Sir Ken Robinson's Schools Kill Creativity

Sir Ken Robinson, the world’s foremost expert in the field of creativity and innovation, has addressed the topic at the 2006 TED Talk conference. His talk was titled ‘Schools kill Creativity’. During this talk he highlighted a few faults in the formal education system the foremost being that ‘Schools kill children’s innate creative talents’ (Unknown, What Sir Ken Got Wrong, 2013). He said that the formal education system’s learning environment isn’t suitable for realising creative ability. It creates instead an environment which gradually annihilates creative intelligence. He had the following to say about the beginning of a school career, ‘What we know about children is this: children don’t need to be helped to learn, for the most part. They are born with vast, voracious appetite for learning … evolve in the womb with appetite… You don’t teach your child to speak, though we do teach them to write. Writing appeared much later in human evolution. But they have a vast appetite for learning and it starts to dissipate when we start to educate them and force-feed them information’. (Unknown, What Sir Ken Got Wrong, 2013) The basic outline of the argument can be summed up in these two visual illustrations: (Not used by Sir Ken Robinson)

Customisation

At the academic institution I attend, a much standardised curriculum is used. To the extent that, when we are required to write creative writing piece in class we are a given a topic and rubric. I understand of course some of the aspects are relevant for example sentence structure and grammar. Yet it is unreasonable, because some children, who have a large creative capacity, aren`t familiar with that certain topic or range of topics.

According to a study conducted by Lord Bew, a member of House of Lords, yielded the following results: School essay writing has become too rigid. “Greg Wallace, one of the members of the panel, who is executive principal of four schools, argued that the so-called “creative writing” SAT exam simply drilled children into the ability to construct formulaic sentences. Far from encouraging their imagination and creative flair, he argued that their creativity was in fact stifled by so rigid a means of measuring their creative writing”. (Bew,