The Decline of Art in the US

This past Saturday, there was a special panel discussion at the Sundance Film Festival called Power of Story: Making Art Matter (You can view it online). One of the panelists mentioned that the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking has been administered since 1966 to capture individual creativity levels. I'm paraphrasing from memory, but what I found interesting, is that the panelist said around 1990, American test scores leveled off after having increased dramatically every year prior to that and have actually been decreasing.


So I went looking. I discovered that Kyung Hee Kim, an associate professor of educational psychology at the College of William & Mary, performed analyses of Torrance test scores for almost 300,000 American adults and children and found that all of the scores of the Lateral/Innovative thinking factor, Vertical/Adaptive thinking factor, and Creative personality factor have significantly decreased or have significantly started decreasing. The decrease has been more in recent years than earlier years.


The Torrance test measures creativing in not only artistic areas, but science, interpersonal relationships and others. Dr. Kim says that in western cultures we think of creativity as artistic but that in eastern cultures they think of creativity as scientific.


Dr. Kim believes the decline in U.S. creativity may be in part because kids spend more time with television than in activities that utilize creativity - playing outside for one thing. She also thinks the lack of creativity development and the stifling of children’s creative opportunities in classrooms is having an impact. She is quick to point out that it's speculation since there haven't really been significant studies to look at this.


Creativity is so important to me that I devised a game for my son when he was almost a toddler. We've been doing it so long, I can't remember when we really started. He would ask to be told stories and we started out telling stories to him. After awhile, I wanted him to be able to come up with stories too. So I came up with a game that we played for years.


One of us would come up with three things and then the other would have to build a story around it and tell that story. As time went on, we would come up with the craziest mismatches we could possibly imagine and still the stories came. Good ones, terrible ones (mine mostly fell into that category), mediocre ones. Funny and poignant ones. It was a great game, and I hope it helped my son's creativity even though we didn't start with that intention.


I've also shared with my son the love I have for caving. We have spent many hours crawling through muddy passages and sloshing through borehole passages with water up to our thighs. On those trips we speculate about what might be down a side passage or how to get the best photograph of a pink planaria.

I like to think I'm a relatively well-rounded, creative type and I hope my son shares that capacity. He's been writing a science-fiction novel since he was about 12 and he's thinking about studying physics, astronomy and marine biology when he goes to college in a couple of years, so I'm hopeful.

Winding Down The Metal Tiger

Depending upon which calendar you choose, the year of the yang metal tiger is either gone or passing in the next few weeks. The eastern astrologers predicted that it would be a turbulent year, and I think they were right (aren't they all, one might ask?). By contrast, this upcoming yin metal rabbit is supposed to bring peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments. They say it's going to be a good year to focus on family, creative endeavors and diplomacy. Astrology may all be, as my grandmother might have said, "a lot of hooey" but it seems pretty timely for me right now.

This past year has felt chaotic to me. I've chalked it up to lots of changes and trying to cram a lot of things into an already busy schedule, but it's been more than that. I've felt more like I have Attention Deficit Disorder than I have ever felt in my life. It's been harder than ever to concentrate on the things that are routine, much less the things that are not. It will be fun to look back in a year and see what's transpired and whether those eastern astrological predictions were worth their salt.

I didn't make any new year's resolutions this year but I have made a change that many people would attribute to one: I joined the Y so I could start swimming again regularly. The timing was completely unrelated to the holidays.

I fell in love with swimming when I was ten years old. I spent from 7am until about 9pm in the local pool for an entire summer, seven days a week, swimming on the regular and varsity swim teams. I ended the summer with two things: a trophy for being the league's high point swimmer and the inability to even get near a pool without my eyes starting to burn (didn't wear goggles back then). I tried swimming at a local gym a couple of times over the years after that because I missed swimming and even with goggles, couldn't get over the burning sensation. I gave up swimming.

My younger brother, who swam on the high school team, started swimming again about a year ago. I don't know whether it was because he fell in love with a swimming coach or just missed it too. Maybe both. And in the past few weeks, my partner had mentioned a couple of times that she thought she needed to start swimming and it had reminded me of how much I loved to swim as a kid, but I didn't do anything about it except muse.

My mother was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia on Christmas Eve so my brother decided to come into town from the west coast to spend a few days with her before the new year. The morning after he arrived, they called me to ask if I wanted to go swimming with them. I worried over whether I had a suit that would fit (no swimming, but plenty of hot-tubbing in the backyard has occurred) then I said yes, picked up some swimming goggles and met him and my mother at the Y near her house.

It was fantastic. I swam a pool length without stopping (then had to rest a long time before starting back down the lane because my body memory hopped into race mode but my lungs definitely weren't with the program). I came home and suggested that my partner and I join the local Y so we could both start swimming. We did it, and both had a really great time swimming together in the slow lane. I think she loved it as much as I did.

My eyes were happy. I suspect the chlorine formula has changed over the years or maybe my eyes have restored themselves, I don't know. Maybe a little of both. What I can say, is that I've renewed my love with swimming and it's already brought me peace, joy, calmness and many happy moments.