Do you remember the first time someone told you that you couldn't draw?
Maybe not in those words. Someone looked at your work and laughed, or pointed out that a horse doesn't have six legs, or held it up next to somebody else's better one. Maybe there was no single moment at all. Only a feeling that stayed, and hardened into a fact. I can't draw.
Nobody says I can't play piano about an instrument they have never sat down at. Drawing is the one skill we describe as a capacity rather than a practice.
Young people draw before they know it is something you can be good at. They build before they know what it is meant to look like. They sing before they think to ask what if I am bad at this. Then the question arrives, and after the question the answer, and after the answer the category. I am good at singing. I am bad at maths. Creative. Not creative. Mathematical. Not mathematical. Musical. Not musical.
Most of us take the category we are given and go. We stop trying the things that are not for us. Oh no thank you, I am not a good dancer. We stop thinking in twelve directions and start looking for the one right answer, because the one right answer is what gets rewarded. Curiosity gets filed under playtime. I have a report to deliver.
The decline is measurable
In 1968 George Land and Beth Jarman gave 1,600 five year olds a divergent thinking test built to select engineers for NASA. Ninety eight per cent scored at genius level.
They tested the same young people at ten. Thirty per cent. They tested them again at fifteen. Twelve per cent.
Kim's 2011 analysis of Torrance scores found the decline has continued across the population since 1990.
Nobody does this deliberately.
What we are building
Assembly is a creative arts studio for young people in Mornington, opening Term 1 2027. Ten students to a course. Taught by working practitioners. One project runs across a full term. There are no marks, and it ends with a public exhibition.
Not because every young person needs to become an artist. Because the habits are worth more than any single right answer. Curiosity. Experimentation. Optimism. Starting before you know how it ends. Sitting with uncertainty long enough for an idea to turn into something bigger, and more real.
Those habits work in a studio. They also hold up in a science lab, a boardroom, a kitchen, a lounge room at home. They are the habits that hold up a life.