The Need For Schools to Develop Creativity

New Zealand’s education debate has once again narrowed to “back to basics” rhetoric. But what if literacy and numeracy are only the foundation, not the destination? As the Government reshapes the curriculum under Education Minister Erica Stanford,  this series begins by asking a bigger question: are we educating compliant workers — or creative human beings capable of shaping an unpredictable future?

There seems to be a lull in the outpouring of educational nonsense from the government so I thought I’d take the opportunity to start a series of articles outlining alternative visions for primary schooling in New Zealand. While my own beliefs will no doubt be incorporated, in the main I will highlight the work of prominent educators, both academics and teachers. 

The intent is to show open minded readers that there are well researched, evidence based alternatives to the very restricted knowledge based curricula currently being promoted by Erica Stanford on behalf of her influencers. You’ll find there’s much more to a real education.

Before I start, I will reiterate a key point: competency in literacy and numeracy is vital and no one is saying anything to the contrary. The difference is that the back to basics people maintain this is all that is needed, whereas the rest see this as the foundation to a truly rich education.

Why Creativity Is the Engine of New Zealand’s Future

In this article I want to focus on the desirability of our education system to foster creativity in our children – it is creativity that brings the future, the ability to come up with new and innovative ideas.

Creative New Zealanders Who Changed the World

To look at some examples, consider people such as Sir Peter Jackson, Sir Ian Taylor, Lorde, Sir Sam Neill, John Britten, and the talented New Zealand yacht designing community who have maintained New Zealand’s dominance of America’s Cup yachting, in spite of the billions of dollars thrown at it by overseas billionaires.

All of these people have used their creativity and imagination to express themselves, far beyond just being competent in the basics. Our life is made much richer by these creative people. Life without the creatives would be so sterile and so much poorer.

When Standards Label Geniuses as Failures

Even more critically, John Britten was dyslexic, needing to have someone read questions and write his answers in secondary and tertiary examinations. Under the standards based education and reporting programme being established he would be labelled as not achieving, as a failure.

The Arts Under Pressure in the New Curriculum

Recently an article about the desirability of developing creativity was published in the New Zealand Listener.

‘At a time when arts education is under siege, research shows that creativity improves mental and physical health.’

The article focuses on the potential of the arts (such as painting, drawing, sculpting, dance, music, drama, poetry, creative writing, and so on) to help adults with a wide range of physical and mental afflictions. All adults and children (not just those with afflictions) benefit from participating in the arts and from being creative.

‘But there is also a growing body of research to prove art itself benefits the brain and the body. And the science suggests we shouldn’t be waiting for a mental health crisis before including some kind of creativity in our lives. At any skill level making art lowers the stress hormone cortisol and lifts levels of feel good hormones.’

Clearly arts benefit adults as discussed in this article, however should we exclude children from that in order to meet the narrow confines of the knowledge based curriculum?

 And to get in first, while the arts are part of the new curriculum documents, with the requirements to set aside the bulk of the primary school day for numeracy and literacy there is insufficient time for other subject areas, including the arts. 

As was the case during the National Standards era, children who are struggling to meet the achievement criteria in literacy and numeracy will have less time and energy to develop their artistic sides. 

We know there is a clear, well researched link between socio-economic background and school achievement, and this means that the poorer children (one in seven living in hardship according to recent reports)  will also have their life opportunities diminished, not that this seems to matter to our government made up of millionaires and property owners.

Breaking Art into Boxes – Does Assessment Kill Creativity?

The curriculum development people in the Ministry of Education have broken the arts down into defined steps, for example, this is the Year 4 (8 to 9 year olds) Visual Arts curriculum:

‘Visual arts elements of line, shape, colour, space, and scale are combined intentionally to express ideas, feelings, or stories using principles, including: 

• Repetition

  — the repeated use of visual elements to create rhythm, unity, or emphasis 

• Contrast

  — the use of opposing elements to create interest or draw attention (e.g. light/dark, rough/smooth) 

• Pattern

  — repeated shapes or motifs. In Indigenous art, including Māori and Pacific artforms, patterns carry cultural meaning 

• Composition

  — the arrangement of visual elements within an artwork. Artists use composition to organise colour, shape, space, and balance to support meaning, mood, or focus. 

Materials and tools have unique qualities, effects, and intentions (e.g. wet or dry, soft or hard).  

Art-making is a process that involves concepts, planning, making, adapting, and completing.’

All well and good, up to a point.  But there’s nothing in there about development of children’s artistic creativity. 

Reminds me of a classroom on one of my former schools – the children produced lovely renditions of well known artists’ work e.g., van Gogh sunflowers. Very nice, the room looked very attractive, but one big question always troubled me – was this art? I’d argue, no it was not, just a sophisticated version of painting by numbers. 

True art is taking these skills and producing something different, however as Year 4 children will be assessed on these points, there is no room for originality and creativity,

‘Creating artworks that use visual elements (e.g. line, shape, colour) and principles (e.g. repetition, contrast, pattern) to set mood or fill space 

Experimenting with tools, materials, and processes to create different effects and strengthen fine motor skills (e.g. using varied techniques and media to explore texture, layering, and construction) 

Following a visual arts process that includes planning, creating, reflecting, and making intentional choices (e.g. planning ideas, experimenting with materials, reflecting on art-making choices)’

You can’t take an art form and break it down into discrete chunks. 

Did van Gogh (or any other artist) base his paintings on the principles outlined above or did he paint from the heart? 

Did Shakespeare consciously decide to apply principles of writing (which actually didn’t exist back then) or did he just write what looked and felt good? 

Those of you who remember secondary English classes will recall how in-depth analytical analysis of a poem or a book destroyed its beauty. 

The Listener article focuses mainly on adults, however it doesn’t take much to adapt this to children’s needs.

‘Arguably, our brains have been wired for the arts. We have been drawing, story-telling and creative decorative objects for thousands of years.’

Professor Peter O’Connor and the Case for Arts-Rich Schools

Auckland University Professor of Education Peter O’Connor,

‘has dedicated his career to bringing the arts to people who need them. The professor of education and social practice set up the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation (CAST) at the University of Auckland and has led drama projects in prisons, schools hospitals and disaster zones.’

He believes, 

‘We find refuge in creativity and imagination and creativity, It’s how we make sense of the world.’

Significantly O’Connor is one of the numerous education academics who are very unhappy about current education policies, continuing from his objections to the previous time a National led government tried to reduce education to the basics, back in the years of National Standards which predictably failed.

‘It concerns O’Connor that the arts are being sidelined in the New Zealand education system, despite research showing pupils at art rich schools do better at the basics of literacy and numeracy, He see successive governments as having undervalued the power of creativity and its link with health and well being.’

Further:

‘Cast is also a partner, with the Sir John Kirwan Foundation, in a project to support mental health in schools. “Schools are becoming increasingly factory-like” says O’Connor. “The arts, by their nature, resist that because they are chaotic, colourful, challenging – they invite disobedience, I kind of get why you’d squash them if you just want compliant little workers.”’

Yes. We’ve been down this road many times.

Sir Ken Robinson – Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I will move now to the late Sir Ken Robinson, an educator who spent his life career fostering creativity, challenging traditional education with its emphasis on standards and conformity, arguing that it stifled creativity and individuality, and didn’t tap into students diverse talents and passions. 

He advocated for an education system that valued imagination, preparing children just for jobs, but for a future where adaptability and creativity are paramount.  

I’ve made this point many times. There’s far more to education than just the basics. 

In 2006 Sir Ken delivered a presentation at the TED Talks, this has gone on to be one of the most watched TED talks ever.

I was privileged to attend an International Principals Conference in Auckland in 2007, where Robinson was a keynote speaker, and where he gave us an extended version of the TED Talk. 

Here is the YouTube video (apologies for the low resolution but this was in the early days on YouTube). I encourage you to watch it, both for its content and also for its humour – Robinson was an engaging speaker with a droll sense of humour! It’s very watchable.

Below the video I have highlighted selections of his presentation for discussion.

‘So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.’

Educating for 2086 – Preparing Children for a World We Cannot Predict

Time has moved on since then, children who start school in 2026 will be retiring in 2086, assuming that 65 is still the retirement age. Anyone who thinks they can predict what that world will be like is seriously deluded. What is clear that the education system of the past, which is very much the current ideology, will not prepare today’s children for their future.

‘What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatise mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.’

Reflect on this next section, especially in light of the draft Visual Arts Curriculum that I highlighted above:

‘Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?’

And also:

‘Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn’t matter where you go. You’d think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do.’

I’ve previously written about this next bit:

Industrial-Era Schooling in an AI Century

‘Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.’

And:

‘If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatised. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.’

Exactly. How many people do you know who left school thinking they were failures, only to go to to very successful lives? 

(Adrian Newey, recognised by his peers as the most gifted and successful designer of Formula 1 racing cars, was expelled from his secondary school having not achieved much in the way of academic success.)

Robinson then covers the nature of educational qualifications, pointing out that basic degrees are now worthless, and he also discusses the nature of intelligence. His reflections are well sounded, however he lived in the times before AI and goodness knows what he would have made of that. He then added

‘I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.’

Educating the Whole Child – Not Just the Measurable Parts

He concluded with this:

‘What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.’

Indeed.

And to reiterate – there’s nowhere in this article where I, or any of the people I’ve referenced, have downplayed the importance of competency in literacy and numeracy!

Education is not a production line. It is not a compliance factory. It is not a sorting mechanism for future wage earners. It is the cultivation of human potential. If we fail to protect creativity in our schools, we are not strengthening the nation — we are narrowing it. Literacy and numeracy are the roots. Creativity is the flowering canopy. Cut off the canopy, and eventually the roots weaken too.

Frequently Asked Questions About Creativity in Schools

Is literacy and numeracy still important?

Yes. Foundational literacy and numeracy are essential. The argument is not against basics — it is against reducing education only to basics.

Does research show arts education improves academic results?

Yes. Studies internationally and within New Zealand indicate that arts-rich schools often see improved engagement, wellbeing, and academic outcomes.

Are the arts being removed from the curriculum?

Formally, no. Practically, when most classroom time is mandated for literacy and numeracy targets, arts time is reduced — especially for struggling learners.

Why does creativity matter in an AI-driven future?

Because automation replaces routine tasks. Original thinking, adaptability, collaboration and imagination become more valuable — not less.