After teaching creativity for nearly twenty years, E. Paul Torrance (my note: one of the Big Names in creativity studies) got tired of people telling him “Creativity can’t be taught.” So he…undertook a meta-analytic review of all the credible research studies he could find that asked the question: Can creativity be taught?

The aggregate results (of 142 studies) showed that creativity training improved performance on divergent thinking tests (my note: divergent thinking isn’t the only component of creativity, but it might be the easiest one to measure) and produced reasonably large gains, especially in terms of originality.

“It does indeed seem possible to teach creative thinking,” concluded Torrance.

The Secret of the Highly Creative Thinker, Nielsen & Thurber, p. 78

Torrance’s study was in 1972. In 1984, two other researchers—Laura Hall Rose and Hsin-tai Lin—ran another meta-analytic study with the same focus. Their conclusion was similar:

Some people have more innate creative ability than others. But no matter your starting point, you can level up.

This makes me think of a creative writing teacher I knew once. He was talking shit about some of his students who were struggling to come up with ideas. He said, “What am I supposed to do—teach them to be creative?”

Like this was the most preposterous thing.

Now I wish I could go back in time and say, “Yeah, asshole. That’s exactly what you should do.”