Creativity: Fostering Golden Environments

Abstract

he intent here is to identify crucial factors linked to the promotion of creativity and to outline their implications for secondary school educators. Writers on creativity have a good idea of what constitutes encouraging environments. And there is general agreement that the development of creativity is the crux of educating the gifted. The problem is that we have difficulty establishing circumstances that will facilitate creative productivity. The word golden, used here to describe creativityenhancing climates, comes from ages--historical periods that produced remarkable clusterings of geniuses: classical Athens, the Renaissance, or the time of the American Revolution. The golden environment is the creativogenic environment described by Silvano Arieti (1976) in his remarkable book, Creativity: The Magic Synthesis. Some cultures have promoted creativity to a much larger extent than others. These creativogenic societies, together with the potentially inventive person, are the two necessary elements for creativity. Arieti further asserts that creative geniuses appear in unusually large numbers in particular periods of history in certain geographic areas. This uneven occurrence suggests that special environmental factors affect the appearance of creativity, rather than exclusively biological factors. Creativity is encouraged by certain features of the environment. If we were to identify these factors, we could try to promote their recurrence and thus promote creativity. The possibility for the appearance of large numbers of geniuses always exists in certain populations. Gowan and Olson (1979) have sounded the alarm: