselessness and untrustworthiness, as if nothing in that intervention could be considered useful. The initial projects from children – pieces made of ceramics, scraps, etc. – show predominantly rustic results, with no recognizable finish, as if they were a mere piling-up of pieces. The temptation to control the creative environment – to teach techniques and to ‘polish’ the projects and make them look pretty to the eyes of the adult – is overwhelmingly powerful.

Why should that happen?

Again, in order to fertilize the field of discovery it is paramount to tolerate the encounter with the unknown, and the momentary loss of references. Children will follow that path only when they feel authorized and validated in this condition of uncertainty. Adults, occupy a position of double responsibility – for the child and for the institution where we work. We easily feel anxious when we find lack of meaning in the child’s production. We tend to rush into either polishing or possible representations – ‘Is this a plane or a car?’. The child tends to endorse this inclination, giving the project some kind of function, perhaps so that we feel better. Often, the child does come to our rescue, reassuring us in our leading role.

The premature representation, therefore, suffocates the possibility of opening to the genuinely new, which, in that moment, would unfold into what Figueiredo calls ‘a happening’:

A happening is a rupture on the tissue of representations and routines; in other words, in principle the happening is a break in the apparatuses of construction and maintenance of the ‘reality fabric’: but a happening is also the transition towards a new representational system.

Whenever a child follows his or her own impressions and elaborates a project in a deeply personal way, the final result, albeit of arguable aesthetic value, becomes deeply meaningful. It is not surprising that many mothers, by the end of the semester, report that their children ultimately forbid them to discard certain pieces of work, which instead occupy special places on study tables and bedroom shelves. Such pieces are the concrete expression of happenings, of new ways of being, only just discovered in the workshops. As Novaes de Sá (2008) states, the essential part of the process is not composed by possible new identifications, but by the simple permission to be, the pure liberty to open to the mystery.

The beauty of the work is primarily founded on the authenticity of its generation, and the process is made meaningful by the experience that the child takes afterwards to their life, inside and outside the school. This experience of authenticity mirrors words from Cupertino (2001: 197): ‘Whatever is good, beautiful and truthful is “just because”. This experience of “just because” gives meaning to itself.’

Therefore, our way toward freedom with children is rooted on a feeling of gratuity around the production. We often accompany children who cannot settle into a project for many weeks; whenever the educator finds the dislodgement to be a source of anxiety, the child will surely feel the same. When the educator feels insecure for the lamentable quality of a project’s finish, the child will certainly choose to experiment less and polish more, replicating a process that is already largely explored in the regular school setting. If the child is encouraged to make a new step, full of creative courage, it is a prerequisite for the educator to be confident walking on that road, and the child must have the privilege to develop this work in a receptive educational environment.

Our role, then, is eminently grounded on the suspension (as far as possible) of expectations about final results, and a careful holding of the delicate process that unfolds in the contact of the child with the materials. Here is expressed the initial dimension of the creativity workshops, complementing – rather than mirroring – the process of child schooling.

One of the most fundamental principles guiding the workshops is the absence of a problem – identified, specific, long-lasting – to be solved. The surprise over what might happen is much more relevant than creating the conditions for a building up of solution-focused knowledge. What we truly need to be capable of maintaining is a state of ‘not-solution’: the experience of suspension, of a planned instability, of gestation; being able to sustain, for long stretches of time, the absence of solutions.

Once this initial dimension is open, every conductor of the workshops will have a personal inclination toward some particular aspect of the group work. Some will be inclined toward looking at the child’s feelings; others will pay attention to group dynamics and the usual roles adopted by every individual in the group; others will look at the development of new abilities and repertoire with the materials themselves. These attitudes allow, throughout the process, for an intertwining of creative experiences and cognitive development.

Once the children survive the initial shock of loss from the usual criteria of quality, they begin to produce more varied pieces, sometimes less well defined, than initially encountered. ‘If you look this way it is a spaceship, but looking this way it can be a gun.’ Even further, ‘I’m not sure what it is, but it looks good, and it can stand up.’ New ideas appear in the groups, and every new idea from a participant spreads as quickly as wildfire: a child creates a microphone, and suddenly eight other different microphones appear in the group. Ideas are as varied as their authors. A space which pays little attention to preconceived or objective criteria of quality for final products breeds more diversity in group leadership. The value attributed to technique gives way to the value of innovative ideas. That can only happen at the cost of lamentable finish, which is always fairly challenging to the educator.

This new way of functioning facilitates for the child a more attentive observation of the functionality of each material: how to use texture, balance forces, stick pieces, etc. We choose, for instance, to say: ‘If you do it this way, it probably won’t stick very well, but if you prefer doing it like this we can go for it, and see later how it ends up.’ We might, indeed, be strongly surprised by the results. What really matters, though, is to always share the credits of that exploration with the child, and to subsequently remember to see and acknowledge the results.

After many months of scarce and repetitive production, we finally see the children studying junctions of pieces that bend and fold, balancing standing volumes, carefully sliding fingers on the clay to avoid cracks, observing the logic underneath the passage of the needle in the fabric, and so on. Action and consequence are finally in the agenda of free creation from our students. We think together about how to solve constructive problems: ‘Here, we need to fix something that turns in order to open and close, do you think we can find anything like that?’ This support is enough for them to find their own solutions. The meeting with constructive difficulties becomes a stimulus to the curiosity and the reasoning of the child, while in a different situation it could be a discouraging element to free creation.

It looks clear to us that children are very satisfied when they produce good-looking objects, but a similar satisfaction happens when they feel that they progressed on the structural understanding of a newly created piece of work. The comprehension of every generated structure, as well as the contact with his or her truly creative capacity, gives the child a strong feeling of autonomy, opening endless new possibilities of creation.