Creativity Crisis in America

My opinion about this situation is that American is losing creativity. These days it is not "cool" to be creative. Some students think if someone is creative they are smart. The students that want to be creative but cannot because of the other students, pretend they are not creative. This is one reason creativity in America has declined. Another reason is that schools are not teaching creativity. American schools are taking out the classes that students can be creative, such as art and band. Electives are a schools last priority for money. This causes the classes to be taken out of the curriculum because the schools do not care about those classes. For example, back in O'Fallon Illinois, my brother and sister were in the marching band, and the school board kept cutting the band budget. They did not care about the band and cared more about the football. This limited the marching band number of competitions. Schools need to do the opposite, and support the creativity classes, such as band and art.
Both, the Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk and Creativity Crisis in the Newsweek, agree with me. One of Sir Ken Robinson's quotes was "If you not prepared to be wrong then you never come up with something original." Today at schools it is a "crime" to be wrong because of the standardize testing. The schools today are teaching you not to be wrong. However, to be creative you are going to be wrong sometimes. For example, Thomas Edison was wrong over 10,000 times before he created the light bulb. It just goes to show you being wrong can turn into an original idea. The Newsweek states that each generation's intelligence scores go up 10 points each year, except America. America's scores have been falling since 1990. Scientists say one possible answer is "the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing video games rather than engaging in creative activities." Another possible answer is the lack of schools' creativity. Scientists say creativity can be taught and should be taught in schools. You ask yourself, how this can be done. Well, it is done by teaching and using the two different types of thinking more. The two different types of thinking are divergent and convergent. Divergent thinking is when you have a problem and there are multiple ways to solve it. Convergent thinking is when there is only one answer to the problem, such as 5+5 has to equal 10. If teachers let their students do more divergent thinking, such as thinking outside the box, then kids will create more creative ideas. Therefore, this will help our test scores and our creativity crisis in America.