Creativity and education

June 29th, 2006

We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain.
The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors. Who live only in their heads. Their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings.

says Sir Ken.

This is truly an inspiring talk about the needs of education going forward. Sir Ken Robinson is senior advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, and an influential advocate for the importance of creativity in education. He makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for overhauling our education system. (Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA.)

Sir Ken, reminds us that education in its present form is becoming a devalued commodity, and that the current education system educates creativity out of us.

Education was created at a time when the need was to fuel the explosion of industrialisation, Sir Ken argues passionately that we need to educate the whole child holistically. Children he believes have extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity. Picasso argued that we are all born artists, the struggle is to hang on to that creativity as you grow up.

The whole world is engulfed in a revolution, which requires us to think deeply how we prepare our children for the future.

You have to be prepared to be wrong to create new things, education and companies stigmatise failure, leading to hubris and stagnation.

Every education system around the world has the same hierarchy of education. Is this right? Yet intelligence is diverse and dynamic. Intelligence engages us totally and collectively.

Creativity can be defined as orginal ideas that have value, and it will combinations of interdisciplinary capabilites that allows us to reframe the world in a new way.

Sir Ken argues that today creativity is as important in education as literacy. It will be the leaps of the human imagination that will build tomorrows companies and economies. Our only hope for the future is to redefine human ecology and rethink how we educate our children

Which should be a worry for any British Government, when they are championing the growing indeed pressing, importance of the creative industries to our economy.

Listen to it here

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