Creativity within Education

(...) 

"Creativity now is as important in education as literacy,
and we should treat it with the same status. 

Kids will take a chance. 

If they don’t know, they will have a goal. 

They are not frightened of being wrong.

 I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but what we do know is:

 if you are not prepared to be wrong you will 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. 

We stigmatize mistakes. 

And we are now running national educational 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: 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.  

Creativity, which I define, as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often that not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

Our educational system has mine our minds (...). 

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

We have to be careful now that we use this gift [human imagination] wisely and we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about and the only way we will do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.


And our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future.

 By the way we may not see this future but they will

and our job is to help them make something of it."

Excerpt from Sir Ken Robinson's TED Conference 2006