is no way to guarantee that one’s ideas will be put to positive use. But one greatly can enhance the probability of this happening if only one gives it some thought. I am doubtful that we scientists are teaching students to give their work that kind of thought (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2004). We can become so preoccupied with career advancement and sometimes short‐range scientific advancement that we may not think about the long term. If we truly want to benefit science as well as education and society, we need to think long term, and we need to foster positive creativity, not merely creativity that may be neutral or negative.
Meanwhile, educators need to move beyond an educational system that heavily emphasizes analytic skills at the expense of positive creative skills. I argued long ago that our educational system tends to produce students who excel in analytical skills but never have much incentive through school to develop their creative skills (Sternberg, 1985a). These are the students who are most heavily rewarded throughout most of schooling, regardless of whether or not they develop their creativity. Historically, students who excel in analytical but not creative skills might come to graduate school and then find that their grade‐achieving skills no longer serve them as well as those skills did in grade school, high school, and college. But what if we, as a field, inadvertently made it enough to get by in a career just with analytical skills? If we further push in our educational system the development of analytical skills or even “hyper‐analytical” ones, we must make sure not to do so at the expense of pushing the development of positive creative skills. Analytically gifted but uncreative students become who they are not because they are born that way, but because their education makes them that way (Sternberg, 1985a). Education needs today, as it always has needed, to balance the development of positive creative skills with the development of analytical ones.
Being creative is usually uncomfortable and can be potentially dangerous. As noted above, it potentially involves defying the crowd, defying oneself, and defying the zeitgeist (Sternberg, 2018). There is a good reason that people always have been reluctant to be creative. They risk falling prey to the “tall poppy” phenomenon, whereby they end up as the tall poppy in a large field of poppies that gets cut down. The world at large needs positive creativity more than ever before. In our push to be transparent, we need to ensure that we encourage positive creative thinking. And, perhaps most of all, we need to encourage simultaneously not only the best science, but also the careful reflection, courtesy, civility, and plain decency that has come to be lacking in so much of contemporary discourse.
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