Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Close on the on the heels of a post about schooling vs. education, a wonderful and funny talk from Sir Ken Robinson on TED about the same issue.



Advocating an open-ended approach to education that fosters creativity as being just as important as literacy for a world which fundamentally changes every five years or so, Sir Robinson talks about many things I've noticed here in China, specifically, that children aren't afraid of being wrong, that is, they'll have a go at it, whereas by the time kids are adults, they're terrified of giving the wrong answer. Even young children here won't take a stab at something if I haven't already told them the answer, something that frustrates me to no end. I'm not just saying wild stabs in the dark, but also having all the tools to put the answer together but without the answer itself, kids are extremely reluctant to try and figure out what the answer might be, especially in my first few classes with them.

"We are now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we are teaching people out of their creative capacity."

This is a feature of bureaucracism, subject of another recent video on TED, from Barry Schwartz, which hits many of the same notes, but from a moralistic standpoint. When people are not allowed to be individuals making decisions, but are handed lists to teach/ do in a rote manner, society, in the long run, is much worse off. "Three Strikes You're Out," is such an example, but so is much of what Robinson is talking about with "No Child Left Behind." You prevent disasters, perhaps. But you also prevent any real sort of progress and personal energy, which I can attest to firsthand, living and teaching in the birthplace of bureaucracy.

Thanks to Cyriac for the heads-up.