Let's Encourage Creativity
What I watched: Do schools kill creativity? by Sir Ken Robison. TED Talk. February 2006.
TED Talks are a learning godsend. Pull up any of their videos, even at random, and you’re likely to be blessed with new information or insights from experts in their respective fields. I’m a TED Talks junkie. I admit it. They pull me in, sometimes a few in a row in one sitting. What a great resource.
I have often said that watching a TED Talk is always 15 minutes well spent. I stand by that remark.
Of the more than 3700 videos on their site, one stands above the rest as the most watched, Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 presentation on how schools kill creativity in students. It’s been viewed more than 70 million times.
Few speakers possess the casual charm, wit, and presentation savvy of Sir Robinson. Watching him is a joy. The way he delivers his messaging ensconced in humor and anecdote allows what he wants to convey to creep up on you and sink in unawares. It’s a masterclass in effective communication.
A thought that popped into my head was that maybe taking a standup comedy class would give me an important skill set when I do public speaking. I’m a good public speaker. Speaking in front of a dozen or thousand people energizes me in ways that few things do. However, I’m not nearly as funny as Sir Robinson. Perhaps delivering my speeches with a few more laughs and giggles would make me a more effective communicator. It’s a truism that if you can deliver a message while making people laugh, the message slides into their consciousness in a stealth manner. That’s certainly food for thought.
Robinson’s message is clear. People of all ages have a remarkable range of creativity in them, including young school children. But schools and our industrialized education system squelch the creativity out of far too many of its students.
Robinson is passionate about education because he sees it as the mechanism by which we take individuals and society into an unknowable future.
So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year [2006] will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
After rightly stating that all children have within them tremendous talents, often squandered, he soon gets to what I see as the crux of the first main point of his talk.
My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
Shortly after, he brings up what I consider the second and most important point about the innate creativity of children.
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?
The hierarchy of subjects taught in schools places mathematics and languages at the top, then the humanities, and then way at the bottom are what we typically refer to as the arts – drawing, drama, music, design – and clearly near the bottom, dance. When I heard dance, my ears perked up.
I’ll return to the dance part in a moment.
Robinson then deftly points out that our entire modern education system is predicated on the industrial model. Educators in the 19th century developed over time a system of education that parroted the industrial factory manufacturing process. Gather the information and parts, put them together in a systematic and uniform manner, and out comes an educated child whose education looks in many ways very much like everyone else’s.
Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? "Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist." Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
For years I have been a proponent of a complete rethink of our education system. Cookie-cutter human beings educated only for the mainstream workforce is not my idea of how to enrich and enliven people to live the most fulfilled and happy lives possible.
Through happenstance I thankfully short circuited that industrial process in my own education because of a woman who ended up unknowingly liberating me in profound ways she sadly will never know. I mention her below. But first, if you listen to Robinson starting about 14:45 into the video, you’ll hear a story about a young girl to whom I related instantly when hearing the story.
Here is the video link again should you want to pause reading and listen to that portion, or the video in its entirety.
If you chose not to listen to the story about the young girl who was deemed to have a learning disorder and unfocused and disruptive in class, here is the short version.
Her mother took her to a specialist to have her learning problems assessed. At one point the specialist told the girl he had to speak to her mother privately and they left the girl in the room, but the specialist turned on the radio before leaving. He then had her mother observe the girl. The girl immediately got on her feet and began to move to the music. The specialist then said approximately this to the mother. “Your daughter isn’t sick. She’s a dancer.”
The mother took the girl to a dance school where she thrived. She later auditioned for the Royal Ballet which led to a successful career as a soloist. She then founded her own dance company and ended up choreographing two of musical theater’s biggest hits.
The girl grew up to become Dame Gillian Barbara Lynne and her career is rather extraordinary considering she was once about to be written off as a troubled child because she did not find the industrialized academic course of study in school all that interesting.
I felt seen!
As a child I danced around and moved constantly. I was an only child and was usually doing this alone, sequestered in my downstairs playroom. Eventually my father made available the outlet of gymnastics and while it was not dancing to music, it was at least the creative use of my body. It sufficed to appease my physical restlessness and I grew to love the sport.
Between the ages of 8 and 19 I trained, practiced, and competed as a gymnast, first as part of a private gymnastics club, then in high school, and briefly in college.
It was in college that the love of gymnastics was taken away from me by a coach who unabashedly asked me to consider dumbing down my selection of classes so that I could train more in the gym. I was horrified.
This was not why I went to college. I entered college with great academic hopes and had assumed my gymnastics would be complementary to my academic pursuits, not force academics to play second fiddle. I quit the college gymnastics team shortly thereafter.
Quite unexpectedly I ended up taking a dance class as an elective the next semester to do something creative and interesting with the body I had honed through 11 years of gymnastics. I took to it like a duck to water.
After a few classes the teacher pulled me aside and asked how much dance training I had, and I told her I had none. She was confused. She asked why my legs could kick so easily above my head and why I could spin like a top. When I told her of my background it made sense to her, and she immediately asked me “Do you want to be a dancer?”
Honestly, prior to that moment I had never thought about being a dancer despite all of my dancing to music as a child. I don’t think that dream would have been considered an option. For some reason I said yes. She then suggested I audition for the dance department. I did and was astonishingly accepted.
You can imagine the phone call with my father as I was explaining to him that his hard-earned money that had sent me to college was going to be used to study dance rather than the accounting undergraduate and law degree to follow that was the original plan he and I had worked out.
Third semester I was a dance major. A famous guest teacher came to the school to teach some classes for the dance students. She also pulled me over after class and asked me “Do you want to dance professionally?”
Again, honestly, that never really occurred to me. I was dancing because I loved it. Joy and freedom were all I felt when I danced. Dance professionally? It sounded good. I said yes. She then said something for which to this day I am forever grateful. “Get out of college now. If you wait to graduate, you’ll be too old. You have a lot of catching up to do but you have the talent to do it, but only if you leave college now and start.” I left college the next week and never looked back.
Now while that’s perhaps an interesting personal anecdote, the reason I relay it here is that when Sir Robinson reached the point in his talk about the little girl in class, I practically broke into tears because I instantly role reversed with her.
Due to a brilliant, caring father with an extraordinary academic career of his own including a Ph.D. and top honors at Catholic University of America, I ended up rather good at the usual academic subjects of mathematics, science, language, and so on. But on some level, I was a clever poseur. I had the skill set gifted to me by my father to navigate the education system, do the minimum work necessary, take tests brilliantly, and graduate from both grammar and high school with a stellar academic record that catapulted me to acceptance at several top universities. Go me!
But that wasn’t who I wanted to be. I play acted an academic because that was the game I was taught to play. My heart resided elsewhere – gymnastics, movement, reading anything I could get my hands on, and creating and building things. I even attempted to replicate a play I had seen with my father at the age of 9, acting all the parts for the few neighborhood friends who would sit still enough to watch. I was naïve and awful, but if someone had really noticed they would have seen a child with an artistic passion belied by what appeared to be an academic and traditional corporate workforce path.
It’s somewhat ironic that I did end up working in corporate America and have done quite well in it, but the journey there took so many forks in the road before ending up in a comfy office. And those forks took me on remarkable adventures as a professional dancer, actor, and singer. I tried beauty school and got halfway through and dropped out, only to end up becoming a makeup artist. I bartended, waited on tables, worked retail, designed windows for a major department store, founded a book publishing company, and so much more. None of which I would likely have done had I graduated from college and embarked on the plan that school, my father, and society had in store for me.
Embrace your creativity. Foster other people’s creativity wherever you find it. Allow both children and adults to exercise their creative tendencies, even if there’s no “practical” end result. Practicality can be overrated. There is value in the pure expression of creativity no matter its form.
Lastly, let me end with saying that as Robinson points out the education we need to grapple with the unknown future must include an abundance of creativity and its nurturing. I believe the enormously successful and innovative people going forward will be those who study and pursue a variety of things so that the various passions spark those creative intersections of information and ideas to arrive at new solutions and marvelous creations. Whether it’s the next great project to address climate change or a painting someone picks up at an art show that feeds their soul every morning when they wake up, it’s creativity that will serve as the foundation for great ideas in service to mankind.
Let me end by offering a quotation for which there is no substantive evidence that Albert Einstein said, but it’s most often attributed to him and I love it regardless.
Creativity is intelligence having fun.
Learning should be fun. School should be fun. Work should be fun. Life should be fun. Perhaps things aren’t always the giddy fun of silliness or mainstream entertainment, but fun in that drudgery should be the exception and not the norm. Only by recognizing our innate need to be creative and by allowing that creativity to flourish in whatever ways are meaningful and fun to us will it set free the rest of our skills and passions.
If you would like to read a superb book by Sir Ken Robinson, I recommend The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything in which Robinson extols “the element,” the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. Excellent book and highly recommended.