After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk, I think something needs to be done to change the public education system to be more allowing and accepting of childhood creativity and innovation. As Sir Ken Robinson said in his talk “all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly” (Robinson). The current education system requires every single student’s to submit the same answer, and allows no room for difference. Kids will take a chance, because they aren’t frightened of being wrong, but throughout our education systems we stigmatize mistakes. In our national education systems being wrong is the worst thing possible, and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Another good point from the TED talk is that “we don’t grow into creativity, you grow out of it, we are educated out of it” (Robinson). As Robinson says throughout the TED talk, our education system changes the way we think and takes the creativity and innovation out us. This is summarized quite well be Picasso when he said “all people are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist at we grow up” (Robinson).
Another point the Sir Ken Robinson brought up in his TED talk is how academic ability has come to dominate our sense of intelligence. In our world today, if you fail all of your classes, regardless of the fact that you can paint a masterpiece work of art, you are not intelligent because you couldn’t pass your high school trig class. This view and perception of intelligence is highly skewed. This relates to Dan Pink’s novel A Whole New Mind, in which he writes about how right-brained people (the creative side of the brain) will rule the future. If this is correct then our education systems really do need to change, if the future is changing to be lead by right-brainers and our schools don’t accommodate to fit this change we will have a large problem because we will be mass-producing children who can’t find a place in the society.
Sir Ken Robinson’s humor throughout the TED talk most definitely created an effective presentation. His stories about his son in the play, and his son moving away from his girlfriend, it helped to capture the attention of the audience more than if he continued on and on for twenty minutes. It kept me amused and paying attention and served as comedic relief in a way.
The TED talk really made me think about my education and the level on which I am able to express myself and be creative. As a student at Arapahoe High School, I am required to take at least one arts class each year, and because of the student’s opportunities to choose their own schedules, if a certain student wants to take more than one art class they have the opportunity to do so. However, most of the classes I am currently enrolled in consist of sitting in a desk, listening to the teacher, watching a video, taking notes, solving problems, and taking more notes. The teachers the assign on a nights worth of homework that is generally plain and not very interesting making it hard to focus and get the work done. On the other hand, in my English Honors class we are allowed to work with projects, and make them our own by adding creative aspects, acting out scenes from Shakespeare plays, making websites and other creative outlets that allow someone who is more right-brained and creative to be more in their comfort zone and do their thing. In education where all of the learning consists of listening to a lecture, then writing an essay about it, or reading from a text book and taking notes on it there is no room for children who have trouble learning that way, or would do better with more hands-on, creative learning that allowed them to do projects that included aspects with art or some form of it to achieve good grades.
As someone who can learn either way, but prefers the more creative tools, I completely agree with Sir Ken Robinson. The best grades I have achieved so far this semester have both been grades that I was allowed to be creative with. One project was to act out a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in this project my group added artistic components to the project by using modern-day songs to make it a musical. Because of my group’s imaginative addition to the performance, we achieved an A+ on the project. The same goes for a history project, the assignment was to make a propaganda poster for WWII, we had to hand draw the entire thing and the n an outside source selected the best one. I drew one for my group and it was selected as the winner, and the teacher is having it laminated, for this assignment I achieved an A+. Another proponent of the creative style of learning is that even if you aren’t Picasso, you can still achieve a good grade. My learning and comprehension of the subject matter came through more in those projects than in any of the pervious projects because for me, I do better with those types of assignments then an essay I am told to write about a specific topic that has been chosen for me.
Works Cited:
Robinson, Sir. Ken. "Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity | Video on TED.com." TED: Ideas worth Spreading. June 2006. Web. 18 Apr. 2011.
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