· Do schools kill creativity? · · · Review

This is a twenty minutes talk about how schools kill creativity, by Sir Ken Robinson. He starts his speech in a very entertaining way which he keeps all along the conference. Even if he seems to be a comediant sometimes, he is always centred on his idea.

At the beginning, he gives us some dimensions about creativity's magnitude. Just after everybody has made a picture of their creativity and its dimensions, Sir Robinson introduces a bigger subject: children's creativity. Anecdote over anecdote that make you wander about what happens in the transition from kids to adults that seems like we are loosing creativity, capacity for innovation? Sir Robinson says that education is happening and that's why we loose capacity and become "robots" programed to do things just in certain way. He celebrates children for not being frightened of being wrong:

"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, 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 our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes, An we are 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."

He points at how education systems is structure in the way to meet the needs of indutrialism, so there is a hierarchy of subjects, where the ones on the top are the ones that are going to be useful to work, and the ones in the bottom, are subjects like, drama, music, arts, dance, that you may like, but the system minimises their importance because they don't go hand in hand with industrialism, so it's not easy to get a job to survive on the world.
He invites us to rethink our view of intelligence, considering intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct; to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children; to educate their whole being, so they can face the future and make something of it.