![]() I hearken back to Plato’s dictum that the single most important thing for a society to accomplish in order to succeed is to teach its young people to find pleasure in the right things. These habits of creative engagement are the ways we work when we apply ourselves with artistry-into any kind of project or problem, not just those in artistic media like dance, music, drama, the visual and literary arts. We when develop these capacities, these ways of working inside, to the point that we can apply them both by intention and intuition, we have and developed them into habits of mind. In this essay, we will explore the key processes, actions and attitudes activated when we invest ourselves in the flow of creating. Creative engagement is to me a bull’s eye of such potent centrality that its concentric circles of resonance and impact contain the kind of learning that individuals, schools, institutions, our culture and the world in general are crying to provide. My current answer is shared in this essay, and in its simplest statement, it is: I think the single most potent school reform goal would be to place the highest priority on individual creative engagement, and to shape schooling to develop the habits of mind that constitute creative engagement. ![]() My answers have changed over time as my understanding of the dysfunctions of American schools deepen, and as my own pedagogy refines and discovers new core practices. Over the years, I have asked many education professionals the following question: If you were to place all your chips on one key idea upon which to stake American school reform, which gamble seems best to take? I have heard answers that range from reducing class size and differentiated instruction, to authentic assessment, drastic increases in teacher pay, to no-schools-but-widescale apprenticeships. ![]()
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