The One Thing AI Can't Originate: Making the Case for Creativity in Education
Ask an AI model to write a business plan or draft a school policy, and it will produce a coherent document almost instantly. Nevertheless, it cannot produce an original idea which considers the human experience or the exact context for which it is being produced. AI remixes and recombines existing material at a scale no human can match, it does not originate and is therefore not creative. That distinction is fast becoming the clearest line between what AI does and what humans are for, and it should be reshaping what schools consider essential to teach. According to McKinsey 77% of CEOs, COOs, and board members say creativity is a crucial growth driver in companies. This is not a new idea. In 1950, J.P Guilford identified creativity as an essential component of intelligence. The rapid development of AI is forcing education leaders to rethink the importance of creativity to ensure that young people are prepared for and understand their role in the AI era.
Creativity across the curriculum
Until now, schools have placed creativity in the art room, the drama studio, or in creative writing, rather than something which is relevant to every subject a student studies. Of course, creativity is already part of some of what we do, However, confining creativity to "creative subjects" has meant generations of students who do not take creative subjects in the later years of their education can leave education with the relevant skills and competence in their fields of expertise but with less of an idea of how to originate ideas.
The cost of that omission is measurable. Researcher Kyung Hee Kim's landmark analysis of nearly 273,000 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, administered to American schoolchildren from the 1970s onward, found that while IQ scores kept climbing, creative thinking scores began falling after 1990 — and the steepest declines were among the youngest children. Whatever else was happening in classrooms during those decades, it was not building students' capacity to originate and be creative. That the decline runs opposite to what students’ need and Guilford identified in the 1950’s is the issue facing schools in the AI era. Creativity and cognitive ability are not the same, and an education system which focuses heavily on the latter cannot develop the former as a side effect. Creativity therefore, needs to be nurtured and encouraged in every subject and every classroom.
How Creativity Is Actually Built
Creativity is not a fixed trait some students have and others lack. It is a buildable skill which develops through deliberate practice and is responsive to specific conditions. In classrooms where creativity is encouraged three conditions are often prevalent:
The first is exposure to a wide range of ideas and unfamiliar material, which encourages original thinking by compelling students to connect their previous knowledge to the new material. This is because original ideas are usually connected to our previous experiences, after all, Thomas Edison would not have invented the lightbulb without previous knowledge gained in electrical engineering.
The second is constraint, which sounds illogical when you consider that we are asking students to be creative and think outside of the box. Nevertheless, ask a student to come up with an idea or draw a picture and they will frequently sit staring out of the window wondering ‘where do I start?’ Providing a clear starting point, with an objective, framework, hypothesis or success criteria can produce lateral thinking, with students providing many different and creatively original solutions to a scenario, moving from a known idea to creating a new idea.
The third condition is encouraging divergent thinking, providing the conditions for students to come up with ideas without stressing the need for a right answer within a specific body of knowledge.
None of this depends on waiting passively for inspiration to strike out of the blue sky. Students who work within these conditions learn to develop original ideas, particularly when practiced alongside real subject knowledge rather than being taught as a stand-alone "creativity module."
Creativity and Critical Thinking – opposite sides of the same coin?
As well as developing creativity, students also need to be able to think critically, to analyse ideas and make informed decisions. Although these two mental processes are often seen as being diametrically opposed they both require flexible yet goal-directed reasoning (Halpern, 2003) and therefore should be taught together because they are interdependent cognitive processes (Park, Li Niu, 2023). In effect, being able to effectively use AI tools is simply not enough. We need our students to develop human power skills to come up with the ideas and to evaluate the effectiveness of the solution.
This is why creativity sits alongside communication, judgement, empathy, and collaboration as one of the Human Power Skills at the centre of what we believe future-ready education must deliver — the distinctly human capabilities that make up what we call the Ariston Quotient, the combination of emotional and intellectual capability (AQ = EQ + IQ) that AI cannot replicate. Treating original thinking as a skill to be embedded through our curriculums is preparation for a world where execution is increasingly automated, and origination is increasingly what is left for humans to do.
At the British International School in Ljubljana and at Ariston Education, we believe the schools who take this seriously are not simply enriching their students' education — they are equipping them with the one capability that keeps them irreplaceable.
