Inventiveness

I was reading the Ed Pysch book the other day, in preparation for my final paper and I ran across this phrase on creativity: “In fact, because creativity requires considerable expertise and fairly sophisticated thought processes, learners are apt to become increasingly creative as they grow older, gain diverse experiences and perspectives – ideally including multicultural experiences and perspectives – and have numerous opportunities to experiment with objects and ideas” (p. 274).  I have but one thing to say in response to this: FALSE! How can we measure creativity to begin with? Are we to measure the number of thoughts one has or should we instead focus on the value of those thoughts?  Everyone has ideas but not everyone has GOOD ideas.  Why then should we give credit to those with more ideas (adults) instead of those who have good ideas (children).  This may seem a bit harsh but when it comes to thinking creatively children take the cake.  Yes, adults can do more with their experiences but more often than not they are afraid of doing so BECAUSE of those experiences.  Children, however, frequently have less to draw on and therefore the ideas that they do have can only be seen as wondrous and, indeed, creative.
Ask an adult to draw a picture of whatever they want and (after looking at you like you turned into a martian) they will either draw something that they think is humorous or they will draw something to piss you off for asking them to draw in the first place (unless their an art teacher).  Ask a child to draw for you, however, and you will get everything from rainbows to dragons to family 'photos' and anything else imaginable.  Which would you call creative? Personally, I vote for the kid.
The problem isn't that kids lack creativity.  The problem is that the adults are squashing it out of them through public education.  When I was about to start kindergarten my mother visited a variety of different elementary schools in our district to see which one she liked best.  Most of them came within the same general realm with very few differences.  There was one school, however, that stood out in my mother's mind as a definite NO.  I'll not share the name of the school but when my mother visited one of the kindergarten classrooms she saw firsthand how the teachers there were determined to eradicate all forms of creativity.  The kids were working on coloring in a picture of a witch.  One boy decided that he wanted his witch to have green stockings and so began to color them in that way.  Instead of congratulating him on his inventiveness, the teacher came over and reprimanded him for being different, saying that if he did not color his witch's stockings with white and red stripes his picture would not go up on the wall next to those of the other children (all of which had red and white stockings).