Creativity leads to prudence and thinking outside the box, sometimes even thinking like there is no box! Which leads to innovation and new ways of doing things that need to be heard and advocated for! Following answers for such an interesting question.

Interplay between creativity and democracy is non-linear. Authoritarian regimes, if they are not corrupt and have a development strategy, often contribute to technical development, which becomes a channel for the release of social energy. Examples - Nikita Khrushchev's technocratic project in 1956-1964, economic growth of authoritarian regimes in East Asia. But in the broader context of social creativity, including the social sciences, the lack of democracy leads to a less dense research environment: there are «exclusion zones» and «areas of silence» that the researcher must bypass. As a result, the social thought that generates models of the desired future becomes more abstract (and radical). Fast content analysis of academic works from non-free countries shows a tendency to write about broad concepts such as "digital society", "risk society", "globalizing society", “social institutions:” etc., rather than make specific empirical studies of social inequality, distribution of incomes, food, knowledge, energy, etc., since such a study will inevitably face corruption schemes, and 2) there is no demand in society for specific knowledge of oneself.

Thus, the fact that democracy provides diversity means that democracy provides concrete thinking (including in the Hegelian sense).

Not sure how to answer. India and the United States are touted as the world's largest democracies. Yes people are free to vote for whoever they want, but their minds are being manipulated by the media and by religious leaders and top politicians in different ways by constant bombardment with slanted interpretations of reality to move their thinking in a specific direction. In short "leaders" in "democracies" have gotten very creative in using the media in moving such societies towards acceptance of more authoritarian rule.

Nevertheless, those who are able to resist this onslaught have the capacity to be very very creative and are therefore a danger to the authorities.

Thanks for these helpful replies, Hassan for advocacy, maxim for the notion of the non-linear, Andre for your USA India perspective. In Williams’ (1961) theory of the long revolutions – democratic, industrial and cultural – in which our societies have been embedded for generations, he argues that the very large scale of the changes and the many generations affected over time make it difficult to have any adequate perspective on the scale, depth and complexity of the changes that we nonetheless experience. I wonder what you think of his theory of 'The democratic revolution', the progress towards people governing themselves which he points out has had a turbulent history, and has been subject to fierce opposition, sometimes in the form of violent authoritarianism. Similarly, the cultural, communicative revolution evokes hostility, and the tussle between progressivism and reaction finds its way into our everyday lives and our ways of learning. These long term social changes and conflicts are inevitably manifest in short term, contingent and local ways: ways of thinking and practising are continually changing and in so doing mirror or amplify the deeper currents of social change?

Back to basics.

John Dewey, Experience and education. Because it is quite important to define what we talk about when we talk about creativity. Creativity is not loose activity, is something quite different as well as democracy is not voting every four years.

Again John Dewey, Democracy and education.

Interesting project! My best wishes.

You may have heard about the demonstrations here in Hong Kong. They started with the proposed extradition law (no one trusts Chinese courts), and have broadened to issues to do with democracy. There is an angle on education, and in a broad sense on breadth and creativity in education, and I'd like to set it out for you.

I am, among other things, a teacher educator. There have been intermittent efforts to blame "Western education" for the "bad behaviour" of young people. Almost 15 years ago about 2004 or 5, a high official in the Ministry of Education, a woman named Fanny Law, contacted the VP Academic at the time, and demanded that he fire four academic staff. He wrote about this on the intranet a year or two later, and it got into the press. The legislative council decided to have an inquiry, and the chief executive of the time, Donald Tsang, got ahead of it by announcing a judicial inquiry. This went on for months. Fanny Law had by then become the director of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (!), and as a result of the inquiry, she was forced to resign. The minister of education, Arthur Li, was shuffled out of the executive council. Arthur Li is now the chairman of the Council of Hong Kong U, and Fanny Law was in the inner circles of the immediate past chief executive, C.Y. Leung.

In 2010, Donald Tsang announced the introduction of "National Education" in Hong Kong schools. This was universally considered a move to introduce indoctrination into the schools. This led a series of demonstrations in which the then 15-year old Joshua Wong became prominent. The initiative was withdrawn.

In 2014, there was the Umbrella Movement, which you probably read about. There were efforts from establishment politicians to blame the "disorder" on the introduction of Liberal Studies in the schools.

Very recently, an article appeared in the Chinese-language Oriental Daily that started by attacking Stephen Cheung, the president of my university. He had put out a statement urging the current chief executive, Carrie Lam, to withdraw the proposed extradition law. He also expressed some mild sympathy with the protesters. The author of this article, a retired prof from HK Polytechnic University who now works for a mainland-oriented think tank, blames poor teaching for the "disorder," and demands that teacher education be brought into line with the goal of maintaining a harmonious society.

Up to now, we've been unrestricted in our efforts to educate teachers for Hong Kong, and efforts to evaluate what we do have been carried out by normal criteria. I fear that we may face more trouble in future. There certainly seems to be a faction of the establishment camp that wants to interfere with our work.

Hey Allan,

A great question and I found Matthew's latest answer to be a fascinating synopsis of a reality where the interplay between the concepts is all too painfully waged. My thinking on the subject is similar-ish to what has already been mentioned in the the thread, certainly regarding Dewey and Williams. If I was to add my own take on the long, 'The democratic revolution and the relationship between creativity and democracy. I would uphold autonomy, or the seeking of it, as a pre-requisite to both concepts. For me, it somehow provides the generational agency necessary to explore one's individual and/or communal identity. It is from this position that one is then able to engage with society democratically or invoke a creative disposition. I've by no means explored these ideas fully yet but am trying to understand what autonomy actually is and where and how it processes or is a process fascinates me. I'm reminded again of the tension between individual and community identities and how they erode one another - was it Rosenburg?