But I can't draw

Do you remember the first time someone told you that you couldn't draw?

Maybe not in those words. But someone, somewhere, looked at your work blankly, or made a face, or pointed: why does the horse have six legs? Maybe they held it up next to somebody else's better horse, with only four legs. Even if there was no actual moment, there was a feeling, and it stayed, and then it was "I can't draw."

Our kids, like we did, draw before they know drawing is something you can be good or bad at. They build things before they know what the thing is meant to look like. They sing before they know they sound terrible.

Then most of us take a category we're handed and off we go, into our lives and our jobs and our ways of being. Good at singing, bad at maths. Creative, not creative. Musical, not musical. Messy, tidy. We steer around the things that aren't for us. Oh, no thank you, I would not like to dance. I'm actually good at maths.

We stop believing in ourselves a little. We stop chasing possibilities and we get into the habit of whittling every idea down to one answer: the practical one, the right one, because that's what gets rewarded. Curiosity and imagination get filed under playtime. For kids.

A test for rocket scientists

There's a story that does the rounds about this. In the 1960s, it goes, a systems scientist named George Land designed a test to help NASA find its most innovative engineers. The test measured divergent thinking, which is the ability to look at a problem and come up with multiple, original answers instead of culling ideas down to one correct one. It's the kind of thinking NASA needed from people who had to problem-solve humans to the moon. Literally. Out of curiosity, Land gave the same test to 1,600 children aged three to five. Ninety-eight per cent scored at what he called genius level. Five years later, the same children scored 32 per cent. Five years after that, 10 per cent.

Treat Land's story as a parable, not data. The real research is more interesting. In 1958, psychologist E. Paul Torrance began giving primary school children a set of creative thinking tasks, drawing tasks included. He scored them on how many ideas they had, how varied and how original. Not on whether a horse had four legs. A decade later he reported that many children's scores dropped around their fourth year of school, and called it the fourth-grade slump. Researchers followed some of those children for fifty years. Their childhood scores predicted creative achievement in adult life, in some analyses better than IQ did.

The slump itself turned out to be less certain. A 2021 review pooling decades of studies found that divergent thinking generally grows through the school years, with dips at some points and not at others. That is the useful part. Creative thinking isn't a gift that drains away on schedule. It moves with the conditions around it, which means it can be built.

Either way, the story sticks because it matches something most of us already suspect. Somewhere between the first packed lunch and Year 12 graduation, we get very good at finding one suitable answer and really crappy at imagining new ones.

Rewind some years, and imagine how you'd move through your life and work now if you still had that. A default setting of possibility and optimism and what if. Ten ideas instead of one easy one. The nerve to be wrong in front of people. And, possibly… a willingness to dance.

Your capable child

This is why we built Assembly. Not because every young person needs to become an artist or work for NASA, but because young people with strong habits of curiosity, experimentation and optimism back themselves, wherever they end up and whatever they do. They start something before they know how it will end, and they sit with uncertainty long enough for a small idea to become a big one. These are better habits for our kids than nose-picking and screen time.

Creative habits are learned in a studio, but they hold up in a science lab, a boardroom, at the kitchen table, in friendships and communities. They're the habits that hold up a good life.

You've got nothing to lose, except the idea that you can't draw.

About Assembly

Assembly is a creative arts studio for young people aged 5 to 18 in Mornington, Victoria, opening Term 1 2027. Courses are capped at ten students and led by working practitioners. Each course runs one project across a full term, with no marks and a public exhibition at the end.