Talk – Sir Ken Robinson – Do schools kill creativity?

This TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson from February 2006 is still the most watched with over 58 million views. It’s without a doubt the one that impacted me and I’ve spoken about the most in recent years. I’ve always found it to be remarkable that what he says makes so much sense, is so straightforward and yet we haven’t been able to apply it.

In writing this post I was very glad to find that TED has written transcripts of many of their talks and made them available on their website. This one in particular has been translated into 62 languages! Plus they’re all minuted so you can click on the different sections to take you directly to that moment in the video.

Here are a few of my favourite bits:

2 mins. 50 secs. – And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

3:32 – I heard a great story recently – I love telling it – of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “I’m 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.”

5:22 – What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not 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 — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. 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. We stigmatize mistakes. And 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.

I realised after posting that I had left out a big part of this quote, especially what I consider to be one of the most important lines of the whole talk: “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” This is something I think I understand as I’ve experienced it – by being too much of a perfectionist, I haven’t allowed myself to make mistakes and learn from them.

11:45 – 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 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.

I feel this happened to me and to a whole generation of people.

12:07 – In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything.

12:38 – 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.

12:57 – In fact, creativity – which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value – more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

I feel this point is connected with what Steve Jobs said about the importance of having diverse interests.

Here he also gives the example of Gillian Lynne and how she discovered her talent. It’s a truly beautiful story which I think it best watched on video.

18:14 – There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.

18:34 – 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. And 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.

This reminded me of the saying I posted recently: “A society grows great when old men plant trees the shade of which they know they will never sit in.”