Do-Schools-Kill-Creativity.doc

Do Schools Kill Creativity?Ken RobinsonGood morning. How are you? Its been great, hasnt it? Ive been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, Im leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes, havent there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that weve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that its put us in a place where we have no idea whats going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education - actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Dont you? I find this very interesting. If youre at a dinner party, and you say you work in education - actually, youre not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. (Laughter) Youre not asked. And youre never asked back, curiously. Thats strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, What do you do? and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. Theyre like, Oh my God, you know, Why me? My one night out all week. (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because its one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because its education thats meant to take us into this future that we cant grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue - despite all the expertise thats been on parade for the past four days - what the world will look like in five years time. And yet were meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that weve all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have - their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasnt she? Just seeing what she could do. And shes exceptional, but I think shes not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. 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. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born . no. (Laughter) I heard a great story recently - I love telling it - 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, Im 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. (Laughter) When my son was four in England - actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If were being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big. It was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it: Nativity II. But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: James Robinson IS Joseph! (Laughter) He didnt have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, You OK with that? And he said, Yeah, why? Was that wrong? They just switched, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in - four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads - and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, I bring you gold. And the second boy said, I bring you myrhh. And the third boy said, Frank sent this. (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they dont know, theyll have a go. Am I right? Theyre not frightened of being wrong. Now, I dont mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if youre not prepared to be wrong, youll never come up with anything original. If youre 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 like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And were now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we dont grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeares father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You dont think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you dont think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebodys English class, wasnt he? How annoying would that be? (Laughter) Must try harder. Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, Go to bed, now, to William Shakespeare, and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. Its confusing everybody. (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didnt want to come. Ive got two kids. Hes 21 now; my daughters 16. He didnt want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. Hed known her for a month. Mind you, theyd had their fourth anniversary, because its a long time when youre 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, Ill never find another girl like Sarah. And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter) 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. Doesnt matter where you go. Youd think it would be otherwise, but it isnt. 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, theres a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isnt an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day 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. Children dance all the time if theyre allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, dont we? Did I miss a meeting? (Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as 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. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say Whats it for, public education? I think youd have to conclude - if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners - I think youd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isnt it? Theyre the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldnt hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. Theyre just a form of life, another form of life. But theyre rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. Theres something curious about professors in my experience - not all of them, but typically - they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. Theyre disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, dont they? (Laughter) Its a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. (Laughter) And there you will see it - grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And theres a reason. The whole system was invented - around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. 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? Dont do music, youre not going to be a musician; dont do art, you wont 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 theyre not, because the thing they were good at at school wasnt valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we cant 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 its the combination of all the things weve talked about - technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees arent worth anything. Isnt that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didnt have a job its because you didnt want one. And I didnt want one, frankly. (Laughter) 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. Its 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, its 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, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isnt divided into compartments. In fact, 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. The brain is intentionally - by the way, theres a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. Its thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, arent you? Theres a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home - which is not often, thankfully. (Laughter) But you know, shes doing - no, shes good at some things - but if shes cooking, you know, shes dealing with people on the phone, shes talking to the kids, shes painting the ceiling, shes doing open-heart surgery over here. If Im cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phones on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, Terry, please, Im trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break. (Laughter) Actually, you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said, If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, its distinct. Im doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany, which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. Im fascinated by how people got to be there. Its really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, shes called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. Shes a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera. Shes wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, Gillian, howd you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote to her parents and said, We think Gillian has a learning disorder. She couldnt concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now theyd say she had ADHD. Wouldnt you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadnt been invented at this point. It wasnt an available condition. (Laughter) People werent aware they could have that. Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it - because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of eight - in the end,