TEDTalks: Ken Robinson (2006) - Creativity in Education

It's funny - I've seen this before, but I decided to watch it again and take some notes.

Robinson begins by claiming one of ideas we need to grapple with is that we don't know what future holds or what it's going to look like, so how do we educate today's children?

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

He comments that by the time we're adults we stigmatize mistakes, "We're educating people out of their creative capacities."

"We don't grow into creativity - we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it."

Robinson is hilarious, and makes some great jokes imagining Shakespeare as a 7 year old in an English class.

"Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects... At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are usually given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance ever day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important."

"As children grow older we start to progressively educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads - and slightly to one side."

Robinson claims that the people who come out at the top of this kind of system are the people who wind up as university professors, but typically those are the kinds of people who are disembodied and live in their heads. "They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads." (ha!)

"The education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there's a reason... There were no public systems of education before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is based on two ideas: (1) The most useful subjects for work are at the top, so you were probably steered benignly away from things when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that...
Benign advice - now profoundly mistaken. The whole world's engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is: (2) Academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole systsem 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."

"In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people will be graduating through public education than since the beginning of history....
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything." (ie. now you may need an MA to get a job - "the process of academic inflation."
"We know three things about intelligence:
(1) It's diverse. We think about the world in all of the ways that we experience it - we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically; we think in abstract terms; we think in movement.
(2) Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at all of the interactions of the brain...intelligence is wonderfully interactive."
Creativity = the process of having original ideas that have value
Creativity, more often than not, comes from different disciplines and ways of seeing things.
(3) Intelligence is distinct.

"I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we stripmine the Earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we're educating our children."

"Our task is to educate their whole being."