The New Smart: How Nurturing Creativity Will Help Children Thrive

Who will thrive in the year 2050?

The New Smart is a riveting study of the kinds of minds that will succeed in the 21st century. As it turns out, the key ingredient for all aspects of life is not traditional IQ but creativity.

In Dr. Terry Roberts’ newest book he presents readers with a 21st century exploration into intelligence and creativity. The New Smart argues that the old notion of intelligence as a static quotient has ceased to mean much of value. Being smart, especially as it’s related to test scores and school grades, has less and less to do with success in contemporary life. Both these words and the ideas they represent are worn out.

Our new age demands something much more fluid, much more resilient―much more creative. In this book, we ask who will thrive in the future? And by reframing the question, we arrive at the following profile of successful creators:

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• They will blend multiple intelligences in a way that might be described as synthetic or even symphonic
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• They will be ambitious and focused without being self-obsessed
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• They will value asynchrony and even seek it out
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• They will use their own marginality to generate novel perspective and new work
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• They will exhibit a steadfast resilience in all phases of life
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• They will be measured by what they produce over the course of their lives, not by any static notion of capacity or quotient

The New Smart asks how we re-train ourselves and educate our children for a life that demands such creativity. It provides a clear roadmap away from standardized schools producing standardized minds and describes in detail why creative is The New Smart.

Dr. Terry Roberts is a former high school English teacher. He is practicing scholar of American Literature and Cultural Studies, with a strong penchant for the classics. He is fascinated by the social and intellectual power of dialogue to teach and to inspire. Terry is the lead author of several Paideia publications including The Power of Paideia Schools, The Paideia Classroom, and Teaching Thinking through Dialogue.

His debut novel, A Short Time to Stay Here, won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction, and his second novel, That Bright Land, won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award as well as the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South. Both novels won the annual Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, given to the author of the best novel written by a North Carolinian. Born and raised near Weaverville, North Carolina, Roberts is the Director of the National Paideia Center and lives in Asheville, North Carolina with his wife, Lynn. He has three children: Jesse, Margaret, and Henry.