The good folks at the annual, invitation-only TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) are finally sharing some of their big-wig keynote speakers through on-line video and audio. Of particular note is creativity and human resource guru Sir Ken Robinson, talking about creativity and education. Robinson believes our public education infrastructure conspires to destroy creative thought, and prepares children for an industrialized world that no longer exists.
Of particular concern for him is our capacity to be wrong, to take chances when we don’t know the answer. Says he:
I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But what we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. 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, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is that we are educating people OUT of their creative capacities.
The talk is a bit heavy on humor and light on productive alternatives, but it’s an entertaining view of an essential topic for our children and our collective future. Worth a watch.
Andrew,
I thought this video was wonderful.
Sir Ken Robinson’s thoughts about dance being at the bottom of the hierarchy of subjects taught and our bodies relegated to the dismal role of transporting our minds to meetings, was a lot of fun to listen to.
If intelligence and creativity result from different types of learning, as Sir Ken says, why do we ignore the value of learning visually, through sound and through movement?