When the first young banker or financial services guru or Monster From the Black Lagoon began bundling shaky residential mortgages and selling them on street corners, he was probably congratulated by his bosses for being “creative.”
Creativity, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily good or bad – nor does being good at it necessarily lead one to fame and fortune. You can be creative at devious and destructive things – or, like some columnists at Banker & Tradesman, you can be creative and impoverished, both at the same time.
Mitt Romney is still stumbling and mumbling his way through the “creative destruction” of the capitalist system, where businesses grow and disappear and employment grows and shrinks, all with a creative flair that may well leave some dead bodies strewn along the side of the road.
For the gentle among us, “creative” referred in the past to starving artists. We admired their creativity, which implied that they were just quirky enough to earn the title of creative, without selling many of their nude portraits of porcupines to those whose checks didn’t bounce.
Today, creativity has migrated a bit to hint at a geeky young man toiling away in his parents’ garage, creating yet another brilliant software package that will take the world by storm and launch nuclear missiles at those who offend us.
Many urban cores, especially the old factory towns that no longer seem to have any factories, have put out the welcome mat to “creative” types – those with disposable income who do something else for a living other than tool-and-dye metal banging.
This murky business of being creative has taken a small hit of late, as political leaders (including Gov. Patrick), blow the horns in tribute to community colleges that, in two years, will presumably crank out enough heating/air conditioning/refrigeration technicians to change the course of economic history – whether or not the handy guys are especially creative.
Creatively Obliged
But that fad will pass as the unemployment numbers go down. Especially in the snobby locales of the Northeast, the lust for smokestack factories, coal mines, steel mills and handy guys has long given way to office parks filled with “creative” types, curing cancer or making software even more complex than it already is.
It was only last year that Massachusetts creatively passed legislation requiring public schools to somehow foster and encourage creativity, transforming the kids from spelling-bee champs to, well, creative types.
Championed by state Sen. Stanley Rosenberg, D-Amherst, the schools are now obligated to create, measure and manufacture creativity among their little urchins. And what is to be the end product? According to Rosenberg, “we aren’t just talking about artists, musicians, painters and dancers, but architects, landscape designers and a variety of fields that rely upon creativity…”
No newspaper columnists? Oh, well.
Of course, this is one of those feel-good initiatives that the schools will largely ignore – and, in this case, that might well be a good thing. An old Iraqi proverb puts it thusly: “When you see the teeth of the lion, don’t assume the lion is smiling.”
The notion that schools will “teach” creativity stands in defiance of the very notion of creativity. Lurking inside some of us (not newspaper editors or assistant school principals) is the mysterious magic that takes us beyond the fundamentals of what we must know to get by – and makes us “creative.” What bland, tepid curriculum guide should the schools create to mold Renoir, as opposed to a house painter?
As near as I can tell through my rudimentary research (I’m not very creative), Massachusetts and Oklahoma are the first two states to fiddle with a mandatory “creativity index” that will help us all monitor whether the schools are encouraging genius to flower – or whether they are merely cranking out yet another generation of Fidelity bond traders.
I wish that I could think of a rhyming verse with which to end this column. That would be so, you know, creative.
