Lack of creativity may stifle education

[2 October 2006 - Desert News - Opinion] What about the students who don't go on to college? Efforts to sell the importance of college may end up demeaning those who don't make it to the ivory tower. Unwittingly, some professional educators are marketing college to K-12 students based on the amount of money as a way to success. This may be a case of good intentions with bad results. By inference, are students being told they are failures because they won't make as much money as college graduates? As a society, do we want to measure success by how much money one makes? ... Most disturbing is that we may be losing a great pool of intelligent, creative and innovative students because they don't fit the mold of how our educational systems — K-12 and higher education — test for academic intelligence. Our K-12 system is not designed to let students use different learning styles such as aural, visual and kinesthetic. Make no mistake, if our nation is to compete with other nations that are graduating more science and engineering students, then we must accelerate our efforts to educate our own. Globalization has changed our world, where creativity and innovation are the talents needed for a nation to compete in today's knowledge-based economy. More and more organizations, including business and the National Association of Governors, are realizing that imagination, creativity and innovation are the currency needed to succeed. The Rainbow Project, a study funded by the College Board, the organization that administers the SAT, found that adding creative, practical and common sense parts to the test better predicted a student's collegiate success and narrowed the scoring discrepancy between ethnic groups (Newsweek, Aug. 14, 2006). More