The convergent nature of tasks as one of the inhibitors of creativity

Creativity is the area of interest of many scientific disciplines, including psychology, sociology and pedagogy. Within each of these sciences, the biggest attention is paid to the essence of getting to know the creative process and ways to develop it. In the case of education, the need to develop creativity is written in every educational document. However, in order to strengthen and support creativity, it’s necessary to know the mechanisms that have negative effect of limiting it. Any, even the most creative, teaching method can be ineffective if it comes with inhibitors that the educator may not even know about. In the literature, inhibitors are defined as any factor that blocks, inhibits or limits the development of creative processes. In the psychology of creativity, four types of inhibitors have been described. Within each of them, there are those, that result from ineffective methods of didactic work. The knowledge that students receive is barren, it doesn’t provoke thought and it doesn’t encourage them to look for answers by their own. Education is focused on the amount of memorized knowledge and not on the ability to formulate problems. The nature of the tasks often prevents the beginning or full development of the creative process. As the research results show, the tasks that students give are most often of a convergent nature and accept only one correct answer or only one solution. This problem is not only at the level of higher education, but also appears in the first grades of primary school and even in kindergarten. It would seem that the reason of this problem is the teacher's work and teaching methods, but students can also deal with this way of formulating instructions in school textbooks. The study of one of the textbooks used in the first grade of primary school, in terms of the nature of the tasks it contains, is just one example of what pedagogy of creativity is struggling today. Because if from in early age we don’t teach children to ask questions and search for results by their own, we can’t speak of effective creative education at all