Creativity and education: an American retrospective

Although early childhood education in America has always had the creative child at the core of its approach, the field itself has generated little systematic research on the topic. In contrast, the scholarly field of creativity studies, with its focus on basic research and theoretical questions, has impacted education only slightly. Creativity and education may have been disconnected topics in a scholarly sense in the US primarily because (1) early childhood education has relied primarily on theory imported from abroad as a guide to practice; (2) psychometric research on creativity proved conceptually and methodologically flawed, short circuiting widespread use of creativity tests by American public schools; and (3) contemporary approaches to creativity have tended to be either broadly theoretical or primarily concerned with answering basic research questions. The article discusses contemporary creativity research; cautionary notes, drawn from the American experience, are also included.