Do Schools Kill Creativity?

TED2006 talk by Sir Ken Robinson, the most-watched TED talk ever recorded. Robinson's argument is that creativity is not a rare gift unevenly distributed — it is a universal human capacity that modern education systematically suppresses, and that we need to treat it as seriously as literacy.

We Don't Grow Into Creativity, We Grow Out of It

Robinson opens with Picasso: all children are born artists. The problem is to remain one as we grow up. He takes this seriously. In every system he has observed, children start out willing to take chances — they don't know the answer, they'll have a go. They are not frightened of being wrong.

Being wrong is not the same as being creative. But if you are never prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time children become adults, most have lost that willingness. Mistakes have been stigmatized. Schools run on the premise that mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is that we educate people out of their creative capacities before those capacities have a chance to develop.

The Subject Hierarchy

Every education system on earth orders subjects the same way: mathematics and languages at the top, humanities in the middle, arts at the bottom. Drama and dance rank lower than art and music. No country teaches dance every day the way it teaches mathematics. Robinson asks why and traces the answer to history: public education was designed in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrialism. The hierarchy is a relic of that industrial model.

Two ideas underpin it. First, that subjects useful for work should rank highest — a logic that directed generations of children away from the things they loved on the grounds that they would never get a job doing them. Second, that academic ability is the measure of intelligence — a collapse of a richer human reality into a narrow proxy. Universities designed the system in their image, and the whole structure became, as Robinson puts it, a protracted process of university entrance.

The consequence: many talented, creative people believe they are not intelligent because the thing they were good at was never valued — or was actively stigmatized.

Intelligence Is Diverse, Dynamic, and Distinct

Robinson proposes three things we know about intelligence. It is diverse: we think visually, in sound, kinesthetically, in abstract terms, in movement. It is dynamic: creativity most often comes through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing — the brain doesn't divide into compartments. His definition of creativity is exactly this: "the process of having original ideas that have value," which comes about through cross-disciplinary interaction. It is distinct: everyone finds their intelligence differently; talent often lives where people would least expect it.

Gillian Lynne

The story that anchors all of this: Gillian Lynne, in the 1930s, was labeled with a learning disorder. She couldn't concentrate, she was always fidgeting. Her parents took her to a specialist. He sat her in a room with the radio on, then watched with her mother from outside. The moment the adults left, she was on her feet, moving to the music. He turned to the mother and said: "Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

She trained, joined the Royal Ballet, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and eventually collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Cats and Phantom of the Opera — some of the most successful musical theater productions in history. Someone else, Robinson notes, might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

The Ecological Argument

Robinson closes with an image: "Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us." What is needed is a new conception of human ecology — one that starts from the richness of human capacity rather than the narrow bandwidth of academic ability. Our task is to educate children's whole being so they can face the future, not filter them through a 19th-century credential machine.