Has the talk made a difference, leading to changes in the way schools work or educators think?
I think it may have. It’s short. That doesn’t hurt. These are issues that people feel profoundly for their kids. People are in education because they feel strongly about it. And they feel, for the most part, that they are trapped in national policy frameworks. They feel in their gut that the framework of national initiatives runs counter to what they want to do. I’m not critical of educators — some, yes, taken one by one — but the system itself is becoming a big problem. You contend that creativity is as important as literacy and that educators “should treat it with the same status.” To raise literate children, parents are urged to read to their kids every night. What should parents be doing with their children every night to raise creative children? There are a lot of misconceptions about creativity. One is that it’s about special people, that it’s rare. Everybody has real creative capacities. They are born with them. They just have to develop them. If someone were to say to you, I’m
