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This video is the summarized slideshow version of Sir Ken Robinson�s famous TED Talk titled
�Do Schools Kill Creativity�.
There have been three themes running through the conference.
One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that
we've had.
The second theme is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to
happen, in terms of the future.
And the third is the really extraordinary innovative capacities that children have.
And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents.
And we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity.
I heard a great story recently of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.
She was six and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly
ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did.
The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?"
And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God."
And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like."
And the girl said, "They will in a minute."
What�s common in all kids is that kids will take a chance.
If they don't know, they'll have a go.
Am I right?
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.
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 like this, by the way.
We stigmatize mistakes.
And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can
make.
Picasso once said all children are born artists.
The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it.
Or rather, we get educated out if it.
So why is this?
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world:
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.
Every one.
Doesn't matter where you go.
You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.
At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the
arts.
Everywhere on Earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts.
Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.
There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the
way we teach them mathematics.
Why?
Why not?
I think this is rather important.
I think math is very important, but so is dance.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.
The whole system was invented and they all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.
So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid,
things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.
Is that right?
Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist.
Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken.
The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence,
because the universities designed the system in their image.
If you think of it, 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 the thing they were good at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through
education than since the beginning of history.
More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology
and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.
Isn't that true?
When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.
If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one.
And I didn't want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because
you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other.
It's a process of academic inflation.
And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.
We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence.
One, it's diverse.
We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it.
We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.
We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.
If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive.
The brain isn't divided into compartments.
In fact, creativity more often than not comes about through the interaction of different
disciplinary ways of seeing things.
The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two
halves of the brain called the corpus callosum.
It's thicker in women.
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.
There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear
from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end.
If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish."
And he's right.
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.
We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the
scenarios that we've talked about.
And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they
are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.
And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.
By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will.
And our job is to help them make something of it.
Thank you very much.