The Value of Creativity

The first time Doug Wallace, author of the bestselling memoir, Everything Will Be All Right, saw a library; he was awed by the presence of thousands of books stacked floor to ceiling. His young mind couldn't grasp the concept of one person reading all those books, yet he couldn't stop thinking about that possibility. Getting his hands on a book was an impossible challenge during those early years.

He was born, the third oldest of eight children, into an impoverished Tennessee family—a family that had been locked in the stranglehold of poverty for generations.

Lacking access to books can affect your life in so many ways. The first research assignment, his third grade teacher asked the class to write a report on the galaxy. "What's a galaxy?" Wallace asked. The teacher replied, "Do your research."

For two weeks he worried himself sick over the report. The two room school didn't have a library. This wasn't a subject that had been discussed in the classroom. So, he asked his mother about the galaxy—no go. Ditto for his father. His older brother and sister knew nothing about it either.
On the day the report was due, he turned in a blank page except for the following words, "I can't find anything."

Predictably, the teacher gave the grade of an "F." Then, she sent him to the principal's office. "There was an article in Time Magazine recently. If nothing else, you could have looked at that," admonished the principal.

Everyone has some idea about what poverty is, but only poverty victims know what it actually means to be poor. The variations in the definition of poverty make public discourse confusing, creating a situation in which the public school system fails to guide the policies and programs necessary to insure that children in poverty are given an equal opportunity. As a result, impoverished children often perform poorly at school.

How about naming the top five things you must do when faced with immediate home eviction? The other kids would have benefitted from researching the lives of children in poverty. No doubt Wallace and his siblings would have scored well on that research assignment. Are studies in mathematics, science and language in fact more valuable than learning about the various lifestyles of the social economic classes, and in particular, the culture of poverty? Wallace thinks the classroom would benefit by learning about the creative ways children in poverty learn how to survive.

Sir Ken Robinson takes the argument a step further. He believes that school administrators also downgrade the value of creativity. He quips that the output of our school system is predicated on the assumption that everyone should be a university professor. He argues that all children are born with the gift of creativity, but our public school systems slowly "educates it out" of them.

Wallace thinks Sir Robinson may be on to something here. Creativity is no stranger to the poor. As an entrepreneur creative skills enabled Wallace to establish, grow, and ultimately sell his law firm, Wallace & deMayo, which had become the largest law firm of its kind in the United States.

Out of four generations Wallace was the only member of his family to make it out of poverty. The fact that so few ever escape is proof that the public school system is not working when it comes to educating the poor children. For members of generational poverty, the public school system is the only hope that they will have to escape the cycle of poverty.

The third grade teacher who gave Wallace that "F" did more harm to his self- worth than anything poverty had ever been able to do. What Wallace didn't know then, was the lessons learned from poverty would later give him an advantage in business-an advantage that his classmates could not overcome through the public school system.

Wallace believes we're all gifted with creativity at birth. He advocates that public schools should facilitate the development of the creative talents of our children. He promotes the concept that schools should value advancement and achievement in creative talents on the same hierarchy as mathematics, science and language.

Being a straight "A" student in "dance" may not be important to a popular and economically privileged student. But, it would work miracles for an impoverish child, especially if the school considered dancing just as important as science.

Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book Everything Will Be All Right is scheduled for nationwide launch on October 1, 2009. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for the generationally impoverished. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Kindle, Sony Reader, and retail book stores everywhere beginning fall 2009.