Education Can Kill Creativity

Link to Video- Sir Ken Robinson TEDx Talk

This week, while I was trying to decide what to write my blog about, I went to the TEDx website. I was curious to see what the most popular video was about, and it turns out that the most-watched TEDx video is about education. The talk is given by Sir Ken Robinson and is titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” I was shocked to see that the most watched video was about education if I’m being honest because these days it seems like many Americans don’t care about our education system. I say that because of all the news we’ve heard over the past few years about wealthy and famous people bribing their children into Ivy League schools, and those schools covering them up. Schools are not helping youth gain a proper education by allowing bribes! On top of that, the hypocrisy of a school allowing youth to bribe their way in while that same school will punish its students for being creative is alarming, to say the least. I believe that everyone should have access to a good education, so it is not ethical when students cheat and bribe their way into a school that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. 

Sir Ken Robinson also talks about the cycle of how schools educate students that will go on to be professors and teachers who will then crush creativity out of the next generation of students because of what they experienced. He says “all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them pretty ruthlessly. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” He then tells a brief story of a child saying their lines wrong in a play, and how “kids will take a chance, and [even if] they don’t know, they’ll still [try]. They’re not frightened of being wrong.” He goes on to say “I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, [but] what we do know is if you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original - if you are 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 are now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make. And 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 and I believe passionately that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.” I have many more thoughts about this topic… but I will wrap up by saying that this philosophy (of being educated out of our natural creativity) seems to be true, and I think that we need to continue this discussion and make a change. It is important for our education system overall, and especially for students who learn differently so that they can be allowed to flourish in creativity.