Inspiration And Limitation

Although China has adopted an innovation-oriented strategy for national development, the education of creativity is far from satisfactory. The answer to this problem lies in educational reform both of the curriculum and value-orientation. Creativity, which is a design feature of human being, is an important area of human development as well as the future of our planet. Accordingly, this research is intended to explore this facet of human existence in the hope of promoting individual as well as social wellbeing in general and providing useful information for the reform of foreign language education in particular.After introducing the issue with a general explanation of the importance of creativity and the lack of creativity in our education, especially in foreign language education, Chapter One presents a question:what has prevented us from being creative, and tries to find the answer in a particular case of foreign language learning which is supposed to have much to do with creativity, that is, writing. Accordingly, Chapter Two tries to explore the relation between writing and creativity in general with a statistic research on modern creative writers in China before 1970s, discovering that a significant proportion of them have had a FLE background either as a major learner or teacher. This finding has confirmed the idea that FLE is not inherently short of creative elements and can be benefited by creative elements. Thus, Chapter Three turns to investigate why some people, especially creative writers, are creative, covering their experiences, motives, inspirations, common traits and determinants. Based on these analyses, Chapter Four extends the discussion on creativity as a universal phenomenon, probing into the myth of creativity such as the needs and significance of being creative, nature, manifest, function, attributes, constituents of it as well as research approaches to it and its relation with humanities. It is found that creativity permeates every aspect of our existence and without it, our life is not complete. As a result, Chapter Five further explores creativity as an integral part of experience and ways of development of it before suggestions of creativity development are made for reforming FLE.The discussion is concluded with an understanding of the possibility of being creative for everybody:we are not merely prevented from being creative; we often prefer not being creative for being such means change and change means extra effort. But without change, can we have development?...