Are we educating our children out of the innate abilities that they desperately need to navigate an uncertain future where routine jobs are replaced by robots and software?
It looks that we are. Research shows that creativity levels have been continuously dropping for the last two decades.
Is the answer more tests, increased competition and standardization of our schools? That’s what most of political leaders and education administrators are arguing.
Fortunately, there are dissenting voices of people who aren’t stuck in a 20th century mentality of training obedient and subservient workers for factories and bureaucracies. Ken Robinson believes our current focus on rote learning, memorization and regurgitation on tests is completely backward.
He argues that our one-size-fits-all factory schooling model is impoverishing the foundations children will need for living a successful, creative life: independent thought and imagination.
The Power of Creativity and Imagination:
In this beautifully edited video, he makes a powerful argument for why we need to transform the way we educate our children now.
Here are few more gems from Sir Ken Robinson on the importance of creativity and imagination in education worth spending your time to watch.
Why Schools Kill Creativity:
His landmark 2006 TED Talk on Why Schools Kill Creativity, has over 40,000,000 million views on TED and Youtube, which makes it the most watched TED Talk of all time.
Bring On The Learning Revolution:
Sir Ken Robinson’s follow up talk to Why Schools Kill Creativity at the TED Conference in 2010
How To Escape Education’s Death Valley:
In his most recent TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish… and how current education culture works against them.
Sir Ken Robinson’s Last Public Talk
In his final public speech before his death in 2020, Sir Ken Robinson invites us all to imagine a new normal, and to understand how we can create a world that values the diversity of each individual’s unique gifts and talents.
Ken Robinson Quotes On Creativity In Education
Here are some of my favorit Ken Robinson quotes:
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
“Every single one of the 100 billion lives who have walked the face of this earth is unique and unrepeatable. To be born at all is a miracle, so what are you going to do with your life?”
“We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make — and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
“We have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.”
“Some of the most brilliant, creative people I know did not do well at school. Many of them didn’t really discover what they could do—and who they really were—until they’d left school and recovered from their education.”
“Education and training are the keys to the future. A key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away; turn it other way and you realize resources and give people back to themselves.”
“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”
“Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.”
“Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”
“We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.”
“The Element is about discovering your self, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.”
“Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler did not solve an old problem, they asked a new question, and in doing so they changed the whole basis on which the old questions had been framed.”
“Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
