Psychologist & education author Thomas Armstrong made a list of twelve grievances he has with the Common Core which he shared in an 2018 article on the American Institute for Learning and Human Development’s website. Many of which sound like they could’ve been penned by Ken Robinson.

What tops his list is the dependence on one-size-fits all solutions. Just like Robinson’s metaphor of the industrial assembly line. By definition creativity is problem solving using divergent rather than convergent thinking. It’s as if the developers of Common Core listened to Pink Floyd’s “the Wall,” and heard it as a brilliant plan rather than a scathing critique of post WWII public education.

Common Core is top-down, rather than grass-roots. In this way it’s very undemocratic. Maybe I’m perceiving it through my own lens as an Art & History double major, but it seems to me that the true nature of creativity is organic (developing naturally, rather than being imposed) and independent- not necessarily wholly self-contained and self-sufficient, no student is an island, but nurturing interdependence rather than dependence or codependency. What I mean is, creativity allows for agency and autonomy within community. Any system that coerces or mandates consistency stifles, rather than encourages creativity.

Not to get too wrapped up in Robin William’s “Dead Poets Society,” but Common Core focuses on skills more than content. “…medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” 

On the one hand, I agree that it’s important and valuable to think and analyze like historians, demographers, economists, city managers, law makers and civil planners in Social Studies classes, rather than just “sit-and-get” names and dates of presidents, generals, inventors and events. However, just as in Art there’s not only subject, technique and composition, there’s also meaning and purpose- how a bill becomes a law isn’t always as important as WHY John Lewis risked his life walking from Selma to Montgomery so to put pressure on Congress to pass and LBJ to sign the Voting Rights Act.

The worst education only addresses Who, When, and Where. Admirably, Common Core sought to shift the focus to What and How, but shouldn’t the best learning begin and end with Why? Maybe I’m taking my cues here from Simon Sinek rather than leading education reformers, but in his article Thomas Armstrong cites British mathematician Alfred North Whitehead as writing about “romancing” students into learning- what we used to call “set induction,” where before getting to the rigor, we presented the relevance in hopes of offering students some meaning and purpose for their learning. Armstrong argues that Common Core fails to woo the learner. 

As an Art teacher, I know that whether we’re learning about some thing as dry and dispassionate as typography and page layout or as deep and  profound as WWI & WWII veterans struggling to express the meaninglessness of existence through surrealism, expressionism and abstract-expressionism “form follows function” is always true. How you do what ALWAYS depend on why.

One of the ways Common Core subverts creativity is because of it’s top-down nature. Where Sugata Mitra advocates learner-centered (“child-centered”) learning, Armstrong suggests that Common Core essentially is a curriculum designed by elitists, from Ivy League academics to billionaire philanthropists to political lobbyist think tanks.

I’m not an English teacher, but not only did I marry one, but many of them have been some of my best friends. What I knew, before researching it is that Common Core pressures schools to replace fiction with non-fiction. Having participated in our AEA’s literacy push in the 2000’s, I’ll stipulate that reaching some kids with reading absolutely requires offering more non-fiction, be that as it may, fiction is reading someone else’s creative writing and it stimulates the imagination which stimulates creativity. As with so many things, we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water.

Ultimately, between it’s pressure on standardized testing and transforming schools into data-processing agencies and teachers into bureaucrats, Common Core is a creativity crusher.

On the other hand… Pablo Picasso once said, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

I had a hard time finding articles supporting the Common Core’s role in encouraging creativity from real researchers and education authors. Most of them were either from Core advocates or in-the-trenches teachers finding ways to adapt in their school systems that had adopted the Core. 

A typical statement is what one blogger (https://creativiteach.me) proclaims, “the standards focus on what is most essential, they do not describe all that can or should be taught. A great deal is left to the discretion of teachers”

The mere existence of such bloggers demonstrates creativity. Common Core can act as the grain of sand that irritates the oyster into producing a pearl. One of my Art professors suggested that then they expect you to jump through hoops, you should take the hoops and start doing tricks with them. A sunken ship seems like an environmental disaster, until it provides a structure for barnacles and coral to attach to and eventually build a reef.

I wish I could get every teacher and school administrator to read chapter six in Ken Robinson’s book. Then, I’d like to replace the Common Core with Robinson’s eight ‘C’ Competencies. No, I don’t see the core as a package with his eight ‘C’s. However, since that utopian vision isn’t going to happen, I’d like to use his competencies in my own classroom and when I’m required to apply Common Core standards, try to package them together as best I can,

Curiosity is the element which all teachers in all disciplines need to model, foster, and to the best of their abilities, inspire in their students in order to motivate them intrinsically to become life-long learners. Truly, it should be the primary goal and focus of school.

Creativity out to be encouraged, rather than actively discouraged or ignored. Obviously, I’m based as a visual arts teacher, but if I could, I’d flip the conventional hierarchy Robison describes where math and sciences are on top, the humanities are in the middle and the arts are on the bottom. That way, instead of music, drama and art being mere “enrichment” as expendable luxuries, they could be harnessed as drivers; providing purpose and meaning to the sciences, inspiring relevance to rigor rather than often being ignored indifferently. 

Criticism & Communication have been components of my Art classes for decades. Description, Analysis, Interpretation and Evaluation are critical thinking skills involved in an “Aesthetic Scan,” steps taken both in introducing new artworks and in reflecting on one’s own work and the work of one’s classmates. Along with depiction, design, and personal expression, communication is one of the four purposes for making art or “aesthetic viewpoints” in art criticism. Of course, one might argue that personal expression is a form of communication as well. You might compare it to poetry, while more direct visual communication is like prose. Color field painters hoped to induce a contemplative experience for their viewers, whereas app developers need to use icons to make their software more intuitive for users. You could argue both are “communicating” non-verbally with their audience.

Collaboration, Compassion, Composure, and Citizenship all have to do with interaction and community. Human beings are social creatures. Call them “soft-skills” or “employability-skills” like Common Core advocates, but truly, they are more essential to being human and more important for adolescents to successfully develop into well adjusted and successful adults than all the math, science and grammar in the world. All teachers should be finding ways both deliberately and incidentally, both directly and covertly in all of their classes.