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What do we mean by ‘creative’?

I think we really mean that school-kids studying English, especially at GCSE, find fewer chances to engage personally, to play, to express themselves, and to make the subject their own. In brief, to have fun. That is the kind of creativityÌý whichÌý the great Victorian poet, critic, and educational reformer, Matthew Arnold, had in mind when he wrote, way back in 1864 (in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’), that ‘the exercise of a creative power, [...]Ìý a free creative activity, is the true function of man; it is proved to be so by man's finding in it his true happiness.’ Arnold adds that this creative activity can be found everywhere: ‘in well-doing’, ‘in learning’, even, he adds, ‘in criticizing’. And that is why the 1921 Newbolt Report, which established English as a subject in the UK, said it was so important to develop methods of teaching ‘which foster the creative impulse’. The authors of Newbolt didn’t just mean asking school-children to write fiction and verse and to perform plays, though they did mean that, and thought it was a good idea. They meant what Arnold meant, that when we teach children Shakespeare, or Austen, or – as we now might – Toni Morrison – we can and should find ways of doing so which feel creative to students and teachers alike.

Is the essay the enemy of expression?

The thought of an exam looming will always be deadening to creativity, and, especially at GCSE, exams tend toÌý elicit rote answers. We need to find a way to dissuade teachers from making all classes about exam preparation. Exam boards can do something about this, by writing marking criteria with words in them such: ‘thoughtful’; ‘surprising’; ‘individual’; and yes, even ‘creative’.

But the bigger answer is that we should think harder about the kinds of writing, and speaking, which we ask of students at all levels. InÌý Britain, we all grew up with essay-writing. We think there is no alternative. Our educational system, writes Peter Womack, ‘makes the form look natural, as if intellectual activity produced essays the way a tree produces leaves.’ But this is just not so. The academic essay as we write it – at GCSE, at A-Level, at university – is a pretty recent invention. It dates back to the mid to late 19th century, and only became dominant in the early 20th. The essay has many virtues: it forces students to organise their thoughts into an argument, to interweave ideas with examples, and at best, it can promote that inner, testing dialogue which is the beginning of intellectual independence. But – as weÌý mostly teach it – the essayÌý is an inflexible form which can only poorly catch the shapeshifting qualities of literature;Ìý it trains students to write in an artificial, ‘objective’ language which they often find alienating, and in which it is difficult – if not impossible – to evoke what is alive and surprising in literary language.

What can we learn from the past?

If we look back to classrooms of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, we find a range of pedagogical tasks, written and oral:Ìý

• paraphrase, which a student would rewrite a text they were studying, perhaps by turning it from verse to prose, or from one verse form to another, or from Latin to English (what we would now call textual transformation);Ìý

• imitate, in which a student would try to rewrite one text in the style or form of another, or modernise it (what we now call recreative writing);Ìý

• verse composition; oration; and more.Ìý

Students studied literature not writing essays about it, but by writing it, and enacting it.

Those tasks were both creative and critical in our sense. And this leads me to my prescription. We have gone wrong by separating out these two sides of English.Ìý

Why creativity needs criticality - and vice versa

As I already indicated, studying Shakespeare critically (or John Steinbeck, or Sylvia Plath), can and should feel creative, and not just because students might write stories or poems based on those authors’ plots or characters, but because they can demonstrate and develop their critical understanding by writing in the style of (say) Steinbeck, and that - in turn - will feed into their writing fresher, more ‘creative’ essays, in which the student can try out other voices.

And, conversely, ‘creative writing’ can only be truly creative if it is also critical. Nothing is more likely to make a student produce an uncreative pile of clichés than a vague instruction to write creatively about – say – their summer holidays, or their feelings on school uniform, or a dream they had last night.Ìý

What students need is what Shakespeare and Milton and hundreds of thousands of school-children had when they went to school in the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries: models of style and form to imitate, parody, play with, and reinvent.Ìý

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Dr Thomas Karshan

Associate Professor in Literature, University of East Anglia

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