Recently, when reading books about the history of mathematics, I suddenly thought of some questions about creativity, such as why do people have creativity? Where does creativity come from? Why is the creativity of Chinese people so low?
Then my thoughts began to diverge, and I came up with some temporary and immature explanations.
Why do people have creativity?#
Creativity often manifests itself in the form of inspiration. Inspiration comes from the randomness and uncertainty of thinking. In other words, at the moment when each thinking activity ends, you cannot determine what you will think of next. This randomness and uncertainty are inherent in every mind. Therefore, everyone has creativity.
Where does creativity come from?#
The more I thought about this question, the more confused I became. I Googled it and found various answers, such as solitude, relaxation, freedom, chaos, sex, procrastination, etc., all of which can be sources of creativity. This question is temporarily set aside.
Why is the creativity of Chinese people so low?#
Chinese people have low innovation ability in the field of technology, and there are many reasons for this, such as the influence of traditional culture, the influence of survival pressure, the influence of academic system, etc. However, these are indirect influences. They are called indirect influences because when doing scientific research and writing papers, you don't always think about the teachings of ancient people, the mortgage you have to pay, your own professional title and salary. You temporarily put them aside when writing papers. The most direct and main reason comes from the impact on thinking caused by doing too many exercises during the period of exam-oriented education.
Usually, Chinese exams have tight schedules and cover a lot of content. In such a short time, they can only test memory, calculation ability, logical thinking ability, reading comprehension ability, and proficiency in knowledge. Exams cannot evaluate a person's imagination, creativity, and passion for a subject.
Statistics show that "among 21 surveyed countries worldwide, Chinese children rank first in computational ability, last in imagination, and fifth from the bottom in creativity."
Where is the reason? In my opinion, there are too many exercises. Doing exercises for the purpose of exams cannot cultivate a person's imagination and creativity. Doing too many exercises will actually harm students' creativity (here mainly refers to science and engineering students, I haven't studied humanities, so I have no right to speak about humanities).
Doing exercises means using existing theories or tools to solve problems, rather than creating new theories or tools to solve problems. When you do a lot of exercises, you will get used to using existing theories to interpret the world and using existing tools to solve problems. You are not willing to invent new theories or tools unless you realize that the theories and theorems used in the process of doing exercises are treated as golden rules and absolute truths in your subconscious mind. People who do a lot of exercises tend to be conservative, lack awareness of innovation and breaking old frameworks (unless the old theories cannot explain new phenomena, and the old tools cannot solve new problems, new theories and tools will be generated at that time). This is the fundamental reason why Chinese students are good at getting high scores but lack ability.
Focusing on doing exercises will result in being good at exams; focusing on the theory itself will make it easier to invent new theories. As the saying goes, you reap what you sow. Most of the energy of Chinese students is used for doing exercises and exams, so they naturally excel in exams but lack in other aspects.
However, there are still a few exceptions. Those students who like to solve problems using various methods during their studies have higher creativity, but still limited. Students who invent new theories to solve problems, even those who only have such ideas, are rare. They often have the potential to become genius scientists.
Discoveries and creations like Newton's law of universal gravitation and calculus, Einstein's theory of relativity, Galois' group theory, Cantor's theory of infinity, etc., cannot be achieved simply by doing exercises. Doing exercises is tinkering within the existing framework, while these discoveries introduce new things and go beyond the original framework. Their source is imagination and creativity, not the ability to do exercises. It can be said that doing too many exercises restricts our imagination and damages our creativity.
People who enjoy doing exercises are suitable to be engineers, while those who enjoy inventing new theories are suitable to be scientists.
In China, the most core ability that determines the scores of the college entrance examination for science students is computational ability, or mental calculation ability. And the ability to do mental calculations is determined by instantaneous memory. And this ability can be said to be the least valuable ability for a person. The college entrance examination (science) selects people with strong computational ability, not people with good imagination and creativity. However, now jobs that require calculation and logic are about to be taken over by artificial intelligence/machine learning.
Creativity is the highest ability of human beings.