Is Creativity Declining?

Newsweek reports:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”

At first sight this might look like New Age lunacy but they also mention:

Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

In other words, this is not a matter of the bullbleep generators trying to keep their “phoney-baloney jobs.” (I suspect those jobs are most sought after for high school and college anyway.) It can't be a matter of television; that predated the period in question. I doubt if it's a matter of video-game playing; video games were common earlier and some of the decline is for children before the age of the most intense video-game playing. You also can't blame this on “No child left behind”; it started earlier.

My guess, for whatever it's worth, is that this is a side effect of routine use of day care. Maybe raising kids in child herds isn't such a great idea.

It might also have something to do with the fact the low-creativity generation (also known as the Millennials) is also the generation most inclined to vote reflexively Democratic. (It was preceded by the more creative and less liberal Generation X.) The last time we had a generation dedicated to conformity (as a result of the “well-adjusted” era of the late 1950s), they exploded when they got into grad school. Watch for leftists to first try to turn this into an issue and then drop it the way they dropped IQ tests.