Schools Are Killing Creativity

After hearing Sir Ken Robinson talk about education I felt like I needed to enjoy some tea on the trolley, but more than that, take a look at my own education, and how the system is shaping kids into these perfect, cookie-cutter, left-brainers. Sir Robinson explains that kids are not afraid to be wrong, and therefore will try almost anything just because they want to. This is basically imagination and creativity in its purest form. Because all kids go though the educational system, they are all eventually taught that it is bad to be wrong about things. Therefore, as those kids get older they become afraid to be wrong, leading to no original ideas and no creativity. Essentially, while in those 12 years in school, the creative mind is “groomed” out of people, and they are taught to be lawyers and doctors and professors.Which in some cases is not a bad thing, but in a time where jobs like these are being sent overseas and given to robots, there is a higher demand for people that can do jobs no one else can.

I found Sir Robinson to have the most relaxing and relatable voice. He started the speech with an applicable and funny story that made the atmosphere more comfortable. The main part of his speech was stories from his life that had relevance to the topic, which showed to the listener that he actually lived in, and with, what he is talking about. He didn’t seem to be saying a memorized speech; it was like he was actually just talking breezily to his next-door neighbor about education. One of the most enjoyable parts, other than his accent, was how he used humor to get his point across. Within his three points on how education is bad, he had a little bit of a lesson and then stories that people were supposed to take something away from.

This TED talk shows that education teaches kids that creativity is wrong, and then punishes them with bad grades. Language and mathematics are the most “important” topics to be taught in schools, presented as things that will help you achieve, but personally I do not know when I am going to use the Pythagorean theorem or subordinating conjunctions in everyday life. I am told to not be an artist or a musician because I will not have a career and academic jobs will end up making me more successful. I don’t want to be trained to be left brained, but even as a right-brained person I can see myself slipping toward the left with the brain test we took. 46% to 54% is a pretty slim margin. Schools should start having kids in 1^st grade take the test, and then take the same one at the end of their school career to see how much the system has influenced the way they think. I can imagine that their right-brained thinking will decrease and their left-brained thinking will increase. The amount of “training” for kids to think logically and systematically raises the question; why don’t we teach dance or other creative subjects? As Sir Robinson says, “everyone has a body”, clearly they have to be here for something, and everyone dances, whether they’re good at it or not. Eventually, the school system will see that they need to start making right brainers because in the world, the demand is for people that can think outside the box and have aesthetically pleasing ideas.