Why creativity is so important for our collective futures.
Sir Ken Robinson
This week I’d like to look at the TedTalk given by Sir Ken Robinson in 2007. This talk has been seen more than 20 million times (I only account for about 5 of those). The talk undoubtedly inspired me to see creative education as paramount for our children and confirmed to me that the education system we have at the moment was built to serve the purposes of the industrial and colonial past. Not the present and not the future.
As Robinson points out, all children have natural curiosity and creativity, but we get educated out of it by a system based on the needs of the past. Kids have the courage not to worry about being wrong; they will have a go until they are taught otherwise. If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. We get educated out of our creative tendencies.
Image Istock Romolo Tavani
Creativity is just as important in education as literacy, he argues, and this is undoubtedly true now as we begin to come out of the COVID pandemic. Moreover, creativity and innovation will be the fuel of future economies.
As Ken Robinson, I believe that an arts and humanities education translates into all professions and is and will be the differentiator of successful companies and individuals.
All intelligence is dynamic; it doesn’t rely on just one area of the brain. Likewise, the brain is not divided into distinct regions that have only one function. Some people excel in the arts and some in the sciences, others in business. However, those that can apply creative thinking to their tasks will have a better chance of surviving and thriving.
Robinson uses the metaphor of a stripped mine for our education system. “We have mined the human mind the way we have strip-mined the earth. The education system is no longer fully appropriate to the needs of the present and future economies”.
We must educate the whole being, not just a part of it. We are given the gift of imagination and then are taught not to use it.