Relationship between creativity and childhood

IB English
Feb. 11^th, 2012

Vocabulary Exercise: Relationship between creativity and childhood

     In many respects, creativity is greater in childhood than in adulthood.
First of all children, full of vivasciousness, care little about where they are located when it comes to creativity. In their play for example, kids pretend to ride a horse while sitting astride a simple stick. They imagine to be a rapacious pirate, a dogged sailor or a powerful fighter - all of this while inside a ordinary family home. Whether being surrounded by soil and mud or prodigality and licentious glut, children are always able to create their own reality (or surreality). They do not need more than themselves to imagine the most bizarre scenarios. Thus, their imagination is unrestrained and absolute.
Adults, on the other hand, have abandoned the limitlessness of childhood. Despite manifold ways of thinking, one becomes loath to allow fantastic types of nature when growing up. Already in transition to adulthood, it is inconceivable to believe in talking animals, gnomes and magical power anymore. Similarly, if something in the room has moved, than a person must have been there and changed something. To believe in fortune or spiritual kinship are probably the only inexplicable yet imaginable issues in adulthood, located in the very periphery of the full-grown mind.
As another example, suppose there are two cartographers, one adult and one infant: While the map of a kid would show wild, colorful and random scrawling, the map of an adult would show chiaroscuro elements, aligned properly.
     This leads to the second argument, namely the supposition that rationality and logic, that are further developed in an adult’s mind, tell solely conclusions based on reality. In other words, things have to be explainable for an adult. For a child in contrast, every matter is equivocal rather than clearly defined, since he has not gathered as much information about life as have older people. Waking up from a febrile dream, for instance, children tell of monsters under the bed or demons in the closet. Hence, their uncertainty allows childs to come up with the most fanciful ideas, possesssing unrestricted potential and broad understanding. Their consequent actions might seem erratic and haphazard, but everything has a background story in their verdant mind.
     Now, one might wonder why an adult is more likely to be restricted in imagination. To answer this question, one needs to understand the method of creativity. Everything the imagination creates relates to elements taken from reality.
In other words, a persons’s previous experiences are the source of all creative output. It explains why an adult’s perception of life is more limited than a child’s view. Conveying creativity, humans take contents of the memory and utilize them in new combinations: A fairytale, for example, is generally unreal but on closer inspection it is a collage of previously encountered aspects. Thus, the reproduction of an actual experience is the origin of creativity.
     Once being aware of the reason for adult’s restriction in creativity, a corresponding question arouses. Can adults imagine less than children, or is there merely a greater control over distinction between real and unreal? Taking the polyphony of life as an example, it can be stated that adults are able to associate more experienced truths with an object than a child can: An apple is related to health and freshness but also to lasciviousness in connection with the bible. However, these meaning are rarely understood in childhood already, due to the lack of experience. By time, a child learns about the above mentioned links but at first it may only connect apples with the grandmother’s garden, the residence of a worm, the color red and food. This example shows that children do not evaluate their experiences yet; they do not distinguish between wrong and right or irrelevant and relevant.

     Another way to illustrate the greater control of adults over the organization of their experiences – and with that, a limited creativity - is the comparison of naiveté between adults and childs. While children have a lot of faith in the flow of life, adults are sceptic and doubtful. A Christmas celebration for instance can be as tawdry and pitiful as imaginable, but children always believe that it is Santa who puts the desired presents under the Christmas tree. As another example, children would unhesitatingtly believe that some fairies have built grandiose archivolts, pilasters or other architectural work, if any person told an enthralling story of the bravura of these fantasy beings. It can be assumed that this willingness to believe anything is due to children’s openness to limitless possibilities and, as already mentioned, their lack of experience which is in turn essential for reasoning.
It is clear, then, that creativity is greater in childhood than in adulthood. First, a child’s imagination is more absolute than the imagination of an adult. Secondly, the mind of children is, compared to adults, less limited and more open to the inconceivable. This is due to a lack of experiences. A person’s experiences are reproduced and rearranged in order to perform creativity, but also to reason properly. Finally, adults have greater control over the organization of their experience. Children, in contrast, do not question as much as adults but still have the openness to nearly everything, which allows them to be more creative.