Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson | TED

0:27Good morning. How are you?

0:29(Audience) Good.

0:31It's been great, hasn't it?

0:33I've been blown away by the whole thing.

0:35In fact, I'm leaving.

0:37(Laughter) There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.

0:48One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it.

1:01The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the future.

1:07No idea how this may play out.

1:10I have an interest in education.

1:11Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education.

1:16Don't you?

1:17I find this very interesting.

1:19If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.

1:25(Laughter) If you work in education, you're not asked.

1:32(Laughter) And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me.

1:39But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?

1:43" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face.

1:47They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?

1:48" (Laughter) "My one night out all week.

1:52" (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?

2:02Like religion and money and other things.

2:05So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do.

2:10We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.

2:16If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.

2:25Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time.

2:33And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it.

2:35So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

2:37And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation.

2:49I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she?

2:51Just seeing what she could do.

2:53And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood.

3:02What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.

3:06And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

3:11So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity.

3:14My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

3:23(Applause) Thank you.

3:26(Applause) That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.

3:32(Laughter) So, 15 minutes left.

3:36(Laughter) "Well, I was born ...

3:41" (Laughter) I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.

3:50She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did.

3:56The teacher was fascinated.

3:58She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?

4:01" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God.

4:04" And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like.

4:07" And the girl said, "They will in a minute.

4:10" (Laughter) When my son was four in England -- actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.

4:26(Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year.

4:31He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?

4:34(Laughter) No, it was big, it was a big story.

4:37Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.

4:39(Laughter) "Nativity II.

4:41" But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.

4:46We considered this to be one of the lead parts.

4:49We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!

4:53" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in?

4:58They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh.

5:00This really happened.

5:02We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, "You OK with that?" They said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?

5:10" They just switched.

5:11The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads.

5:15They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold.

5:18" And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh.

5:20" And the third boy said, "Frank sent this.

5:22" (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.

5:38If they don't know, they'll have a go.

5:42Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.

5:45I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.

5:49What 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.

5:57And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.

6:02They have become frightened of being wrong.

6:04And we run our companies like this.

6:06We stigmatize mistakes.

6:08And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

6:13And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.

6:19Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists.

6:23The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

6:26I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it.

6:31Or rather, we get educated out of it.

6:34So why is this?

6:37I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago.

6:39In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.

6:42So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was.

6:45(Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born.

6:53Are you struck by a new thought? I was.

6:55You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you?

6:58Do you?

6:59Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?

7:02Shakespeare being seven?

7:03I never thought of it.

7:04I mean, he was seven at some point.

7:06He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?

7:08(Laughter) How annoying would that be?

7:17(Laughter) "Must try harder.

7:26" (Laughter) Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!

7:33" To William Shakespeare.

7:34"And put the pencil down!

7:36" (Laughter) "And stop speaking like that.

7:38" (Laughter) "It's confusing everybody.

7:43" (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition.

7:56Actually, my son didn't want to come.

7:58I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16.

8:00He didn't want to come to Los Angeles.

8:03He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England.

8:06This was the love of his life, Sarah.

8:09He'd known her for a month.

8:11(Laughter) Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16.

8:17He was really upset on the plane.

8:19He said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah.

8:21" And we were rather pleased about that, frankly -- (Laughter) because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.

8:35(Laughter) But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.

8:48Every one. Doesn't matter where you go.

8:50You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.

8:52At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities.

8:55At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.

8:58And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts.

9:02Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.

9:06There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.

9:12Why?

9:13Why not?

9:14I think this is rather important.

9:16I think math is very important, but so is dance.

9:18Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do.

9:21We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?

9:24(Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up.

9:32And then we focus on their heads.

9:34And slightly to one side.

9:37If you were to visit education as an alien and say "What's it for, public education?

9:42" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.

9:57Isn't it?

9:58They're the people who come out the top.

10:00And I used to be one, so there.

10:02(Laughter) And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement.

10:13They're just a form of life.

10:15Another form of life.

10:16But they're rather curious.

10:18And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about professors.

10:22In my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads.

10:25They live up there and slightly to one side.

10:28They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way.

10:31They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.

10:35(Laughter) Don't they?

10:42It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

10:44(Laughter) 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.

10:59(Laughter) And there, you will see it.

11:03Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.

11:08(Laughter) Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it.

11:14(Laughter) Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.

11:20And there's a reason.

11:21Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century.

11:27They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

11:30So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.

11:32Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.

11:37So 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.

11:44Is that right?

11:46"Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist.

11:50" Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken.

11:53The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

11:55And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image.

12:03If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance.

12:09And 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.

12:18And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

12:20In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history.

12:28More people.

12:29And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.

12:37Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.

12:40Isn't that true?

12:41When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.

12:44If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.

12:47And I didn't want one, frankly.

12:50(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.

13:02It's a process of academic inflation.

13:04And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

13:07We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

13:10We know three things about intelligence.

13:12One, it's diverse.

13:13We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it.

13:16We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.

13:19We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.

13:21Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.

13:24If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive.

13:32The brain isn't divided into compartments.

13:34In 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.

13:47By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum.

13:52It's thicker in women.

13:54Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multitasking.

13:59Because you are, aren't you?

14:01There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

14:04If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often ...

14:09thankfully.

14:10(Laughter) No, she's good at some things.

14:14But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling -- (Laughter) she's doing open-heart surgery over here.

14:23If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed.

14:29I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here.

14:32" (Laughter) "Give me a break.

14:40" (Laughter) Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, "If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?

14:48" Remember that old chestnut?

14:49I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

14:57" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct.

15:09I'm 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.

15:15I'm fascinated by how people got to be there.

15:18It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne.

15:24Have you heard of her? Some have.

15:25She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work.

15:28She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera.

15:30" She's wonderful.

15:31I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.

15:34(Laughter) Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?

15:39" It was interesting.

15:41When she was at school, she was really hopeless.

15:43And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder.

15:48" She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting.

15:50I think now they'd say she had ADHD.

15:52Wouldn't you?

15:53But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point.

15:57It wasn't an available condition.

15:59(Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that.

16:05(Laughter) Anyway, she went to see this specialist.

16:11So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this 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, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on.

16:27Little kid of eight.

16:28In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "I've listened to all these things your mother's told me.

16:34I need to speak to her privately.

16:36Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long," and they went and left her.

16:41But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk.

16:45And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her.

16:49" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music.

16:54And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick.

17:00She's a dancer.

17:03Take her to a dance school.

17:04" I said, "What happened?

17:06" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was.

17:09We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me -- people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think.

17:17" Who had to move to think.

17:18They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary.

17:22She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School.

17:25She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.

17:28She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber.

17:34She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.

17:41Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

17:45(Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.

18:02I 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.

18:13Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity.

18:20And for the future, it won't serve us.

18:22We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

18:27There 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.

18:38If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish.

18:45" And he's right.

18:47What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.

18:51We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about.

18:59And 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.

19:07And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.

19:11By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will.

19:15And our job is to help them make something of it.

19:18Thank you very much.

19:19(Applause)