Great Talk About Education, Creativity, and Individual Differences

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

Sir Ken Robinson

My notes from the talk:

Education is meant to prepare us for a future that is uncertain.
Creativity is now as important in education as is literacy.
Child says, “I’m drawing a picture of G-d.” Teacher said, “But nobody knows what G-d looks like.” Child says, “Well, they will in a minute.”
Three kids playing the wise men in a school play. The first one says, “I bring you gold.” Second, “I bring you myrrh.” The third says, “Frank sent this.”
Kids will take a chance. They are not frightened of being wrong. If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will not come up with anything original. We run our companies – and national education systems – to penalize mistakes. We are educating people out of their creative capacities.
We don’t grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Or, we are educated out of it.
Shakespeare was once seven. He was in somebody’s English class. How frustrating would that have been!
Every education system in the world has the same hierarchy of subjects. Math and science, then humanities, then the arts. There isn’t an education system in the world that teaches dance with the regularity with which we teach math. As children get older, we begin to concentrate on the areas from the waist up. And then we concentrate on one side of the brain. In fact, if you really look at our educational system, the whole thing is structured to produce university professors.
For university professors, their head is just a transport mechanism to get their heads to meetings.
Our education system is predicated on the needs of academics. The academics have designed the system in their image. It is causing academic inflation.
Intelligence is diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it.
Intelligence is dynamic. The brain is not divided into compartments. Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. It typically comes from interdisciplinary interactions and ways of seeing things. Corpus callosum, which joins the two halves of the brain, is thicker in women. This makes them better at multitasking.
Intelligence is distinct. The lady who did Cats was taken to a doctor when she was eight because she had so much trouble concentrating in school. The doctor listened, and then said “Mrs. Lynn. Jillian isn’t sick… she’s a dancer.” So she took dance lessons, and found her gifts. How much better than putting her onto Ridlin.
We have to rethink the principles on which we are educating our children.
If insects disappear, life on Earth would end. If people disappeared, all other forms of life would flourish. (J. Saulk)