On creativity in schools

While waiting outside the concert hall to get in (you’ll know which concert in a moment!), I was watching a TED video, and here are a few things Sir Ken Robinson was saying on the subject quite dear to me:

• If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that has been on parade for the past four days, what the world would look like in 5 years time, and yet we’re meant to be educated for it. So I think the unpredictability of it is extraordinary.
• All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
• Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
• There’s a little girl who was in a drawing lesson and she was six and she was all the time sitting in the back of the class. And the teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention. But in these drawing lessons she did. And the teacher was fascinated, and she went over to her and she said: “What are you drawing?” and the girl said “I am drawing a picture of God.” and the teacher said “But nobody knows what God looks like.” and the girl said “They will, in a minute!”
• Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but what we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you’re not capable of coming with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. …We are educating people out of their creative capacities.
• Picasso once said: all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
• We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.
• We used to live in this little town where Shakespeare’s father was born… Are you struck by a new thought? …You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you??? Have you ever thinked of Shakespeare being a child? Of Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? Heheh, really. How annoying would that be? “Must try harder.” Being sent to bed by his dad: “Shakespeare, go to bed!” “No!” And “Put the pencil down!” And “Stop speaking like that!”
• Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Doesn’t matter where you go. At the top are Mathematics and Languages, then the Humanities and at the bottom are the Arts, everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there’s a hierarchy within the Arts. Art and Music are normally given a higher status in school than Drama and Dance. There isn’t an education system on the Planet that teaches children Dance, the way we every day teach them Mathematics. Why? Why not?
• On university teachers (he used to be one), he said: they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. In my experience, not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied. You know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their heads to meetings.
• I saw a great T-shirt recently saying: If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?
• I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconsider our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity and for the future, it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are teaching our children.
• Wonderful quote from somebody else: If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years all life would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years time all forms of life would flourish.

To learn more about this talk, including a fabulous story about Gillian Lynne, or to find other TEDTalks by Sir Ken Robinson or others, visit www.TED.com. You will thank me for this tip. I did.