SIR KEN ROBINSON: DO SCHOOLS KILL CREATIVITY?

1.    Introduction

3 themes through the conference which are important:

-         Human creativity, its variety and its range

-         Unpredictable future for our children

-         Extraordinary capacity for innovation that children have although we squander them

 He introduces that he wants to talk about education and creativity.

2.    Give some examples.

-         The girl who wanted to paint the picture of God

-         The story of his son performing the Nativity at school

What he pretends with these stories is to tell us that children are not frightened of being wrong. ¨If you are not prepared to be wrong, we´ll never come up with anything original¨. And by the time they get adults, most kids have lost that capacity. We are running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

-         Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

3.    Educacional system

-         He moved to Los Angeles and then he realized that every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top mathematics and languages, then the humanities and at the bottom are the arts. And even there is a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are normally given a higher status than drama and dance.

-         Education is focus on their heads. The whole purpose of the educational system is to produce university professors. And they are just a form of life.

-         Our educational system lies on the idea of academic ability because it was invented in the 19^th century to meet the needs of industrialism. The hierarchy is rooted on two ideas:

1.    The most useful subjects for work are at the top: mathematics and languages. Music? You are not going to be musician. Art? You are not going to be an artist.

2.    Academic ability, which is confusing the view of intelligence. This is killing highly talented, creative people. In the next years, more and more people will be graduating through education but suddenly degrees are not worth anything. Before, you had a degree and you had a job, but now, more degrees are required to apply for a job. It is a process of academic inflation. We need to rethink our view of intelligence.

4.    About intelligence

3 things:

-         It is diverse: visual, sound, kinesthetic, abstract, movement.

-         It is dynamic: it is interactive. It is the process of having original ideas that have value.

-         It is distinct. He explains how Gillian Lynne, the choreographer of Cats and The Phantom of the opera, discovered her talent. Finally, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.

5.    Conclusion

We should adopt a new concept of human ecology, new conception of the richness of human capacity. The education system has mined our minds for a particular commodity, and for the future, it will not serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children. Quote by Jonas Salk: ¨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¨.

TED celebrates human imagination. See our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are.

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Personal opinion.-

-         In our educational system students are valued for their marks in the exams, and they are treated all equally. Teachers, in general, do not value their effort, from where they start, till they arrive. It only rewards students for their achievements in terms of results, marks, in some cases, the effort throughout the time is not considered. Education is based, therefore, on simple numbers. We are confusing education with academic ability.

-         Our education system turns its back on creativity. It does not let people think out of the box but only follow some concrete patterns of behaviour. In many cases, teachers are not prepared for real creative education. I think teachers, as parents, should not push children into any direction, just let them explore their inner capacities, to give them the possibility that they discover themselves their own capacities, likes and skills.

-         I agree with Sir Ken Robinson that the purpose of our educational system nowadays is to produce university professors or/and, generally speaking, people with a university degree. It is supposed that a degree gives you the knowledge to cope with that job, but it is certainly the contrary. University curriculum is not practical at all, but the contrary, they only feed the universities themselves, in other words, they produce their own professors and that is all.

-         And what about the wrong idea by which many people think that the more degrees you have, the more intelligent you are?