Creativity and Imagination

So I'm driving and listening to some idiotic discussion on NPR on creativity and imagination in which some fool is discussing how to encourage creativity and imagination in your child.

The reality is this: there are a few people who seem to have been born with an aptitude for creativity and imagination, and occasionally they get the chance to make use of that ability. Most people simply are not creative--or their idea of creativity is essentially banal or mundane or cliched. It's even possible that those people who are born with creativity can improve their ability at school--although, in many ways, the best thing that could be done for someone creative is to make his or her childhood miserable, alienating, isolated, awful. Then he or she will have something to write about. And it may be that, within the ranks of the truly creative, there is a hierarchy--some with creativity to burn and others with an occasional moment of the authentically creative.

And what about someone like me? Does it take creativity to recognize creativity? Or is that some lower order of the creative?

Most students can barely understand the idea of metaphor--and even if they do understand it, most of those can't seem to figure out why it's so important.

So when we have literature classes in school, we essentially teach them in the worst circumstances: we grade the students, when, for the most part, their inability to understand literature is simply a reflection of the fact that few people are truly creative. Even a monkey can be fascinated by bright lights. Little wonder our literature classes are stupifyingly boring.