Education executive Joel Kupperstein writes that creativity in schools is often squeezed out by an overemphasis on measurable skills. He recalls how his young daughter used to ask if they could take the “low way” instead of the highway — her term for a shortcut to avoid traffic. That childhood invention is a natural expression of creative problem-solving that students lose as they move through the U.S. education system.
A 2024 report from the Journal of Creative Education found a notable absence of structured creativity learning in American classrooms. Many other countries are integrating creative thinking into their curricula, but the United States has been slower to follow. The report suggests children enter school fearless and inventive yet leave cautious and constrained.
Why kindergartners outperform executives on creativity tests
The Marshmallow Challenge, a team-building exercise where groups build a structure using spaghetti, tape, and a marshmallow, often shows that kindergartners outperform adults and CEOs. Not because they are smarter, but because they haven’t yet learned the assumptions about how things are supposed to work. They experiment more freely, less convinced there is only one right answer.
As students progress, they internalize those assumptions. They learn the “right” way to solve problems and stop looking for alternatives. Kupperstein writes that the structure of schooling itself isn’t the problem. The trouble is how quickly boundaries become fixed and how little freedom students feel to explore or question them.
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In the name of assessment and accountability, schools over-rotate toward knowledge, skills, and abilities. Those are easy to observe, measure, and compare. Creativity, by contrast, is messy and hard to quantify. So schools prioritize things with defined answers and predictable paths.
But creativity flourishes only in the presence of knowledge. It thrives when students understand something well enough to apply it to new or unfamiliar situations. The challenge is not to abandon assessment but to make space for the kinds of thinking that allow students to discover solutions that are not already known.
From subject drills to real-world decisions
Kupperstein compares typical schooling to isolated basketball drills — dribbling, crossover technique, chest pass. A student can master every skill and still freeze in a real game. A game is not a series of skill demonstrations. It is a series of decisions made in a complex, unpredictable flow. That shift — from the “right” way to the “effective” way — is where creativity begins. This mirrors what learning scientist James W. Pellegrino calls the difference between knowing something and being able to use that knowledge in context.
Applying ideas in messy, unfamiliar situations is a completely different cognitive task from reciting them in practice. Creativity emerges when learners must apply what they know in unscripted and dynamic environments. The article presents a simple analogy: a screw. Schools teach students to turn screws into pre-drilled holes. But the world does not hand you a pre-drilled hole. Building a bridge involves wind, expanding steel, tight budgets, and deadlines. Sometimes turning a screw is not even the right solution — students may need to weld, bolt, or invent a new fastener. Teaching isolated maneuvers alone fails them.
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The role of failure — and what AI might change
Creativity and failure are linked, Kupperstein argues. Kids fail constantly in video games but do not quit. Failure is a necessary step to reach the next level. In school, however, the perfect score is celebrated. The productive struggle is not. If children learn to fear being wrong, they learn to fear learning itself. They begin to cut corners or lean on technological crutches like AI.
He suggests AI may shift the value of knowledge rather than replace it. Students will still need strong conceptual understanding to interpret information, evaluate outputs, and decide how to apply ideas. Creativity and judgment become even more critical. Some education researchers note that while creativity is valuable, it should not come at the expense of foundational knowledge. The balance between assessment and exploration remains a subject of debate.
The article makes a call to celebrate the process of learning — not just the correct answer. That means experience-based learning, open-ended explorations, and classrooms where struggle is expected and valued. Even the highest achievers struggle, and that struggle is vital in a welding class or a calculus class. If we opt out of modeling and encouraging creativity because it is too messy to grade, we limit students’ futures.
Kupperstein — executive vice president and chief product officer at Project Lead The Way — ends with the image of the “low way.” Encouraging students to find their own shortcuts and celebrating when they do might be the most important lesson schools can teach.
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