I thought this video clip was interesting. I agreed that students or people should not be classified into academic (smart people) and non-academic people based on one's attending college. The longer I live and the more people I meet, I find highly intelligent, incredibly gifted, and successful people who never attended college. It is sad to think these people wouldn't view themselves as anything less than brilliant. The piece that surprised me the most was that 98% of students in kindergarten scored at the genius level for divergent thinking. The same students were re-tested years later and the percentages decreased. (I actually didn't see or hear the exact percentages, but I could tell they decreased from the rest of the conversation. Maybe it was my computer, so if you heard them, let me know.) One would think that these percentages would get better as students learned more and got older. It is sad that small children are good at something so valuable, but they lose it because somewhere along the way they learn that there should only be one right answer.
My question is similar to Rick's. How can we show value or even cultivate important things such as divergent thinking, creativity, real-world problem solving, and other "gifts" that aren't measured on a standardized test (that only has one right answer per question) when so much pressure and focus is on test scores?
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