Changing What We Think About Education : The Necessity of Creativity

I found this TED video while I was still a student at the University if the Arts. The speaker in this video is Sir Ken Robinson and he speaks to audiences throughout the world on the creative challenges facing business and education in the new global economies. He is a funny and poignant speaker and he speaks to the core need of creativity in education.

Then as I still do everyday, I wonder about how people interact with art and how they incorporate creativity into their daily lives. 

I think also that often people forget a lot about what they learned in school; not the subjects or facts necessarily, or lessons and homework specifically. The majority of the time those fundamental tiny tidbits of information about maths, science, history, grammar and so on tend sink in just do the sheer repetition of daily lessons. I am referring to the act of people forgetting what their environment of education has taught to them.

I believe very strongly that the role of educators is to develop a students natural talents so that the student can flourish, as it very well should be. But our society globally does not do this in education due to in part standardizing curriculum and testing. Of course immediately most people could site the very few exceptions of magnet schools, alternative practiced education, home or cyber education--but I can not honestly not incorporate these into my statement, because these are not services that are available to every child.

Education is something that people hold very close to themselves on a personal level. We are all the products of someones classroom. Were we taught there to seek out a path to happiness through our innate given talents, or were we taught to repeat passive knowledge? Speaking generally of children, if they don't know something they will try it out; to see how something works or to make something that is new to them. Children aren't afraid early on in their life of making mistakes, and we currently have in place an education system where mistakes are the absolute worst things that a person can make.

Mistakes are not creative, but experiencing mistakes are the best way to create creative solutions; this is they way you create originality. Children at a young age usually after preschool or kindergarten are made to sit and absorb knowledge.  Sir Ken states that "children are educated from the waist up...until you get to their heads" there education says focused until they leave school. He raises an excellent point that in all education systems there is a hierarchy of subjects: maths, sciences, humanities and so on and that arts are down at the bottom of the list. And even then there is a hierarchy to the arts--art and music are at the top of the list and that drama and dance are at the bottom. Why? Wouldn't have that been amazing to have learned dance as intensively as you had to learn algebra? 

I would like us not to forget how we were taught in school; either you feel your scholastic experiences being positive or negative. Keep them with you. Always learn, always cultivate new experiences, and never beat yourself up when failures occur. Failures occur so that you can succeed at a later time.