Today’s Children, Tomorrow’s Creatives: Living, Learning and Earning in the Conceptual Age

This introductory chapter sets out the challenges all schools face in preparing young people for a world vastly different from the one most teachers grew up in. It then moves to consider how to design pedagogical activities that are likely to result in creative learning outcomes. The changes that new technologies are making to our living, learning and earning are unprecedented. This means, among other things, that value-adding learning environments will continue to become more digitally resourced, more networked, more self-directed, more software mediated, more open and more accessible. Yet we need to be thinking more radically about what children learn and how they learn it than ‘going digital’ in the learning environment. Fortunately, we are beginning to understand that creativity is a key driver of a sustainable and productive economy for a global and ethical citizenry. Moeover, we now know that creativity is in many respects both teachable and learnable. In understanding how important creative capacity is to the Conceptual Age, teachers can work towards making it less vaporous and more visible as a set of dispositions and capabilities that are at the centre of curriculum design and implementation.