→ "Do schools kill creativity?" →

In this old TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the impact it has on children that schools still value very narrowly defined academic skills:

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 at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way...

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. 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. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

How can schools adjust to value all the skills our students possess, not just those that will get them into college?

→ "How Schools Kill Creativity" →

This is eight years old, but I just now read it (I don't watch TED talks, I read the transcript). Ken Robinson makes some great points:

My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

I know that TED talks don't really give the presenter enough time to go into every permutation of their thesis (that's my main problem with TED talks), but still, I think it's misguided that he ties this creativity so closely with music and the arts.

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.

I have nothing against art or dance (even if art class was my first B in high school, and my dancing looks like the seizure-filled fever dream of Mikhail Baryshnikov). But if we focus on "creativity" only in those fields, we are missing a lot of opportunities to teach creative skills in math class and history and Latin. John Cleese said it best:

Creativity is not a talent, it is a way of operating.