"We are educating people out of their creativity," is one of Sir Ken Robinson's more famous lines. It has gone viral along with many of his other often humorous thoughts on education.
A decade ago, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK and was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development for the Northern Ireland Peace Process. He's been invited for his thoughts on creativity and education by Fortune 500 companies, federal and state governments all over the world and has been involved with several provincial governments in Canada.
His latest book is called The Element: How finding your passion changes everything, in which he interviews several prominent people about how they discovered their passion and talents. He says it's remarkable to note how many of the people he has spoken with, from Cats' choreographer Gillian Lynne to former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, passed through their formal education without really understanding what they were capable of.
He is a critic of many governments who pooh-pooh the arts and joked that the Medicis, the powerful figures during the Renaissance, never went about generating the most creative region in the world by setting out a math strategy.
He was the featured speaker on April 26 at a fundraising evening in Toronto for the Coalition for Music Education in Canada, and took time out to speak to GlobeCampus.ca.
GlobeCampus: You've said that often education does not value what we're good at and that many leave school thinking that they were not very smart. Tell us about how schools sometimes can really get it wrong.
Sir Ken Robinson: An awful lot of people go through a formal education without discovering their natural abilities. In a lot of systems of formal education, the curriculum is structured in a particular way so that certain sorts of disciplines are marginalized. If you happen to be good at the things that are on the margins of education, you end up feeling marginalized, too. Also, there is an increasing emphasis in schools on standardized testing. In these systems, the testers aren't really looking for examples of highly individual or creative abilities but looking to see if you know the standard answers. And the effect of that is, even for the disciplines which are apparently favoured, like science and math, there is an equally strong tendency to suppress creative thinking.
GC: You would like to see schools have a richer vision of human ability and creativity. Can you tell us how this can start to happen?
Sir Ken: All the great schools I know are unique. They may have to cover similar things but they do it differently. It starts with the school principal understanding the importance of their role in setting a tone and creating community and a mood, with a sense of possibility. And then it's about looking at each school and saying what is it here that may be inhibiting the real development of our kids, and do we have to do that, do we have to do it that way? Is there some other way we can do things?
GC: You say that our education system is often unable to recognize the full spectrum of human talent in our young people and that this thinking is still connected to the industrial revolution.
Sir Ken: The features of formal education are rooted in the manufacturing principles of industrialism. The organizational structure of education is very much like a manufacturing process. Kids are educated in batches by age. You're supposed to start at one end and the assumption is that, by the time you get out of it, you're a fully educated person. The whole mindset is that if you don't go to college and get a degree then your life's over. The fact is, the economic value of a college degree is toughening and the idea that getting a degree will clinch you a job for life has not been true for years. But we still act as if it were true.
GC: Do performing-arts schools answer some of the needs for recognizing a person's natural vocation or do they, too, often miss out on a person's calling?
Sir Ken: One of the things I always press for is a holistic view of education. But I'm equally concerned at the vitality of the other disciplines in schools. The real innovation and creativity always comes from people crossing borders, crossing boundaries, thinking differently and very often through the interaction of disciplines through applying ideas from one field into another field. The real vitality of intelligence and creative thinking is in making connections, not from keeping everything separate.
GC: You say the older a person gets, the more frightened he or she become of making mistakes, and you point out that creativity needs that element of us sometimes being wrong. Can you explain why that is so important?
Sir Ken: At the heart of creativity is a willingness to take risks, a willingness to experiment, a willingness to explore avenues that don't go anywhere and a willingness to be wrong. And if you're living in a culture of standardized testing, high-stakes funding, where mistakes are not tolerated and seen as a sign of mental infirmity, then you're breeding a contradiction right at the heart of the system.
GC: For someone who is middle aged, do you think it's harder or easier for them to find out what they're really good at and what they enjoy?
Sir Ken: There are lots of reasons why people don't do things they love to do or haven't explored things they may feel they have a natural aptitude for. By the time you reach middle age, you're surrounded by social networks, family, friends, sometimes children, and obligations. People have an image of you by then. If you say, look I'm going to head off in some different direction, you often face a room of raised eyebrows. You? You are going to be a flamenco dancer? Or study chemistry? What I always encourage people to do is to recognize: If not now, when? I think we all have a duty to ourselves to try and live a life that has meaning and purpose and fulfillment. And often that comes by following your own true north, accepting that life is not linear, that you can always go back, do a 180 and try something else. Much of the lives we live are a result of how we think of ourselves. And when we start to think differently, we start to see different options and possibilities.
A new education system?
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Originally Posted by The Devil's Sergeant
