Education: Let's Release Creativity!

In this witty and entertaining speech, Ken Robinson focuses on the drawbacks of the educational system standing in almost all countries, which contemplate education only as a preparation for the labour market. This misguided approach 'kills creativity', since only values job-oriented skills, and as a result, it marginalises many talented students, whose are considered to have failed.

Taking the subject further, Robinson questions the validity of the current educational framework that stigmatizes the failure and maintains a hierarchy of subjects related with academic abilities, but that make it impossible the appropriate development of the intelligence and creativity in its different angles. “This educational system is good just to produce university professors”, he said. Additionally, he points out that this system frustrates talent and innovation capacity, and therefore young people will be less prepared for a fast-changing and unpredictable future.

He invites us to wonder how figures like Shakespeare, Picasso or Einstein would cope with this educational approach. Perhaps they wouldn't have had a chance, and they would have been considered of being wrong, as they didn't have 'useful skills'. Consequently, He argues that it is necessary a new conception of Human Ecology, which favours the three aspects of intelligence -diverse, dynamic, and distinct-, and that considers the gift of human imagination and their creative capacities. “All children born artists”, stated Picasso; thus, let's them grow up as they are.



               TED Talks - Ken Robinson: Schools kill Creativity