Why schools need to embrace kids creativity Sir Ken Robinson
My contention is, all kids have tremendous
talents.
And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
I heard a great story recently – I love telling
it –
of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.
She was six, and she was at the back, drawing,
and the teacher said this girl hardly ever
paid attention,
and in this drawing lesson, she did.
The teacher was fascinated.
She went over to her, and she said, “What
are you drawing?”
And the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture
of God.”
And the teacher said,
“But nobody knows what God looks like.”
And the girl said, “They will, in a minute.”
Kids will take a chance.
If they don’t know, they’ll have a go.
Am I right?
They’re not frightened of being wrong.
I don’t mean to say that being wrong
is the same thing as being creative.
What we do know is, if you’re not prepared
to be wrong,
you’ll never come up with anything original
if you’re not prepared to be wrong.
And by the time they get to be adults,
most kids have lost that capacity.
They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this.
We stigmatize mistakes.
And we’re now 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.
If you think of it,
the whole system of public education around
the world
is a protracted process of university entrance.
And the consequence is that many highly-talented,
brilliant, creative people think they’re not,
because the thing they were good at at school
wasn’t valued,
or was actually stigmatized.
And I think we can’t afford to go on that
way.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children
are born artists.
The problem is to remain an artist as we grow
up.
I believe this passionately, that we don’t
grow into creativity,
we grow out of it.
Or rather, we get educated out of it.
We have to be careful now that we use this
gift wisely,
and the only way we’ll do it is by seeing
our creative capacities
for the richness they are
and seeing our children for the hope that
they are.
And our task is to educate their whole being,
so they can face this future.
By the way –
we may not see this future, but they will.
And our job is to help them make something
of it.
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