How schools kill creativity

How schools kill creativity

Sir Kenneth Robinson’s talk is about creativity, childhood and education. We’ll see the main messages of his presentation, and how they influence the society.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”

Sir Kenneth Robinson uses this sentence to explain that a lack of creativity, of originality, comes from the fear of being wrong. He criticizes the fact that our current school system is based on mistakes stigmatization. When they grow up, most children are losing their creativity; they are no longer able to innovate, to “think out of the box”. And this is a problem, because the biggest companies are ran with this fear of mistakes. Our kids are educated with the idea that being wrong is the worth thing ever, they are progressively losing their creativity, and “we’re educating them out of their creative capacities”.

“If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say: “What’s it for, public education?”

I think you’d have to conclude the all-purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors”

In fact, the educative system is the same all around the world, there is a hierarchy between subjects: Mathematics and Languages at the top, Social sciences in the middle and finally Arts.

This hierarchy is killing kid’s creativity. It’s formatting them. Since public education had been created to content the needs of the new industrial society, our current educational system is focusing on child’s academic ability. Two ideas are maintaining things like this: firstly, it’s not useful to learn something which couldn’t get you a job, and secondly, academic ability is the only form for evaluating intelligence.

Nowadays, degrees are gradually losing their importance; 50 years ago, passing successfully the French baccalaureate was so hard and was a guarantee to get a job, but now, this degree is almost given to students, and it doesn’t give no guarantee to get a job at all. Another example is that in France, students who have got a MA have got the highest unemployment rate.

This talk not only shows the failure of our educational system, it also allows us to understand how education is important for our future. We’re educating our child’s for their future, we must give them a chance to get out of this systemic cul-de-sac and make a new start.

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