#8—Cross-cultural myths for stimulating creativity in Children

A longer version of this article was presented at "Emerging Perspectives in Education: Opening the Intuitive Gate" in 1991 in San Francisco. People’s beliefs and world-views come from cultural and personal conditioning as well as creative breakthroughs. Children are our greatest source of a creative future. All peoples need creativity to meet world problems and regenerate and re-create culture. There are many hindrances to developing creativity and cultivating it in children. To meet and transform the hindrances of the creative child we need: 1) to know what qualities to look for and develop in children to enhance creativity, 2) to find a criterion of beneficial beliefs and values through the reservoir of myths and through asking deep questions, 3) to understand the quest for a universal myth and questions that might invoke an emerging myth and 4) to use methods for transforming hindrances to creativity to an activation of it for the greater purpose of a more global reculturation process. Deep questions that children have touch upon universal themes in mythologies that contain old world beliefs and values and many that are perennial. These can be classed into six types of myths and questions that correspond to fundamental human needs as well as to respond to modern world problems.