I absolutely agree, 100% with this man.
Sir Ken Robinson presented at the TED2006 conference. TED2006 is part of the TED series of events held February 22-25, 2006 in Monterey, CA. The conference topic was: The Future We Will Create.
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Ken conveys his views to us:
1) Based on his experience at the conference - he sees extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations at the TED conference in 2006.
2) How, education is like religion and money - it goes deep within all of us and that everyone there had an interest in education.
3) Education is meant to take us into a future that we cannot grasp. That children starting school in the year, 2006, will be retiring in 2065 and no one has a clue what the world will look like in 5 years time and and yet we are meant to be educating these children.
He discusses the extraordinary capacities that children have - capacity for innovation.
All kids have talent and “we” squander them. Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. He gives us examples of how creative children are in their “untouched” state before we and/or educators get to them. He gives examples of the quick-wittedness of small children:
Once story is about a little girl in a drawing or art class. The little girl hardly ever paid attention. The teacher walked back to the little girl and asked her what she was drawing? The girl said a picture of God. The teacher said but nobody knows what God looks like. The little girl said, “they will in a minute.”
Another story was about a play that his own 4 year old son had a part in. The nativity play where the three Kings come bringing gifts. The three young boys each have a box for as their gift. One boy said I bring gold, the second boy says I bring myrrh, and the third boy/king says, “and Frank sent this.”
Children take a chance with their answers and if they don’t know the answer - they create one. They are not frightened of being wrong. He doesn’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is that if you are not prepared to be wrong - you will never come up with anything original. By the time we are adults most children have lost this capacity. We have become frightened of being wrong. Our companies run like this. We stigmatize mistakes. We are 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. Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. Ken believes passionately that we don’t grow into creativity rather we are educated out of it.
In every education system there is a hierarchy beginning at the top with math, language, humanities and then to the bottom are the arts. Then there is a hierarchy in the arts. Art and music are higher than drama and dance. Why is it like this?
As children grow up we educate them progressively from the waist up and start with
Who succeeds? Who gets the Brownies points? Who are the winners? Ken has to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.
Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. There was no public systems of education system (around the world) before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. Ken believes there is a hierarchy comprised of three ideas:
1) The most useful subjects are at the top.
2) The remainder - most other kids are steered away from the things they like. Don’t do this. It was benign advice and now profoundly mistaken.
The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. Academic ability currently is how the universities designed the system - in their own image. The whole system around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant and creative people think they are not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatised. Ken believes we cannot afford to go on this way.
In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be graduating through the current education system than since the beginning of history. And, suddenly degrees are not worth anything. Isn’t that true?
Now, kids with degrees are heading home to play video games. This is a process of academic inflation. We need to radically rethink our intelligence. Intelligence is dynamic and interactive. Creativity, which Ken defines as the process of having original ideas that have value more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
3) That intelligence is distinct. For example he presented a story about Gillian Lynne, a famous theatre choreographer that he interviewed. He asked her how she became a dancer? She attended school in the 1930’s. The school believed she was hopeless because she had a learning condition (back then it was most likely ADHD). The school sent her to see a therapist. There were interviews and in the end the doctor told Gillian that he needed to speak to her mom privately. Before he left the room, he turned on music. When they were out of the room for a bit they observed Gillian on her feet and moving to music. The doctor told her mother she is not sick, she is a dancer. He told her mother to take her to a dance school. She found that it was full of people just like her who could not sit still. There were people there who had to move to think - they did all sorts of dances.... Today, Gillian is a multimillionaire. Someone else would have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Sir Ken believes 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 that we striped-mined 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 are educating our children.
“if all insects on Earth disappeared, 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.”
― Biologist Jonas Salk
Sir Ken believes he is right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination and creative solutions to avert some devastating scenarios. We have to be careful and use this gift wisely.
Ken believes the only way we will do this is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate our childrens’ whole being so they can face this future.
By the way we may not see this future BUT they will - it is our job to make something of it.
