CONCEPT
The Divergent Thinking Test
George Land and Beth Jarman's 1968 NASA-designed instrument that revealed 98% of five-year-olds score at genius level for divergent thinking—a figure that collapses to 2% by adulthood through the operation of industrial schooling.
The divergent thinking test, originally designed by George Land and Beth Jarman to measure creative capacity in NASA engineers, asks how many uses one can generate for a common object such as a paperclip. The genius-level score requires fluency, originality, elaboration, and flexibility—the willingness to shift categories entirely and refuse the premise of the question. When administered to 1,600 children, 98% of five-year-olds scored at genius level. By age ten, 30%. By fifteen, 12%. Among 280,000 adults, 2%. Robinson cited this data throughout thirty years of public life not as curiosity but as indictment: something was systematically dismantling the capacity between ages five and fifteen, and that something was school.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The test's design was deceptively simple. Land and Jarman had been commissioned by NASA to identify engineers and scientists with exceptional capacity for generating multiple solutions to novel problems. The instrument they developed measured four dimensions of divergent cognition: fluency (number