Schools Kill Creativity

Posted by in Movies & Videos, The Blog, Top Picks

Have you been formally introduced to TED? Ted who? What? There are two resources I highly recommend to parents who want to stay curious & creative: the RadioLab podcast and the TED Conference website. This week for the {Not My Words Wednesdays} post, I’d like to share a video from a collection my Pinterest friend Marina Castilla recommended. The video is funny & interesting, if you have the time I highly recommend it.

TED Summary: Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

Short on time? Yeah, most parents don’t have twenty minutes to sit and watch a video. Below are a few  of my favorite bullet points from the transcript.

Let’s Lasso the Moon Tip: TED offers an interactive manuscript, so if you want to watch certain portions of this talk you simply chose the phrase that interests you. It is located to the right of the video on the TED website. Once you’ve selected a phrase, the video will automatically navigate to that section of the TED Talk. Very cool.

  • Picasso once said this  he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
  • Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
  • What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.

Conclusion: Our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

What are your thoughts? Let’s chat in the comments.


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  • Subshibe

    Creativity in the broadest sense! We need to nurture the ability to observe, to analyze, to think critically, in order to create, to improve, to see both sides of an argument, to appreciate value and quality. Today we teach narrow “skills”, and we stunt the ability to adapt to a faster changing world.

  • http://awesomelyawake.wordpress.com/ Shawn

    Great post … I just read a post on how to not kill your child’s creativity — a pin I wanted to add last night but forgot. I actually send my children to a charter school that doesn’t follow these same societal pressures to always think one way, which is awesome. That also fits right into our spirtual beliefs as well. We enforce rules but not how to do things … it makes a big difference. We don’t give answers, we ask them what they think the answers are so they can think for themselves. It’s definitely a break from the traditional — and requires thinking outside the box as a parent. I would say that as parents we must provoke the traditional way things have been done in education and inspire new ways to think — even if it’s one family at a time.

  • Polly P Neill

    I am always so glad when I take the time to watch a TED talk – I just caught one this morning about economic development and poverty and it was great! And you mentioned the Radiolab podcasts – those guys are truly brilliant, certifiably insane, and hilarious. When I was little I wanted to write obituaries for the New York Times now I’d like to work with those guys!

    • Anonymous

      I am smitten; I love, love, *love* RadioLab. I listen to them while I clean the house & commute to work.

  • Adrianne Meldrum

    TED is a great place to learn. There are mind blowing videos on there, like one about a robot that moves in the sun and thinks for its self…truly amazing and looks super strange. They definitely keep you thinking out of the box.