Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED

Creativity and education

• Robinson's central contention is that creativity is as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status.
• All kids have tremendous talents, but we squander them ruthlessly.
• Children will take a chance and are not frightened of being wrong; if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.
• By adulthood, most people have lost this capacity, and we run companies and education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
• Picasso: all children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. We don't grow into creativity, we get educated out of it.

The hierarchy of subjects

• Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy: mathematics and languages at the top, humanities next, arts at the bottom.
• Within the arts, art and music rank above drama and dance; no system teaches dance daily as it teaches mathematics.
• Education progressively focuses children from the waist up, then on their heads, and slightly to one side.
• Public education systems came into being in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrialism, based on two ideas: the most useful subjects for work are at the top, and academic ability dominates our view of intelligence.
• The whole system is a protracted process of university entrance, so many brilliant, creative people think they're not because their talents weren't valued.
• Academic inflation: degrees are worth less as more people graduate than in all previous history combined.

Intelligence

• Intelligence is diverse (visual, sound, kinesthetic, abstract, movement), dynamic (the brain is interactive, not compartmentalized), and distinct.
• Creativity is defined as the process of having original ideas that have value, often arising from interaction between disciplines.

Gillian Lynne

• The choreographer Gillian Lynne, of "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera," was thought at school in the 1930s to have a learning disorder; today she might have been labelled with ADHD.
• A specialist saw her moving to music and told her mother: "Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer."
• At dance school she found people like her who had to move to think, leading to a multimillionaire career. Somebody else might have put her on medication.

Conclusion

• We need a new conception of human ecology, reconstituting our view of the richness of human capacity.
• Our education system has mined our minds like we strip-mine the earth, and it won't serve the future.
• Our task is to educate children's whole beings so they can make something of the future we won't see.