TED talks: Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

Link: http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html?qtwh=true&utm_expid=166907-14&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com.sg%2F

Food for thought: Some points made by Sir Ken Robinson

• His main contention: Creativity is as important as literacy!
• "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original"
• Mistakes are constantly stigmatized in school and this form of teaching seems to be educating children end their creative instincts instead of developing them.
• All over the world, the humanities (e.g. dance, arts etc) are not emphasized. As children grow, they are increasingly educated from the waist up, then to the head, and then one side of their heads.
• The purpose of public education, judging from its output, seems to be to produce university professors. Though they are not the high watermark of human achievement, the education system, predicated on the idea of academic ability seems to be driven towards creating disembodied individuals who live within their brains. 
• Public education only came about formally in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrialization. The main objective was to produce the most useful subjects for work. And so children are given benign advice from a young age to stage away from things that they like that will not get them a job in the future (i.e. dance and art). 
• The current education system advocates a protracted process of university entry and emphasizes only on academic ability, which makes highly talented and creative people think they are not, for what they do well is stigmatized.
• Based on UNESCO research, there will be more people graduating with university degrees in this century than in any other century. Degrees are not worth anything now. Jobs that used to require a B.A. now requires and M.A. etc. This is the process of academic inflation.
• 1)There is a need to recognize diverse intelligence
• 2) There is a need to recognize intelligence as dynamic
• 3) There is a need to recognize intelligence as distinct
• Example of Gillian Lynne, now successful choreographer of musicals like Cats and Phantom of the Opera: She used to be mediocre in school. Teachers could not stand her  constant fidgeting and lack of focus. It was when her mother brought her to the doctor's that they realized that Gillian Lynne was a dancer, that she responded to music very well. After enrolling her into dance school, Gillian Lynne went on to be extremely successful as she found herself with like-minded people, people who thought while they moved.
• There is a need to stop mining students' mind like how we mine the earth for commodities, stripping them from creativity. There is a need to reconstruct our understanding of the richness of human capacity. Fundamental principles for education needs to change in order for us to prepare our children to face an uncertain future we probably will never see.