Another great talk found at TED following after a conversation with Mark the other day about the way we think and perform education in the world today. Truth told, Mark did most of the talking as I was preoccupied with looking forward to my Guatemalan Christmas dinner, so I decided to do a bit of homework for next time. Mark and I’ve spent a good bit of time before discussing the way our educations are shaping us as individuals and socially responsible citizens, and if indeed they are doing a good enough job at that. We’re both in and out of school and self studies, and have had the opportunity to look in on our schooling from the outside, and we’ve begun a little side project, a curriculum that I’ll post about again when it’s up and on its way. In any case, in this video talk by Sir Ken Robinson, in which he says we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence, is a great viewpoint on how we have developed a global hierarchical educational system which scorns mistakes and stills creative development in children, stigmatizing talented people who don’t fit into the neat categories for useful citizenry, and a highly inspirational call to arms for a new educational strategy. Check it out no matter your education and whether or not you see your body as a form of transport for your head.

more below.

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (…)
Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

(…) Kids will take a chance. They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies this way, we stigmatize mistakes, and we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is, that we’re educating people out of their creative capacities. (…) We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, – or rather, we get educated out of it.

The truth of what happens is, when children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. (…) So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. (…)
The whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not. Because what they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.

TED.com > Talks > Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?