{CHAPTER 17}

HERLUFSHOLM
AND RECLAIMING
CREATIVITY

In this chapter, we will make a visit to Herlufsholm boarding school in provincial Denmark. This hallowed school in the town of Næstved is probably the last thing most Danes think of when they think of creativity.

Herlufsholm was founded in 1565 by Herluf Trolle and Birgitte Gøye, who had no children of their own and wished to contribute to the construction of a strong educational system. But what role could Herlufsholm play in a book on creativity? Is this not the school associated with discipline, boarding, and uniforms rather than with inventiveness and innovation? The answer is that Herlufsholm is interesting as a case because it has recently begun placing greater emphasis on developing its students’ overall personal, social, and creative skills. Over the past few years, the school has been forced by circumstances to be creative, confronted by a true crisis that required it to revise its fundamental concept and accept additional day students as families of Danes living abroad have ceased sending their children back to Denmark to be educated.

That a school like Herlufsholm is taking creativity seriously represents an intriguing piece of evidence that some people have realized that enhanced focus on standard competencies may not be the way forward on its own. It is also evidence that creativity is no longer regarded as something for those who get into the office late and need to come up with good ideas on the way from the water cooler to their desks. Creativity is also for men and women in business suits who have realized that the world is experiencing extreme change and that the ability to recognize opportunities in this change is becoming unavoidable. Even though we still think of creativity most when we are discussing art, advertising, and acting, it is also creative to discover new and smarter ways of, say, getting fresh milk from the farm to the home refrigerator. Or selling a cup of coffee with syrup at exorbitant rates, as the big coffee shop chains manage day in and day out. Creativity has come to stay and is spreading into every nook and cranny – even all the way to Herlufsholm.

OUT IN THE COUNTRY

It is difficult not to be both impressed and a touch frightened by the sight of Herlufsholm’s imposing buildings. The great lengths of red brickwork loom above the green landscape, with its church and moat. As we park the car and watch students entering the dining hall in their identical uniforms, it is like observing a scene from the past – were it not for the children’s designer wellies, which signal the latest footwear trends.

In the car on the way to Næstved, we have spoken of Christian’s own time at Herlufsholm. Christian explains that he chose to go to boarding school and that, unlike many of the other students, he was not just the latest generation to play a part in a historic family tradition. The eating rules, the uniforms, and the traditions attracted him. Even though Christian has only visited Herlufsholm a handful of times since his own schooling, he can sense from his role on the school’s advisory board that something has changed. This enormously conservative bastion of tradition and its residents (students, teachers, parents, and alumni) have transformed into something absolutely different. We will now explore what this different entity might be.

CREATIVITY?

Headmaster Klaus Eusebius Jakobsen is not eager to speak about creativity when we start our interview in his office. He is, in fact, somewhat doubtful as to why we would wish to interview him in particular, especially concerning creativity. Perhaps he is a bit nervous about Herlufsholm being profiled as a “creative” school. The word still has a whiff about it of collaborative learning, purple nappies, liberation, play, and chaos – a whiff that Klaus would not necessarily wish to reach the parents. We try to relieve his concerns by explaining that we have heard about the school’s new Round Square International process, which involves Herlufsholm being the only Danish representative in an international association of schools. Beginning in 2009, Herlufsholm’s membership of the association obligates the school to offer students the opportunity to develop themselves at a personal level. We think this sounds excitingly innovative, representing both a break from strict topical orientation within the individual school subjects and signalling a desire to orient the school away from a purely instrumental understanding of academic skills.

This sets Klaus at ease. He describes to us how, when he first began working at the school in 1993, it was one riven by crises. The boarders and their parents were abandoning the school, and the school’s reputation in the local community was far from perfect.

The tide has now turned. Never before has the school had so many day students from Næstved, and on account of the school’s new international track, it is again attracting a stream of students from families of Danes living abroad. This combination of an international education with learning about one’s own roots seems to be a winning one. Students now receive marks for helpfulness and are required to take a traditionally creative subject as well as an athletics class, all of which contributes to creating wise, broad-minded, and rounded individuals.

To ensure local support, Klaus has gone against the school’s tradition and become involved in local politics. When we meet him, in fact, it is just after he has returned from a morning meeting in which local politicians and county administrators discussed plans to close Næstved Hospital. According to Klaus, this would be catastrophic for the school. It is not hard to imagine the hue and cry from parents living abroad if they heard it was a long trip to the nearest hospital.

A PARADOXICAL CASE

Herlufsholm, like the LETT law firm, is something of a paradoxical case in this book concerning creativity. It is difficult to let go of the Romantic understanding of creativity as exclusively arts-oriented and individual and instead move toward an understanding of creativity as specific innovations within all of life’s domains – including changing school practice. When Klaus starts speaking about creativity, he begins by listing the traditionally creative subjects (painting, athletics, drama), but once he gets to talk about how the school has changed in recent years, he mentions Round Square International.

As its name implies, Round Square International (RSI) is an international association of schools with the vision of “educating young people so that – besides achieving good and solid academic foundations – they also undergo personal development and learn to be responsible individuals”, as it is put on page 10 of the Herlufsholm school handbook. Students have the opportunity to test their abilities in terms of arranging sports tournaments, helping emergency assistance organizations, doing volunteer work, sitting on the student council, working with democracy or green energy at school, and being responsible for café events and other activities.

This work builds upon six so-called IDEALS: I for internationalization, D for democracy, E for environment, A for adventure (leisure activities that challenge the individual), L for leadership and S for service (volunteer work). The aim is to ensure that students experience better human development, social involvement, and assist other – less privileged – young people. Membership thus represents more than just a network for the school; it is also a philosophy that drives students to make a difference and trains their abilities to engage with their environment.

When the headmaster discusses the project, it is with an evident sense of excitement. “For me, it’s a bit like a small child,” he says, “but it hasn’t been easy. I came here full of energy and ideas. I’ve probably learned to hold back a little. There was a period when it was just a bit too much for my teachers.” But Round Square International is one of the ideas that has yielded fruit. The project enjoys wide backing among parents and teachers.

Klaus explains his desire to develop the school and how he still gets a lot of new ideas. This also means that he has encountered the typical problems confronting passionate individuals, headmasters included. Teachers are known for valuing their ability to plan their own work, and the Danish schools have a long tradition of methodological freedom. A leader with too many visions will often run smack into something that some would term “resistance”. Klaus says, however, that he has a strong managerial team around him, people “who can really do their thing”. They are able to help execute and ensure the quality of all the good intentions.

PERSONAL, SOCIAL, AND CREATIVE SKILLS

But why choose a tradition-steeped Danish boarding school with strong ties to its surroundings and with an explicit focus on students’ personal development and on encouraging them to activate their creativity by placing more focus on subjects like painting, drama, and athletics?

It is as we stated in the introduction to this book: if you wish to be attractive in the labour market, it is no longer enough just to possess instrumental skills. These skills need to be supplemented with the ability to envision new futures, to use your imagination, to see opportunities, and to make a difference. A report by Applied Municipal Research, now KORA in Denmark, recently argued that creative skills are sought after by employers. Ever since Denmark’s secondary education reform in 2005, music, media subjects, painting, and drama have been in decline in secondary schools because the number of class hours has been sharply cut, and a number of these subjects are no longer obligatory for students. The report shows, however, that these subjects in particular help develop students’ collaborative abilities, discipline, and skill at seeing and performing possibilities.

These are skills that are quite obviously useful in other subjects as well. Drama, for instance, can teach students to work together in a team (an ability that is useful in project work) and the ability to perform is quite significant when it comes to oral presentations in exam contexts. In the creatively themed secondary schools, there are thus far more students who choose creative business and later achieve creative work functions.

There are good reasons for keeping an open mind in terms of the opportunities for making use of creative competencies in ordinary subjects.

THE ROLE OF THE SCHOOLS

All in all, the recent enthusiasm for creativity among employers is echoed in the educational system and among researchers. In Creativity and Innovation in Business and Beyond from 2011, McWilliam describes how this is associated with a general shift in the understanding as to what creativity actually is. She thus differentiates between a first-generation and a second-generation understanding of creativity inasmuch as second-generation-understanding in particular prompts schools to be actively involved in the creativity agenda. The differences between the two generations of conceptions of creativity are summarized in the table below:

The second-generation understanding of creativity, which has grown over the past two decades, has prompted the well-grounded assumption that the educational system can play a significant role in promoting creativity. We now recognize that creativity is learnable and that – in line with this book’s central argument – it is less a matter of thinking outside the box than of moving along its edge and being familiar with the rules and limits of one’s domain. Creativity here will be understood as a primarily team-based project and as something that unfolds in different ways. In other words, creativity unfolds in various ways in accordance with whether it concerns the ability of seeing opportunities and doing something new in chemistry, in drama class, or what have you.

This is also suggested in Glâvenau’s 2011 article on “Children and Creativity: A Most (Un)likely Pair”, which argues that earlier conceptions of creativity cast the phenomenon as something natural, spontaneous, and uncultivated, which would – almost by definition – be mangled by exposure to an educational system that cultivates and teaches children about standards and cultural systems of meaning. In recent years, however, it has become more legitimate to assert that a child’s creative expressions in the form of, say, drawing or playing are but the first of countless further steps on the path toward true creativity – and that the school can both play a role in encouraging creativity among children and youths and in refining and sharpening that creativity which they display of their own accord.

It is, however, obvious that not all our interview subjects agree with all the aspects of this second-generation understanding. Indeed, a number of them feel that creativity is innate, even if they all note that they have benefited from an environment that has recognized their contributions and initiatives. Key to the second-generation conception is an emphasis on the importance of interaction between the individual’s dispositions and environment.

CREATIVITY IN EDUCATION

But how can you learn creativity, and what role does the educational system play? One possible answer could lie in introducing students to a process like the one at Herlufsholm, through which they learn some of the elements that we know play a role in creative processes. In other words, the key could be for students to gain experience in seeing opportunities in situations that possess no predetermined solutions, combining insights achieved from various fields, collaborating, and performing. An even more general way forward could be to demonstrate to students that knowledge can be regarded as a portal to further thinking and dialogue. Let us take a brief look at this assertion.

In the field of psychology, we often date the emergence of creativity to 1949–1950, when the psychologist J.P. Guilford held a later much-discussed lecture at the American Psychological Association’s Annual Meeting. Guilford argued that psychologists and teachers traditionally placed too much focus on convergent thinking (problem solving, logic, correct answers) at the expense of divergent thinking (unusual, lateral thinking that involves seeking out new possibilities).

Guilford described creativity as a normally distributed ability and as something other than that which is measured by intelligence tests (contemporary psychology’s favoured testing tool). He felt it was necessary to describe creativity in the same manner as phenomena such as intelligence and learning and not to allow creativity to appear as a mysterious or spiritual ability.

Creativity was then in many ways that which intelligence is now, even if those who score highly on IQ tests can be creative as well. Arthur Cropley, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hamburg, argues in his 2008 Creativity in Education and Learning that creativity has been regarded as a means of using IQ or as a form of “IQ in action”.

CREATING ACCESS TO CREATIVE PRACTICE

Perhaps one of the greatest problems involved in teaching children and students how to create, is that schools often bar children access to seeing and feeling creative practice. Knowledge is produced through manipulation – which literally means moving something with your hand – of tools and the environment. Within such a framework, education would be a question of teaching children and students to explore their surroundings and combine its materials and characteristics in new ways. It is not about constructing knowledge in an isolated mental space. Imagination, fantasy, and thought are not delimited from the world in some inner space but are, rather, characteristic of moving thought further in the world and being creative with the world’s materials.

A 2011 study of 2500 wage earners in Denmark undertaken by the ASE trade union showed that 72% of respondents had no desire to start their own business. An identical study from 1999 had shown that only 48% of respondents had no desire to start their own business. The contemporary financial crisis could, of course, be playing a role in this decline of the entrepreneurial dream, and many people had perhaps recently seen friends, family members, and colleagues suffer as a result of the global economic downturn. The report concludes that although Denmark is becoming better educated as a country, it is also becoming less willing to act in an entrepreneurial manner.

The conclusion would seem to be that education socializes us to be wage earners. There is, in other words, continuity between Guildford’s 1950 speech at the American Psychological Association’s Annual Meeting and the findings of the 2011 report on entrepreneurial spirit among Danes. This suggests that there is good reason to question whether and how educational institutions can assist students in regarding knowledge as a tool for intervening in the world. Maybe we are not doing this well enough.

In line with the present book’s love for concrete case studies and stories, we will close this chapter with gallery owner Jesper Elg’s encouragement for us to make use of art and to take seriously the importance of creativity in the educational system. Jesper is co-owner of Galleri V1, and we ask Jesper what he believes to be the greatest barriers to creativity in Denmark when it comes to developing new products and ideas – and what advantages we have as well.

“Our greatest barrier is our educational system, which doesn’t provide our children and youths with a fundamentally creative upbringing. Later in the process, we’ll be cutting state educational support, educational institutions, and research. Creativity, innovation, and knowledge are what we’ll need to live off in Denmark in the future. This is the case in all fields – art, design, energy, agriculture, engineering, medicine, and production. Politically speaking, we lack a strategy for ensuring that Denmark’s on the edge of the box. Right now, we’re in the process of sealing the box with packing tape.”

Jesper is deeply engaged in the issue of our taking art and creativity seriously as a kind of societally formative process. He says (and we encourage you to try, for the moment, to read the following as if the word “art” is replaced by the word “education”):

“Art should be at the cutting edge of our society. It should engage – when necessary, inspire – and be willing to turn its back when required. Art is an important free space. Not a nursery class without a childcare worker, not freedom without responsibility, but a space in which we can experiment with content, expression, and communication.”

But how can we work at finding something new, and what work process is necessary for this to succeed?

“As a point of departure, I believe it’s an insatiable curiosity and an open approach to the world. I use a lot of different channels when seeking inspiration: literature, music, news, and people. Through experience, you localize these signposts to which you can return when you need inspiration. I often get the best feedback from people who aren’t directly involved in my industry. These can be people who work with some other creative business, who inspire me to assess a challenge differently. As a gallery owner, I obviously have a unique relationship with the artists with whom I work. It’s not really comparable with anything else I’ve tried. It’s incredibly rewarding and difficult. You share most of the upswings and downturns professionally as well as personally. You get really close to one another. I’ve learned so much from working so intimately with groups of spectacular and inspirational minds. And even if there are obviously patterns in artistic strategies, it’s still surprising how great the differences are between people’s creative processes.”

This chapter began with our approach to Herlufsholm, a school that has begun taking creativity seriously and has itself needed to implement a creative change process to survive sharp competition from boarding schools the world over. The chapter has also served as an introduction to the potential role of schools and the educational system when it comes to encouraging creativity. As has been suggested, it is only relatively recently that schools and education have been regarded as playing a positive role in promoting creativity. Such reflections are specifically the result of a second-generation understanding of creativity in which creativity is conceived of as something that can be learned.

This chapter closes with additional theoretical considerations concerning how we can impart upon students an understanding of knowledge as a tool for intervening in the world and contribute to students understanding themselves as actors relative to the conditions of their own and others’ lives. The ASE study stresses why such an understanding is necessary. There is evidence that we need to focus on creativity and creative production now more than ever – a task at which Jesper Elg feels we are currently failing.

In the next chapter, we will bring together our impressions and seek to get to grips with what we can do to encourage creativity – one of the keys to strengthening Europe in our globalizing world.