Education and Creativity

Hello to you. Today I'm going to review to Sir Ken Robinson's talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity". I must say that at the beginning, I thought that this interview was boring but I noticed that Sir Ken is right about education. In special, Robinson speaks about the relationship between education and creativity, in his words: "My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status." Clearly in Chile this isn't so, just look at the government's education program.

However, one of the most striking phrases that he said was "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 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." Simply when we're wrong most people make fun of your mistake  and this becomes part of your life story (an example are nicknames) Phrases like "You don't know to writte/speak/add/subtract because you're dumb" or "This drawing is ugly, you don't have talent for this" do that the kid avoids mistakes because other kids make fun (sometimes ruthlessly) from his/her mistakes, so the error is associated with being silly. 

Other interesting thing is which the author mentions about scientific and humanistic subjects showing that the former are more important than the second: "But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy 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." A good example is that in Chile people generally believe that the humanistic careers are easier than the scientific or the student of these carrers won't have a good future (in terms of employment and economic) Very well known is the classic prejudice that exists on whoever study arts: If you study arts (music, sculpture, painting, drawing, etc.), you're going to end up playing in the Paseo Ahumada."

As well as Robinson said: "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." Perhaps this is why talent search programs (Talento Chileno, Factor X, Mi nombre es, Yo soy, etc.) are successful not only in Chile but in the world, do you think the same?