The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History

To invoke art was to signal that Synectics’s brand of creativity shared something with art—not in materials, technique, knowledge, or conditions of work, but in a supposed way of thinking, even a way of being in the world. Per Synectics theory, this meant thinking poetically. But it also meant being one with the work.

Whether because they wanted to protect their secrets or because they were genuinely uninterested in the question, it was not creatives who drove the conversation about creativity, but rather those who managed them.

As a new psychological term of art, “creativity” drew a conceptual space that included the greatest accomplishments but also everyday acts of originality. This new concept served much of the function that genius had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that is, the thing imagined to be the engine of the progress of mankind.

With help from the GI Bill and monumental government investment in higher education, between 1940 and 1964 the number of people with professional and technical degrees more than doubled, growing at twice the rate of the general labor force.

Rather than standing athwart history yelling “stop,” as the postwar conservative William F. Buckley urged, or questioning the whole system of constant growth and military one-upsmanship that drove such roiling change, they formulated a model of human nature consistent with it.

The fact that Osborn dedicated the later part of his career to convincing educators that every American child needed to be trained in his Madison Avenue–bred, industry-forged methods of creative thinking reflects a worldview in which commerce was, or should be, the model for society itself.

The notion that creativity is what makes us human is both toothlessly vague and far too limiting, especially if it makes us think of other very human impulses—to care, to maintain, to collect, to reuse, to copy, to fight, or even to follow—as less relevant.

as fun as the process may be, it must always come back to someone else’s bottom line, the session must always end.

These liberal education reformers were attempting to reconcile what the historian of education David Labaree has called the three competing ideals in American education, each corresponding to a different end goal and a different model of the student subject. The goal of “democratic equality” sees students as citizens, with the role of schools being

The term creativity, in other words, allows us to think and say things previous terms don’t. It is not a new word for old ideas but a way of expressing thoughts that were previously inexpressible.