Convergent and creative education

by Ileana Vlad, inventor and psychologist

Knowing and creating are two different skills. The first means arriving at the correct answer — the one that already exists and that somebody knows. The second means producing an answer that did not exist.

School trains the first thoroughly, measures it well and rewards it consistently. The second it assumes. The assumption is that a pupil who has accumulated enough knowledge will, at some point, know how to do something new with it. Sometimes that happens. Most of the time it does not.

Convergent and divergent

Convergent thinking gathers: from several pieces of information, one correct conclusion. Divergent thinking opens out: from one starting point, several possible directions, some of which lead nowhere.

Both are necessary, and neither is “better”. An invention needs divergence in order to appear and convergence in order to survive verification. The problem is not that school teaches convergence. The problem is that it teaches it exclusively, for twelve years, and then we wonder at the result.

How the imbalance sets in

Not by decision. By the mechanics of assessment.

A convergent answer is marked in three seconds: it is right or it is not. A divergent answer requires judgement, time and exposure on the teacher’s part. In a system with thirty pupils in a class and an obligation to justify every mark, the first kind of question wins every time — not because anyone decided so, but because it is the only one that fits.

The pupil quickly learns the real rule, which is written nowhere: the question has an answer, and your task is to find the one the teacher has in mind. It is an excellent rule for examinations and a disastrous one for everything else.

What this costs

It costs one particular kind of person: the one who would have asked the question nobody had thought of. Such people do not disappear — they withdraw. They learn that their question disrupts the lesson, and they fall silent. I have written separately about what happens to them then.

And at the scale of a country, the cost shows in the least expected place: not in the number of inventions, but in the number of people who never even try.

Dual convergent-creative education

The idea is not to replace one with the other. It is to teach both, explicitly, with hours and assessment for each.

In practice that means a few modest things. A share of the time in every subject given to open problems — not as recreation, but as part of the subject. Separate assessment for the two: the mark from the exercise with one answer and the mark from the problem with no known answer, both written down, both counting. And one simple convention, kept from kindergarten to doctorate: the unexpected question is received, not managed.

What can be done tomorrow

A teacher cannot change the syllabus, but can change one hour a week. Ten minutes of an open problem to which they themselves have no answer. The rule that for the first five minutes nobody evaluates anything. And the habit of saying, when an odd idea arrives, “tell me more” instead of “that is not it”.

Three small things. But they are exactly the three that are missing.