Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Before watching this video (very entertaining I might add), I hadn’t given that question much thought.  Now I have to agree that a child’s ability to succeed in life shouldn’t be solely measured by high test scores. How many of your classmates who were not “academically” smart, but where creative geniuses in their own right? I know because I’m surrounded by them all day, and I’m thankful that they found a way to hold on to it as adults. Check the video and tell me your thoughts.

My favorite talking points from the video:

• We should treat creativity with the same level of importance as we do literacy.
• As kids we always took a chance at anything regardless of how little we knew about it. We weren’t frightened of being wrong. (I want my childhood fearlessness back!!)
• If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. (How prepared are you?)
• By the time we’ve become adults; our companies and our education systems have trained us to believe that making mistakes (or being wrong) is the WORST thing that can happen. (Such bullies aren’t they?)
• We don’t grow into creativity. We get educated out of it.
• Children are pushed away from subjects that they like such as art, dance, and music on the pretense that they won’t get a “good” job in that field.

More about Sir Ken Robinson here.

Interesting fact:

This talk has been downloaded more than 3.5 million times in more than 200 countries. The number of people who’ve seen it may be 20 times that or more.  Now that you’ve watched it, can you blame them??