Remembering Ken Robinson

Read these words and think about what “might be” when it comes to creating a new system of learning for our kids:

“So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

…

“I heard a great story recently – I love telling it – of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly every paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, ‘What are you drawing?’ And the girl said, ‘I’m drawing a picture of God.’ And the teacher said, ‘But nobody knows what God looks like.’ And the girl said, ‘They will in a minute.’”

“…[K]ids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. 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. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

“Picasso one said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?”

…

“…[E]very 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. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And it 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 every day 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. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do…”

“Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.”

“If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ 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. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.”

“And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life. But they’re rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there’s something curious about professors. In my experience – not all of them, by typically – they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.”

…

“Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19^th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.”

“Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So 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. Is that right? ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice – now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.”

“And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design 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 consequences 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.”

“In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And 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.”

…

“We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain,…intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In 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.”

…

“And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’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. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne? Have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did ‘Cats’ and ‘Phantom of the Opera.’ She’s wonderful…”

“Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, ‘How did you get to be a dancer?’ It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30’s, wrote to her parents and said, ‘We think Gillian has a learning disorder.’ She couldn’t concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point. It wasn’t an available condition.”

“Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, 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 has having at school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, ‘I’ve listened to all these things your mother’s told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We’ll be back. We won’t be very long,’ and they went and left her.”

“But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother ‘Just stand and watch her.’ And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, ‘Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick. She’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.’”

“I said, ‘What happened?’ She said, ‘She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was filled with people like me – people who couldn’t sit still, people who had to move to think.’ Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She’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. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”

…

“What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And 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. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way – we many not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”

Ken Robinson delivered this talk at TED back in 2006. “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is still the most watched TED Talk in history with over 77 million viewers. Sadly, Robinson passed away in 2020.

I met Robinson twice, and walked away from both meetings fired up to do my part to make our current K-12 school system better prepared to meet the needs of all learners. But over time, it’s become apparent to me and others that our current public school system can’t and won’t make that type of change. Over the past 20 years since Robinson delivered his talk, little has changed inside our traditional K-12 system.

It’s time for a new learning system for our kids. I’m guessing Robinson would agree.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB