“We have a deep interest in education, like religion and money. Education is what will take us into the future,” says Ken Robinson: author of Creative Schools.
“We all agree on what extraordinary capacity that children have. All kids have a tremendous capacity for creativity,” he said on the most popular TED Talk.
Creativity now is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
Robinson told a cute story that took place in a classroom. “A little girl was sitting in the back of the class drawing, and the teacher came back to her and said you never pay attention, what are you drawing? The little girl said I’m drawing a picture of God. The teacher said nobody knows what God looks like and she said, they will in a minute.”
Maybe that kid was taken to a doctor and diagnose with ADHD. She only cared about art and not much anything else. You could imagine she is now on Adderall.
Kids are not afraid of being wrong, but by the time they get to be adults they have lost that capacity and are frightened of being wrong.
All children are born artists; the problem is to remain artists when they grow up. We don’t grow into creativity; we are educated out of it. In the education hierarchy, math, science and English are at the top and the arts are at the bottom. Thomas Dale has the arts specialty center, but this is more about allowing creativity in the classroom and not keeping a student’s brain in a box.
We think in all sorts of ways and the brain isn’t divided into compartments.If fact, the way to look at intelligence is the interaction of looking at different ways of doing things
The education system has mined our minds in a way that strip mining mines the earth, and with it, creativity is dumped over the side of the mountain.
The point is that while administrators keep score, teachers are somehow forced into a race for higher test scores. Because of that, a student’s creativity and motivation (doing what they enjoy) is squashed, and they end up losing the very thing they are good at.
Congratulations to the new graduates and good luck on your path into the future.
