"Creativity is the key to a brighter future, "say education and business experts. Here is how schools and parents can encourage this important skill in children.

If Dick Drew had listened to his boss in 1925, we might not have the product that we now think of as great importance: a new type of tape. Drew worked for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. At work he developed a kind of material strong enough to hold things together. But his boss told him not to think more about the idea. Finally, using his own time, Drew improved the tape, which now is used everywhere by many people. And his former company learned from its mistake. Now it encourages people to spend 15 percent of their working time just thinking about and developing new ideas.

Creativity is not something one is just born with, nor is it necessarily a character of high intelligence. The fact that a person is highly intelligent does not mean that he uses it creatively. Creativity is the matter of using the resources one has to produce new ideas that are good for something.

Unfortunately, schools have not tried to encourage creativity. With strong attention to test results and the development of reading, writing and mathematical skills, many educators give up creativity for correct answers. The result is that children can gain information but can't recognize ways to use it in new situations. They may know the rules correctly but they are unable to use them to work out practical problems.

It is important to give children choices. From the earliest age, children should be allowed to make decisions and understand their results. Even if it' choosing between two food items for lunch, decision-making helps thinking skills. As children grow older, parents should try to let them decide how to use their time or spend their money. This is because the most important character of creative people is a very strong desire to find a way out of trouble.

   Storing food is common in members of the crow family. A new study tested the birds outside for this naturally occurring behavior, which may have evolved（进化）specifically because it gives crows a survival advantage. Some crow species are known to naturally use tools to recover food. So the researchers tested whether the birds could store and recover a tool so they could use it to find their food after a gap of 17 hours — something we wouldn’t expect them to do naturally. But they were able to instantly select the tool out of a number of unnecessary items.

In another experiment, the researchers taught crows to select a token（礼品券）from a number of items so that they could then exchange it for food. Again, the birds then showed that they could plan for the future using this new behaviour. This is different from all of the previous studies in future planning, which have focused on naturally occurring behaviour. For example, we know that chimpanzees select, transport and save appropriate tools for future needs.

These studies have shown that animals can plan for the future — but they leave an important question open for debate. Are animals only able to plan to use abilities that have evolved to give them a specific advantage, or can they flexibly and intelligently apply planning behaviour across various actions? Most critics would say the former, as the animals were tested in naturally occurring behaviour.

But the new research provides the first evidence that animal species can plan for the future using behaviour that doesn’t typically occur in nature. This supports the view that at least some recognitive（认知的）abilities in animals don’t evolve just in response to specific problems. Instead, it suggests that animals can apply these behaviour flexibly across problems in a similar way to humans. We need to study how flexible behaviour evolved. Then we might be able to see how crows’ ability to plan for the future fits in with their broader cognitive powers.