Ken Robinson Talk on How Schools Kill Creativity
This is Ken Robinson. Sir Ken Robinson. He studies creativity. This is his take on schools, which I agree with. It’s a bit long but it’s worth it. When you think about why people act the way they do, it’s not only media that’s influencing us. It’s any big cultural force that has access to shaping us all, and schools also fit that. Who doesn’t go to school? Here’s a couple excerpts from the speech.
“My contention is that all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.”
“Creativity is as important now 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. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. 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 this way. We stigmatize mistakes. And now we’re 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 intro creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”
“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think that they’re not because the thing that they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.”
“Our education system has mined our minds in the way in the way we strip mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us.”