Schools Kill Creativity

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  bullet points I pulled from the transcript.  It was very challenging for me to reduce the transcript. I know this post is still way too long. C’est la vie.  I highlighted some thought provoking sections.

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.

• All kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
• Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong.
• If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong.
• By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
• 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.
• Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
• Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented — around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
• Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance.
• The consequence is that 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. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.
• In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
• 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.


PS: Don’t miss future posts and projects! Be sure to sign up for our RSS feed or connect online: