Do schools kill creativity?

Just think about it? Based on the rise of human diversity in the world around us and the culture attributes that comes with those individuals, the advancement of technology and the process of academic inflation, the world around us is heading into a future we cannot yet grasp. In this video Sir Ken Robinson discusses the concept of our educational system and how it is set up to kill creativity. Creativity defined, is the phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. Creativity is a gift we are all given at birth, and if nurtured and cared for, is the reason we are where we are at today as a race. As humans we want to advance in all areas of life and creativity is the fuel for that plane ride into the untold either detrimental or beneficial future. He then leads the discussion to how our educational system and our concept of human ecology needs to be reformed in order to deal with the future we cannot yet grasp.

What Sir Ken Robinson tries to get across in this video is the extraordinary capacity of creativity kids are born with, but then dies throughout our educational system. Kids will take a chance, not scared of being wrong. But the problem lies if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time we grow up we lose that capacity, we now are scared to be wrong, thus killing our creativity.

In this Ted Talk Sir Ken Robinson, explains that our educational system was first set up to meet the needs of the Industrialism. The system places first, most useful subjects at the top math, science, languages, and second, academic ability. Robinson feels we need to radically redefine how we view intelligence. We have to rethink the fundamental principles we are teaching our children. We must educate our ‘whole’ being. He explains three things about intelligence, that it is diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it i.e. vision, sound, abstract, in movement. Intelligence is also dynamic, and lastly distinct. Just think, where are we really heading if our creativity is dying as the days pass by?