Creativity and Curriculum

Abstract

Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1969, Vol 14(5), 264-265. Reviews the book, The Creative College Student: An Unmet Challenge edited by Paul Heist (1968). The present volume an intriguing set of essays on what pedagogy is like in the college setting and how the customary curricular arrangements impinge on college students–tries in various ways to come to grips with the problem of such bias, which it finds to be extensive. Take, as an example of the kind of asymmetry to which we are referring, the difference in degree of educational resources and of curricular emphasis devoted by the typical collegiate institution to academic work in music, drama, and the dance, say, as compared to biology, chemistry, and physics. The second-named trio of fields tends to be viewed as more worthy of serious attention than the first–although this would not have been the case in ancient Greece and it is by no means clear that we do our culture a service by tilting its educational payoff matrix away from the arts and toward the sciences. The upshot is that a college curriculum is sufficiently at odds with the rest of life that a student's degree of mastery of academic fare gives little indication of what he will do outside the hothouse environment of taking courses and receiving grades. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved)