Albeit a little dated now, I find this talk by Sir Ken Robinson (2006) still very inspiring, hopeful, interesting and funny. I just re-watched it and thought I’d share it:

The key points I took away:

• It’s important to make mistakes and to encourage students to do so, to feel it’s ok to fail: without making mistakes we can’t come up with something original, forbidding mistakes also kills creativity, which can be defined as “the process of developing original ideas that have value” (Robinson, 2001:3).
• We grow out of creativity: we need to keep that child-like spontaneity that allows us to be innovative (often by accident)
• Education is historically geared to support STEM subjects, to meet the needs of industrialisation not to give young people a chance to flourish, to develop their talents. It was thought (and in many fields it still is!) that:
  • The most useful subjects are those that can secure a job (I used to be told too: “why would you want to be a musician, you’ll never get a job!”)
  • Academic ability is what counts most, what is seen as intelligence: Many brilliant, intelligent, creative people think they’re not because the subject they were good at was either considered inferior or stigmatised.
• More people than ever in history are now graduating from higher education and a degree is not worth anything: academic inflation. We now need a Masters or a PhD to stand out
• Creativity is as important as literacy
• Intelligence is:
  • Diverse
  • Dynamic (there are no compartments and creativity often emerges from the interaction of different ways of seeing things)
  • Distinct

I feel lucky to have been able to escape from a very traditional upbringing and having worked in the arts for my whole life (both in the industry and education). Although I often wonder if I have actually managed to escape, but this is another story.

I feel lucky to be able to work here in an environment where I feel creativity is celebrated and so is that complex intelligence that Robinson speaks of.

I just find it mind boggling that the government doesn’t think the same: we’re going backwards by only celebrating science and squashing the arts. I am passionate about science, but I also strongly believe that it needs creativity and imagination to find the key to interpreting the laws of nature, the angle that pure reason can’t find.

Bibliography

Robinson, K. (2001) Out of our minds. Learning to be Creative Chichester: Capstone