Students starting school this year will be retiring in 2068. Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five years, let alone 50 years and yet the schools are educating for that future. Sir Ken Robinson is a leading thinker on creativity and education advisor to the British Government. He argues that we've been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. Sir Ken presented on TED, an annual conference bringing together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their live (http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html)

 

Sir Ken believes that school kills creativity while that creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. “We are currently 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: All children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. Robinson believes that “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it or rather that we get educated out of it”.

 

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. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches Dance everyday to children the way we teach them Mathematics. Why? Why not? Sir Ken: “Math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they are allowed to, will do. 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, the right site. If you were to visit education as an alien and say, ‘what is it for? Public education‘. I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output… Who really succeeds? Who gets all the Brownie points? Who are the winners? You’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education is to produce university professors. They’re the people who come out the top. I used to be one and I like university professors, but we shouldn’t hold them up as the high water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life. But there’s 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’re disembodied in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads!”

 

We all hear the well meant advice: `Don’t do music you are not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, because you won’t be an artist, there is no money it that! Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of human intelligence and the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized. In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly degrees are worth less than 20 years ago, you need an MA where the previous job required a BA and you need a PH D for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. How do we react to that?

 

Sir Ken is fascinated about `how people discover their talent. “It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who most people have never heard of: Julian Lynn. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats and Phantom of the Opera. I once asked her: ‘Julian how did you get to be a dancer?’ She told me that when she was at school she was really hopeless. And the school in the thirties wrote to her parents and said, ‘we think Julian has a learning disorder.’ She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. But this was the 1930’s and ADHD hadn’t been invented. People weren’t aware they could have that. She went to see this specialist with her mother and she was led and sat on this chair at the end. There she sat on her hands for twenty minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems she was having at school because she was disturbing people and her homework was always late. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Julian and said: I’ve listened to all these things your mother has told me and I need to speak to her privately. And they went and left her. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio and when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, ‘just stand and watch her.’ The minute they left the room she was on her feet moving to the music. They watched for a few minutes. Then the doctor turned to her mother and said, ‘You know, Mrs Lynn, Julian isn’t sick she’s a dancer! Take her to a dance school. Julian said to me: `I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked into this room and it was full of people like me; people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern.’ She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School and became a soloist. After founding her own company; the Julian Lynn Dance Company she met Andrew Lloyd Weber. Julian Lynn has been responsible for some of the most successful musical theatre productions in history. She has given pleasure to millions and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down…”

 

Do you agree with Sir Ken that 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 we strip mine the earth for a particular commodity and for the future it won’t service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children and we must make creativity as important as Math. Why are we educated to become good workers instead of creative and entrepreneurial thinkers/doers?