Do schools kill creativity?

I just watched Sir Ken Robinson’s speech from last year’s TED conference. It’s old, but definitely worth a look if you’ve got 19 minutes:

First, I think his diagnosis is mostly right on target. Of course, this isn’t much of a surprise given that I’m highly skeptical of traditional schooling and subscribe to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which Sir Robinson seemed to be advocating. In sound-byte form:

We are educating people out of their creative capacities.

One critique: It may sound pedantic, but I think he really should have said that we are schooling — rather than educating — children out of their creative capacities.

Second, his delivery method was fascinating. I can’t remember the last time I saw humor blended so thoroughly and effectively into a speech. His talk is at heart an argument — a somewhat radical one, at that — against schooling as it is currently practiced. And yet he managed to avoid framing the issue in terms of “us” versus “them,” or seriously antagonizing large groups of people. Too often when we feel even slightly attacked, our defense shields go up and we stop listening. By putting everyone at ease through his humor, Sir Robinson doesn’t obstruct his message but instead makes it possible for us to actually hear it.

Lastly, I loved this:

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.

I think I’ll re-read that line every day for at least the next month.

posted by Nicholas ⋅ tagged TED, education, unschooling

2 responses to “Do schools kill creativity?”

1. May 25th, 2007 at 10:54 pm , Amanda says:
   

   I particularly liked these parts:

   Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

   and

   Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — comes about as the interaction of different processes of doing things.

   That makes intuitive sense to me. Creating something new is likely to happen at the margins. And the margins are where a field is not well defined, and where it overlaps with others.

   Also, I’m not a usage expert, but I’m pretty sure the convention is Sir Ken, not Sir Robinson.

2. May 26th, 2007 at 7:41 pm , Nicholas says:
   

   Yep, you are indeed correct: Sir should be used with a given name or with a full name, but not with just a surname.

   Thanks for the correction!