Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I have been blown away by the whole thing. There have been themes running though the conference which are relevant to want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we have had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it is put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen in terms of the future no idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, eveybody has an interest in education. Don’t you, I find this very interesting. If you are at a dinner party, and you say you work in education. Actually you are not at dinner parties, frankly. If you work in education you are asked. And you are never asked back, curiously. That is strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody you know, they say “what do you do?” and you say you work in education you can see the blood run from their face. They are like “ oh my God, why me?”, “ my one night out all week.” But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it is one of these things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and Money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it , partly because it is education that is meant to take us into this future. That we can not grasp. If you think of it. Children school these year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue despite all the expertise that is been a parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet, we are meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary And the third part of this is that we have all agreed, nonothless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have their capacities for inovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, was not she? Just seenig what she could do. And she is exceptional, but I think she is not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of chilhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent and my contention is, all kids have tremendous 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. I heard a great story recently, ı 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 techer was fasnicated. She went over to her, and she said “what are you drawing?” and the girl said “ I am drawing a Picture of God.” And the teacher said. “ but nobody knows what God looks like” And girl said “They will in a minute” When my son was four in England actually, he was four everywhere to be honest. If we are being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? It was a big story, Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it. “Nativity II” But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: “James Robinson IS Joseph!” He did not have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in brearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh, this really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, “You OK with that?” They said “Yeah, why? Was that wrong?” They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxess down, and the first boy said, “ I bring you gold” and the second boy said, “I bring you myrrh” and the third boy said, “ Frank sent this.” What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they will have a go. Am I right? They are not frightened of being wrong. I do not mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you are not prepared be wrong you will never come up with anything original, if you 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 are 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. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we do not grow into creativity we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfied, just outside Stratford which is where Shakespeare’s father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You do not think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Because you do not think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, was not he? How annoying would that be? Must try harder. Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now!” to William Shakespeare and “put the pencil down! And stop speaking like that, it is confusing eveybody.” Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles and I just want to say a word about the transition. Actually, my son did not want to come. I have got two kids; he is 21 now and my daughter’s 16. He did not want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He had known her for a month. Mind you, they would had their fourth anniversary because it is a long time when you are 16. He was really upset on the plane. He said. He said “ I will never find another girl like Sarah.” And we were rather pleased about that, frankly. Because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Everyone. Does not matter where you go.You would think it would be otherwise, but it is not. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, at the bottom are the arts.

Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system,too. There is a hierarchy within the arts. Arts and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There is not an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. I think this is rather important, I think math is important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they are allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, do not we? Did I miss a meating? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up.

We start to educate them progressively from the waist up and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say “What is for, public education?” I think you would have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeed by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points who are the winners. I think you would have to conclude the whole purpose of public education thoughout the World is to produce university professors is not it? They are the people who come out the top and I use to be one, so there and I like university professors, but you know, we should not hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They are just a form of life, another form of life but they are rather curious and I say this out of affection fort hem: There is something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They are disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It is a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior acadenmics and pop into the discotheque on the final night and there you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat. Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it. Our education system is predicated on the idea of the academic ability. And there is a reason, around the world, there were no public systems of education.

Really, before the 19th century they all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are the top. So you were probably steered beningnly away from things at school. When you were a kid, things you liked on the grounds you would never get a job doing that, is that right? Do not do music, you are not going to be a musician; do not art, you won’t be an artist. Being advice — now, profundly mitaken the whole World is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the sysyem in their image. 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 are not because the thing they were good at the school was not valued, or was actually stigmatized

and I think we can not afford to go on that way. 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 is the combination of all the things we have talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work and demography and the huge explosion in population.

Suddenly, degress are not worth anything, is not that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you did not have a job, it is because you did not want one and ı did not want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need a MA where the previcious job required a BA and now you need a PhD for the other. It is a process of academic inflation and it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

. We need to radically tethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about inteligence. One, it is diverse. We think about the world in all 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. Secondly, inteligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations inteligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain is not divided into compartments. 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 seening things. By the way, there is a shaft of nerves that join the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum, it is thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday this is probably are better at multitasking. There is a raft of research but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, she is dealing with people on the phone, she is talking to the kids, she is painting the ceiling, she is doing open-heart surgery over here. If ı am cooking the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone’s on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed and I say “Tery, please, I am trying to fry an egg in here.”

Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, “ if a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

and the third thing about intelligence is, it is distinct. I am doing a new book at the moment called “ Epiphany” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I am fasnicated by how people got to be there. It is really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman. Who maybe most people have heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? She is a choreographer, and eveybody knows her work, she is wonderful. I use to be on the board of The Royal Ballet. Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, “ How did you get to be a dancer?” ıt was interesting, when she was at school she was really hopeless and the school, in ’30s, wrote to her parents and said “ We think Gillian has a learning disorder, she could not concentrate; she was fidgeting.” I think now they would say she had ADHD would not you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD had not been invented at this point. It was not an available condition. People were not aware they could have that, anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talk to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school because she was distrubing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, I have listened to all these things your mother’s told me. I need to speak to her privately. “Wait here. We will back and we won’t be very long” and they went and left her, but as they went out of the room he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk and when they got out of the room. He said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her” and the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to to the music and the watched for a few minutes and he turned her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian is not sick, she is a dancer take her to a dance school.” I said, “ What happened” She said “She did. I can not tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me. People who could not sit still. People who had to move to think” Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned fort he Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She is been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history she is given pleasure to millions, and she is a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson, I believe our only hop efor the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconsititute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we were educating our children. 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 is right. 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 have talked about. And the only way we will 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.

KAYNAKÇA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=37s

Do Schools Kill Creativity?, Ken Robinson