Center for Educational Practice

Teaching: A Heritage of Everlasting Creativity

by THOMAS R. ROSEBROUGH, PH.D.
University Professor of Education

And so when I thought I was in my story or in charge of it, I really have been only on the edge of it, carried along. Is this because we are in an eternal story that is happening partly in time? — Wendell Berry in his novel, Jayber Crow

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. — British historian Paul Johnson

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible . . . He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. — Colossians 1: 15-17

As foreseen by many over the last two decades, American public schools are in crisis. The symptom or “consequence” is that we have a shortage of hundreds of thousands of teachers. Why has this occurred? In brief, policymakers and their allies have systematically removed virtually every incentive from educators who want to serve students. Most teachers long for the days when schooling was first about the students as persons and then about results. There are other factors like low pay for one of the most stressful and potentially transforming jobs in society; but in the end, teachers leave the profession because they are not valued for why they teach.

Linda Darling-Hammond (2022) says that “root of the crisis is the way teaching was conceptualized when our current school structures were designed a century ago.” They sought to emulate Henry Ford’s assembly line factories in the name of efficient management and production. This included a “more tightly prescribed curriculum, more teacher-proof texts, more extensive testing, and more regulations. They also consciously strove to hire less well-educated teachers who would work for low wages and would go along with the new regime of prescribed lessons and pacing schedules without protest” (p. 8). The author uses the term “legacy of teacher shortages.” How do we break through and attract great teachers? We must look at another dimension, the loss of which affects the staffing of our classrooms as well. To change this legacy we must confront the underlying causality.

In a 2011 book, Ralph Leverett and I proposed “a return to schooling where education begins with learners and their transformation, where the teacher-student dynamic is spotlighted, where the academic and the social are meant to be connected and combined, and where the social is once again joined with spiritual meaning and transcendence” (p. 14). Beginning in 2001 in an effort to “fix” schooling, policymakers came up with a simple solution for a complex problem: a single-minded focus on essential skills and accountability. It does not work. Darling-Hammond believes that “the moment may be ripe for the set of transformations needed to develop a true education profession in this country” (p. 11). She proceeds to list a set of worthy foundational goals, including high quality teacher education, mentoring for beginning teachers, ongoing professional development, participation in school improvement decisions, leadership opportunities for expert teachers, and equitable, competitive salaries. Such steps would move us closer to practices in high-achieving nations like Finland, Canada, and Singapore where the teaching profession is honored and supported.

While I think these steps are necessary to move our country away from crisis-mode, they are mostly macro-level and thus not sufficient because we are aiming too “wide” to hit the target. Policymakers operate at the macro-level primarily because it is the most visible, the lowest hanging fruit. Causality, however, can be found at the micro-level, the less visible dimension. From a more transcendently micro-perspective, we must move our schools where teachers connect with students toward purposes of everlasting creativity. As one high school teacher recently lamented as part of a discussion on best practices, “How can we do in-depth topical study when the required curriculum is broad and shallow?” Unless we change our pedagogical worldview, we will still reside on the floor looking for the ceiling, and yes, walking on the ground instead of reaching for the stars. Our students are more than sponges for academic content, and they are more than a test score.

The 21st century demands skills and dispositions that are adaptable to solve problems that heretofore did not exist. Zakaria (2006) quotes the minister of education in Singapore, a country in Asia which was atop the world in science and math rankings:

(America) is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. . . Those are the areas where Singapore must learn from America. (p. 37)

Here is the irony: Our country has thrown away our educational identity of creativity and adventure in order to imitate countries with exam meritocracies. We have become them even as they want to become us!

The worst case scenario? What if the “system” produces teachers where students never have a “connecting” experience with a good teacher through their 12-13 (or 16-17) years of formal education? Such a thought is troubling. It seems timely to ask: Where are we right now with American public school education? To evaluate we have to look at more than the descending achievement levels from the pandemic. The NAEP (the “nation’s report card”) currently reports for 2022 that 39% of fourth and eighth graders in U.S. public schools are below NAEP basic proficiency, 4 points “up” from 35% in 2019 (in many schools educators would say these are optimistic numbers). The Covid remote learning scenario certainly has affected learners adversely, but the 2019 numbers were hardly a high-water mark to celebrate. One-third of our children cannot read and compute at even the basic level of achievement twenty years into the alphabet soup of policy-maker futility of NCLB (2001), RTTT (2009), and ESSA (2016).

It takes a culture to raise public schools. Politicians inside and outside the profession are out of ideas, maybe because their focus never has been on the students in a meaningful way. They believe that high achievement alone, defined by a statistic, is the definition of success. Why is this? Priorities are skewed toward power and money, seldom the whole learner. It takes a whole teacher to teach a whole learner. Thus, a whole teacher is not required in today’s school model because the focus is primarily “academic.” Whole teachers (transformational teachers) are scholars, practitioners, and relaters. The teacher-relater concept is defined by this equation: Who we teach = Why we teach. Our contemporary culture removes the heart of the reason most teachers teach. Twentieth-century theologian Richard John Neuhaus said it succinctly, “Culture is the root of politics, and religion is the root of culture,” and unfortunately, twenty-first century culture seems impoverished.

Standardization is an attempt to hyper-organize schooling so that great teachers are no longer required, which goes back to Darling-Hammond’s point about how U.S. teachers have been perceived. It excludes the humanity, the wholeness of the teacher-student relationship that energizes the culture of schooling itself.

Here is the crux of America’s educational crisis: Public schools are tied to a paradigm of standardization that inexorably will fail to move students toward everlasting creativity. Neuhaus’ words of culture, politics, and religion might be “educationally” re-stated: An American culture that is uninformed by biblical values cannot produce successful schools and students. Why? Simply said, transcendent morality is the fulcrum on which the lever of education rests. Teachers cannot teach in classrooms where right is wrong and wrong is right. And, one of the biggest wrongs is the systemic objectifying of students and teachers as a means toward the narrow end of higher test scores. Treating someone we care about as an object for gain is always a deal breaker; everyone desires to be an end in themselves, to be accorded respect and value. Public schools need not become religious, but they are now tied more strongly to federal and state directives than to local communities, where good-sensed authority is more likely to reside. Public schools will continue to serve their broad-based constituency, but they unfortunately cannot serve that sector in the deeply immeasurable ways needed for success for an increasing number of reasons.

The Invisible Spark for Creativity

Creativity has always been the key to education’s future. To think something different—to make something new—to solve a problem—to change a life for the better--these are the mantras, the fabric of good schooling. To achieve these ends we must first commit to these purposes. Sadly, our public schools have lost this commitment. Where can we re-discover everlasting creativity?

The future of education lies in extending the best of the past into the present, and the heritage of U.S. education, private and public, is solidly Christian in its ethos and principles. The Christian liberal arts connection is broken in American public schools. While this statement is hardly a news bulletin, the headlines of the present inescapably illuminate our difficulties and hopes. In our time we who teach can easily forget a heritage which can guide us in connecting to the eternal. Our past is ignored at our own peril as a society, especially for education. Such ignorance can be characterized, referring to culture in general, in different ways: British historian Paul Johnson calls it “contemporary arrogance” while American presidential historian Jon Meacham terms it “tyranny of the present.” The commonality here is mindless self- and social-awareness to the detriment of current generations. The past can serve like an old fashioned movie projector to illuminate the present, showing us the images of what came before to light our contemporary paths.

One of those lights, and I think the most critical one, is the idea that teaching is a calling, a role that God ordains as a gift to humanity. Martin Luther 500 years ago reminded us that any vocation is an opportunity to serve God. Even teachers who claim no religious tendency want to feel like they are making a significant difference. Perceiving ourselves as serving others for a greater good is a compelling force, but currently the state-mandated inspiration is that core curriculum delivered like an information-download is a national panacea. Those in political power who have little understanding of the dynamics of education have long bought into a philosophy of education, even an ideology of the nature of learning that is informational, didactic, stamped for expiration, and now standardized.

Consider the contrast: In the 4th century A.D., a brilliant man answered a salient question, “What is an educated person?” Augustine, a converted Roman pagan, later a bishop, reconciled the “seven liberal arts” of the Greeks and Romans with the tenets of Christianity (as found for example in the Apostles Creed). With the power of grace given by the Holy Spirit, the “magnificent seven” subjects of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy could lead humanity to a higher truth. Faith and learning were integrated. Think about it. The liberal arts has been the curriculum of our schools in one form or another for over 2000 years, rather arbitrarily invented perhaps, but when endowed with faith, a force that changed the world for the better. Thus was laid a heritage, just a few hundred years after Jesus’ time of earth, for the definition of an educated person. Indeed St. Augustine brokered a relationship where to grow in love and virtue we must submit our intellect and will to God’s perfect love. And, we stand on the shoulders of many others as well.

This heritage in education, the Christian liberal arts tradition, has been enhanced and transported by many others across the centuries (Pulliam & Van Patten, 2003): Aquinas (c. 1200) with his faith and reason merger; Erasmus (c. 1500) with knowledge and truth and an eye for the individuality of students; Luther (c. 1520) with vocatio for all and literacy for the masses via the Bible; Calvin (c. 1540) with catechisms and core values; Comenius (c. 1640) with his child development ideas and focus on the whole child; and Froebel (c. 1820) with a learning garden for children at play with “gifts” and “occupations,” inventor of the Kinder-garten. Allow me to return to Comenius for amplification of past innovation in education.

Parallel in time with the strict 17th century Puritans was a humble Czech priest named Comenius. His thoughts and practices in education were 300 years ahead of their time in the areas of child development and educational psychology and pedagogy. He was Moravian in his denomination but ecumenical in a decidedly non-ecumenical time of the Thirty Years War between Catholic and Protestant nations. He rowed upstream culturally and called for schools to be environments of order, peace, and gentleness toward children. Such environments for Comenius contrasted sharply with the didactic, recitation-based, harsh discipline classrooms of the time, demonstrating that Christian education could occupy a bigger tent.

Shortly before his death he wrote Orbis Pictus, a truly innovative text that taught children to read by associating letters and sounds with words and pictures. It is a widely held view that Comenius was invited to become Harvard’s second president but declined. Comenius’ ideas on stages of human development inspired 20th century research by Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Jerome Bruner, all of whom found evidence that “readiness to learn” was a product of both nature and nurture in learners.

Contemporary public schooling ignores this research to the detriment of students (and to the burnout of teachers). Good teaching has always struck a balance between challenge and frustration, with a sensitive teacher traveling alongside students as they learn. This balance easily is lost when the “system” condones insensitivity in the push to treat standards like hitching posts instead of the guideposts they are meant to be.

A holistic, even reverential view of education is vital. To revere someone means we deeply respect or admire them. Do we as a society revere what teachers do? Do we revere the potential of our learners? Teachers do not have to be saints to earn our respect and admiration as they teach our children daily—U.S. teachers teach the most hours per week and year among more than 50 countries. They occupy the essential profession, one on which all others depend; additionally and most consequentially, they are on the frontlines of society’s turmoil and issues. How for example can schools have discipline in their classrooms when many parents at home require no accountability? Yet, as someone observed, teachers are often viewed as delivery people for a local pizza business. They are employed to transport on time a curriculum product with an ever-present “pacing guide,” and to the state’s or community’s satisfaction. Whose “pacing?” The state’s, not the child’s. This mindset is one of benign neglect of the possible. It stifles pedagogical relationships which kills creativity.

One teacher expressed it this way, “I hope my administration doesn’t discover that I told my students that I care about them more than their test scores.” This same teacher had great results to go with great relationships with students, just as the research indicates. This educator felt almost subversive in prioritizing relationships.

What Can Be Done?

In the grand scheme of education why might this pedagogical connection, this learning link between teacher and student be significant? In a word: success. What is the teaching thread that binds schooling to success? Means of education across the years, even through graduate school, must somehow teach us how to do our best, to be our best creatively. If education fails to “see” the visible and invisible value of creativity, it is literally not worth the time. Creativity is the thread that binds education to success.

We all realize that life experiences outside of schooling as well as inside can play a big part in learning to do and be our best. Learning is more often take-out than dining in, but schooling should at least set the table. In school I had public speaking opportunities, cooperative learning experiences, individual and competitive challenges, both kind and frank feedback, exposure to artistic and mechanical skill building, and opportunity to share myself with others in need. I have learned that fear of failure is a healthy mindset, a motivating force in performance that can even exceed a will and drive to succeed. Failure in a supportive culture leads to success. When I have come up short, I know so because of good schooling inside and outside classroom doors. I have learned to do and be my best by observing others who are successful, by reading about techniques and mindsets, and by realizing after failings that preparation is vital. Do our schools today help students in such ways?

The solution does not lie in macro-level organization and standardization, but rather in a micro-view of human development and pedagogy. First we accept that learning is complex and resists simple-minded solutions like loading up accountability on year-end exams (which results in a post-hoc vacation from learning the last month of the year in many states). There are beacons of light in public schools with the flexibility of thought to promote differentiation, accept and utilize multiple intelligence theory, encourage growth mindset practices, and facilitate self-directed learning through guided inquiry. Unfortunately these bright lights are the exceptions not the rule.

Standardization is the enemy of creativity. Notice I did not say structure is the foe because it is most certainly needed in fostering creativity. Without structure there is ultimately chaos. But, currently our American public schools overwhelmingly standardize their classrooms, curriculum, teachers, and students away from creative impulses. Many educators realize what is happening; others do not and are like frogs placed in a pan of cold water, slowly heated past their realization until it is too late—they (along with their students) are cooked!

We can as teachers, however, mimic our Lord’s example and create learners who want to continue learning. The desire to create is internal and undoubtably God-given because He is the ultimate Creator. The beauty of the situation for teachers is that we are working not only with books and pencils and tablets and technology, but with human souls who can be moved toward everlasting creativity.

This is education’s heart. Wendell Berry, mentioned above, is describing a reality of living that, almost incredibly, we seldom reflect upon. Dallas Willard (1998) relates that “spiritual” is not something to which we have to aspire; it is something we already are. Our lives are lived as spiritual beings even as we grapple and contend with the material world of the senses; that is, we are carried along on the edge of eternity as we perceive the everyday of our working lives: other people, offices, school buildings, chairs, tables, clocks, computers, cell phones, music, pets, nature’s beauty and terror, and so much more of course. I mentioned clocks. Nothing symbolizes our secular lives more than a clock. We live in a time-bound world but we are called to go beyond its bounds to the sacred.

Transformational teachers can touch the sacred for their students when they reach for everlasting creativity. By contrast, classrooms that force core standards without considering student readiness to learn are artificially crafted and disruptive. Curriculum standards and rigor are vital, but they are only a part of a complete pedagogy equation. Arguably, education has always had a twofold goal structure: academic and social. Academics is about knowledge; socialization is about students’ socio-emotional well-being. If we had to choose (and we emphatically do not), which is more important? We might view this as a faux framework since one goal entity should relate to the other, but ignoring child and adolescent development research constitutes such a choice.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” declared one very knowledgeable person, Albert Einstein (Isaacson, 2007, p.7). Yet our public schools for the past two decades have enshrined a pursuit of lockstep, fully calibrated, standardized schooling undergirded with “let’s test anything that moves.” It is scientism applied to education, more specifically a brand of behaviorism based on a paradigm of input, output, and reinforcement. The reinforcement part is to expect success, a narrow test-score kind of success, from educators who actually have only a small percentage of control over that success. Important research by Marzano, Pickering, and Pollock (2001) estimates that teachers control only 13% of the variables tied to student performance, elements like instructional strategies, curriculum design, and classroom management. The other 87% of the variables are not controlled, such as home environment, health issues, basic motivational barriers, and even state-mandated rigidity in curriculum choices and time constraints.

Teachers across the years have always known that they can only control so much in their classrooms. What has held them to the profession is the magnet of the invisible: why teachers want to teach and how students are motivated to learn. The compelling force involves creativity.

Digging Deeper

Encouraging creativity in education can be framed as a divine argument. Theologian Dallas Willard (1998) makes a persuasive biblical case for everlasting creativity in God’s highest creation: human beings. Teaching was held high as a spiritual gift by St. Paul for good reason. Willard says, “after passage into God’s full world—we will begin to assume new responsibilities” . . . that “new creative responsibilities are assigned.” He cites Luke 19:17 and Matt. 35:21, “Well done, good and faithful servant, our magnificent Master will say, you have been faithful in the smallest things, take care of ten cities, five cities, many things, or what is appropriate” (p. 398). Our most pressing question as teachers is not how can we cover curriculum today (although important), but how can we create a classroom environment where all our learners are deeply engaged and eternally impacted?

Here are a few thoughts on how teachers at any level can encourage everlasting creativity:

1. Enter the classroom prayerfully that our words and actions show the “fruit of the Spirit” detailed in Galatians 5:22-23: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law” (NKJV). The Passion Translation says there is “a clear textual inference” that the fruit (singular) of the Holy Spirit is love, with the other eight virtues reflecting a Spirit-filled life of agape love (p. 523).
2. For those who teach in a public arena, the words “against such there is no law,” are compelling. No law in the U.S. or elsewhere can prevent display of these virtues of love. Public school educators sometimes work in fear of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. “Fear not,” says St. Paul as the Spirit-life cannot be limited, restrained, or destroyed unless we allow fear to override by not knowing the law. Public school teachers and administrators are indeed free to serve Jesus by living out agape love.
3. Plan lessons and activities that employ encouragement of self-directed student learning. When learners are challenged with good questions, they will respond with creative answers. And, they will remember what they were asked and what was discussed. Guided inquiry can supplement more direct instruction because it integrates good questions as a methodology. By seeking to touch natural curiosity in students we can create a life-long passion for learning, surely the goal for all teachers.
4. Vary teaching methods. Brain-science research is clear that learners crave variety, options, and choices. Standards may be fixed, even rigid, but the means of delivering them can be open and flexible. Variety is not only the spice of life, but also a catalyst for creative and meaningful classroom environments. It is a pedagogical essential to connect curriculum to the motivations of learners—the more choices we offer, the greater the chance of connection as a gate to creativity.
5. All teaching begins with an attitude. Realize that creativity is related to freedom in pedagogy. Creativity at the individual level emanates from a feeling of released curiosity. For example, Jony Ive is the mastermind behind Apple’s most iconic products like the iPhone, iPad, and AirPods. His is a fascination for materials and how people use things. He says, “I am terrified and disgusted when people are absolutely without curiosity” (2022, p. 1). Surely we teachers can rekindle our own curiosity so that learners are inspired.
6. Our students will never reach their potential unless we create a nurturing classroom environment. The key to nurturing anybody or anything rests on one word: relationships. From the longest longitudinal research ever done (it began at Harvard in 1938 and is still going), Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz (2023) reach a simple but profound conclusion. What makes life fulfilling and happy is the power of relationships. And, they say that it is never too late to strengthen or build new relationships. Educators have a ring-side seat for creating a culture of everlasting creativity.

Isaiah (64:4) says that the “eye hath not seen, neither ear heard” what lies before us in the next life. Willard writes intuitively, even humorously,

Thus, we should not think of ourselves as destined to be celestial bureaucrats, involved eternally in celestial “administrivia.” That would be only slightly better than being caught in an everlasting church service. No, we should think of our destiny as being absorbed in a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and enjoyment. (p. 399)

God our creator values creativity. Perhaps now is the time for American society to reconsider it as well. Thus, we would value not just what have we learned, but even more, who we are becoming. As William Butler Yeats reminded us a century ago, “Education is the lighting of a fire, not the filling of a pail.”

Willard speaks of heaven as “the blessed condition of the restoration of all things—of the kingdom come in its utter fullness” (p. 400). The heavenly perspective is that we now live partly in time. Let’s seek transformation in education as a function of everlastingly creative wholeness, in pursuit of a vision where our students are at the center of purposes.

References

• Darling-Hammond, L. (2022). Breaking the legacy of teacher shortages. Vol. 80, No. 2. http://ascd.org/el/articles/breaking-the-legacy-of-teacher-shortages.
• Isaacson, W. (2007). Einstein: His life and universe. New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Lipsky-Karasz, E. (2022). Jony Ive on Life after Apple. New York: Wall Street Journal.
• Marzano, R., Pickering, D., & Pollock, J. (2001). Classroom instruction that works: Research-based strategies for increasing student achievement. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
• Pulliam, J. D., & Van Patten, J. J. (2003). History of Education in America. 8th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.
• Rosebrough, T. R., & Leverett, R. G. (2011). Transformational teaching in the information age; Making why and how we teach relevant to students. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
• The Passion Translation (2018). 2nd Edition. BroadStreet Publishing Group.
• Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Willard, D. (1998). The divine conspiracy: Rediscovering our hidden life in God. New York: HarperCollins.
• Zacharia, F. (2006). We all have a lot to learn. Newsweek, 147(2), 37.