Recently I found myself at the Broad museum in LA, dwarfed by massive household objects as part of an exhibition by the late Robert Therrien. As I wandered under giant tables, stooped under colossal chairs and looked up at 10-foot-high stacks of plates, two thoughts occurred.

First, how the defamiliarisation of an object forces one to deconstruct it and examine it much more closely.

One reflects differently about banal household objects when they are removed from their context, distorted and isolated. From an educational point of view, it remains an essential trait of the teaching of critical thinking to go into great detail, to unpack and spend the time to really analyse elements of thought.

However, the conveyor belt of volume-heavy curriculum we are still on makes this difficult. How often do we have the time to slow down to unpack threshold concepts, to journey into an odyssey around a single work of art, scientific concept, historical fact? Consider the arts in most middle schools; how much time do we spend really going deep into performing arts, music and visual arts? Does the timetable allow for it?

If we scuttle along the surface in a race to get through the curriculum, when do we find the time to inspect and investigate things deeply? And surely such a slowing down of thought, such a journey into detail, is all the more necessary in a hyperactive age where we consume thousands of images per day and process almost none of them? We need to magnify essential concepts in the curriculum and deconstruct them to truly teach them and hope for a critical appreciation of them. Hence, critical thinking, one of the pillars of the 21st Century, becomes clearer: it needs time.

Second, Therrien’s work reminded me of the famous Torrance creativity test in the 1960s. Participants were asked to brainstorm all the possible uses of an object, like a brick. The highest number of possible uses indicated the more creative minds. In order to truly consider potential uses of the object, the more creative minds would radically shift perspective and even dimensions. What would the brick do if shattered? If broken in two? If augmented in size? If miniaturized? It is by stepping out of what seems obvious into those creative pastures of the unknown that we begin to dream up new notions, new ideas and potentialities.

In a world already saturated by AI, where people are no longer writing their own ideas but all relying, more and more, on algorithms to do it, creating a flat, dehumanised and unoriginal landscape, who will stand out? Where will those emotional hooks and truly original ideas come from? And from an ideological perspective, what will it take to step outside of a thought silo, perpetuated and nourished by self-enclosed loops of confirmation bias? To do this, we must exercise considerable powers of creativity: think not algorithmically but inferentially, act not through exhausted generalisations but through brilliant and totally novel insights, flashes of originality. Who would think to create giant plates and tables? And when lost in such a gargantuan landscape, the sensations are wholly new and refreshing. Therrien’s art dramatises creativity, which is not just thinking outside the box, but distorting the box itself.

As we step back into our schools and universities, let’s continue to evoke the power of criticality and creativity in learners by shifting perspective, deconstructing the obvious, plunging ourselves into the unfamiliar and rendering the mundane extraordinary, the household extraterrestrial, the common uncommon.