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The big question for American educators, though, is how one actually goes about teaching “extra.” The three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—we know how to teach and test. Teaching “extra,” though, requires both teaching and inspiring creativity. There is no one way to do this, and the different attempts to teach creativity and “extra” are among the most exciting experiments in education today. But we know it can be done because people are already doing it.

The Three C’s

Tony Wagner, the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and author of The Global Achievement Gap and Learning to Innovate, Innovating to Learn, has a good definition of a “better” education. It is one that teaches what Wagner calls the “the three C’s”—“critical thinking, effective oral and written communication, and collaboration.”

Thinking critically, Wagner says, involves asking the right questions—rather than memorizing the right answers. Communication and collaboration involve defining objectives and then working with others to bring them about. A person needs all three C’s to become a creative creator or a creative server.

“If you cannot communicate, you cannot collaborate,” explains Wagner, “and if you cannot collaborate, you will be less creative.” There is a myth, he says, that the most creative and innovative people do their best work alone. “That is simply not true from what I see in the workplace and from talking to highly innovative people. Innovation today is almost always done in teams that are multinational, multilingual, and even virtual.” In such teams, he argues, “to work effectively you have to communicate effectively.”

But how can we nurture that first C—creative and critical thinking—in a classroom setting? It is not easy to define creativity with any precision, let alone measure it or teach it. Nonetheless, because the merger of globalization and the IT revolution is putting every job under pressure, because well-paying jobs will more and more require a measure of creativity, and because the burden of preparing Americans for the workforce falls so heavily on our schools, the schools must find ways to inspire the three C’s while teaching the three R’s.

Here we offer a few examples of what strike us as successful efforts to do so. We begin with Steve Jobs and his often cited 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. Jobs attended Reed College, in Oregon, for one semester, and then dropped out, but that brief experience left its mark.

I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount