I am watching a fascinating talk by Sir Ken Robinson, the author of Out of Our Minds. In his talk he gives a very funny and intelligent talk about about creativity in kids and schooling.
A quick review of my notes: Kids starting school today will retire in 2065, and we don't even know what the world will look like five years from today! An extraordinary unpredictability in other words. How do we know what to teach them? If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything new. We stigmatize mistakes. We educate people out of their creative capacities. We tend to be educated out of creativity. Interesting how every school system on the planet has the same hierarchy of subjects: Math and writing on top, the arts at the bottom. Art and music is the highest of the artforms, whereas dance is at the bottom. We gradually educate the kids from the hips and up to the head. The entire purpose of the educational system seems to educate university professors. But professors are only another form of life who lives in their heads. The look upon their bodies as a transport for their heads.
Education was created to facilitate the industrial system. In that system, there were no need for artists, and they would not get a job. Now everything is changing. But still, the entire educational system is geared to prepare you for an academic career. The result is that creative people think that they are not because their creative talents were always stigmatized. In the next 30 years, we will train more people than every before, due to technology and demographics. Suddenly, a degree is worthless! Our educational system has mined us of a special kind of intelligence, but we need to rethink how we educate our children. We must see our creative capacities and our children for what they are.
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