چكيده لاتين :
Creativity is an extraordinary human capability. Even if it took – and continues to take – various and different forms, every time the meaning of its action is focused on the capability to create change. In fact, creativity has the power to redesign and transform the “natural” order of the things as they are” according to another order: an order specifically human that presents the things as they could become”.
The history of education staged this capability telling about its idea, its methods or instruments, its ultimate aim. Following a phenomenological criterion, it is possible to study the creative experiences and recognize the character of the creative action according to six different paradigms, each one presenting distinct and peculiar borders of creativity.
First of all, creativity has the borders of the discover. It’s a paradigm that – according to the Jean Jacques Rousseau’s thinking – presents creativity as the way to knowledge the reality. It’s the specific time of childhood: as such it has a deadline coinciding with entry into adulthood.
Secondly, creativity can be contained in the borders of mystery: the creative action manifests the “hidden” sense that the sentiment is able to grasp in the lived experiences. This creativity – reworked in particular by the vision of Romanticism – has a “metaphysical” condition: to believe in the furtherness of meaning.
Creativity can also means experimentation of becoming. In this third paradigm, it acts in an open space, without centre neither landmarks. In this border that follow the deconstructionism assumptions, creativity is worth as inexhaustible power of expression.
In a broader perspective, creativity has not only an accessory and functional role: in fact, it is possible to recognize creativity as the primary and original character of human doing or human being.
According to the paradigm inspired by the John Dewey’s pragmatism vision, creativity is the essential trait of human intelligence: it is able to recognize the possibilities still implied in the reality and to choose the betters for the common good. It’s the paradigm that affirms the social-democratic character of creativity: the possibility to transform an experience into a common experience depends on the choice realized by the creative action.
Creativity can also be the essential character of another version of human doing: that is the productive creativity, specific of post-modern paradigm, engaged to guarantee the continuous and inexhaustible production of novelties. It’s the creativity acting within the borders of unlimitedness.
If – on one hand – the creative action is principle and source of human doing, on the other it can even act as principle and source of the human being: in the borders “opened” by the personalism of authors like Jacques Maritain or Gabriel Marcel, the last paradigm argues in favour of a creativity showing the ability to think up ultimate aims in order to create a “human” world, a world that doesn’t exist yet but that can exist.
In face of these paradigms, the educational question is not to choose: each one has or has had its pedagogical value and its educational efficacy in its particular and specific space. Instead, the
challenging is to mark new borders able to highlight the creative aspects having actually meaning (interest, utility, value) for our time.
The suggested paradigm will specify the creative character of human action qualifying it as critical and civic. Creativity – first of all – has to be critical: we need a reflexive creativity engaged to problematize and to comprehend the experience for participating actively to life of society. Consequently, Creativity has to be recognized as civically marked. Its action has to become a service where the individual responsibility works for the community. It is a creativity that creates questions and researches solutions; a creativity that plays the role of human researching spirit; a creativity to cultivating through an educational process that educates to questioning and participating.
