Ken Robinson
Sir Ken Robinson (1950–2020) was a British education authority, speaker, and author, knighted in 2003 for services to education. His 2006 TED talk, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", became the most-watched TED talk ever recorded, with over 70 million views. He died in August 2020.
Robinson spent his career arguing that modern education systems systematically suppress creative capacity by organizing around a 19th-century industrial model — one that ranks academic ability above all else and treats arts as peripheral. His core claim: children are born creative and curious, and we educate those qualities out of them.
His definition of creativity — "the process of having original ideas that have value," arising through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing — shaped his broader argument about intelligence. In Robinson's framing, intelligence is diverse (we think in multiple modalities), dynamic (it emerges from cross-disciplinary interaction), and distinct (everyone finds their way into it differently). The subject hierarchy in schools addresses only one narrow slice of this range, which is why many talented people reach adulthood believing they are not intelligent.
His books include The Element (2009), on finding the place where natural talent meets personal passion, and Creative Schools (2015), on redesigning education from the ground up. The Gillian Lynne story — the girl labeled with a learning disorder who became the choreographer of Cats — is the emblematic case study across both his talks and his writing.