Schools kill creativity (0)

Schools kill creativity
Kristiina Moosel N-14
Ken Robinson had a greate speech in TedX 2006. He was discussing about creativity and how we help ourselves and others to develope it. Mostly I agreed with him but still there were some points , where I could argue with him.
Ken Robinson says noone knows how’ll the future be like. The future where our kid’s are going to have to live in. Still our education system wants us to prepare them for that. Prepare them for the mystery , for something we have no idea about how it’s going to be. If I had no younger relatives, I’d have to dissagree with him - I mean , when I was in secondary school I had to study mostly only those subjects I’d really need in the future. But I have some relatives younger than I am. The youngest is 9 right now. And when I look at what she must study, well, I studied it in 4th or 5th grade and I didn’t have to study that much with that heavy pressure .
He also talks about talent and how we call it. We see a kid with a tremendous ability and we think right away that he or she is so talented . Actually, what I think is that kid had just found something he/she feels passinoate about and practiced a lot. Of course there are some super kids , who haven ’t practiced that much but are still very good at what they’re doing. Just not that much as much we think there are. I mean, for a kid it’s easy to look talented. Ken Robinson gave his son as an example - the part where his son plays Joseph and switches the lines with other actor on a premiere. I can give my cousin as an example. She wants me to make her a choreography every year around the Christmas . One year she forgot everything, except the beginning and the end, so she improvised everything in between . I was really proud of her, cause at first I thought she’s gonna freek out and run away. But she didn’t. Kids, they’re fierce. If they don’t remember anything , they’ll make it up. They’re more afraid to just stand and watch the silent crowd than to be wrong .
Ken says that kids are not afrayd to be wrong. But by the time they start going to school, they are taught to be scared of being wrong. In school, the most important subjects - math , languages and humanities – are those where you don’t have enough space to be wrong in. But subjects, where you could make your wrong decisions to work for you, are in the bottom and most of the teachers, don’t care about them that much. Subjects like art, singing , dancing and so on. There’s still one thing that I don’t agree with Ken. He says that there’s no school, where kid could study arts as much as math. In Estonia, we have schools where are classes specialized of some certain subjects like folk dances, gymnastics, different languages, art and so on. Still it isn’t like that in every school, even not in every class in this certain school. Ken admits, that right now we are tought to be university proffessors. I must agree with him, cause if we’re not taught to be proffessors then doctors or lawyers. But there’s so many different specialitiesthat needs to be filled. Many of them are the ones most of us don’t want to work with. Not because they don’t like them, but because the others stigmatize it. Theese are not the subjects you could study about in the university. But even in pre-school you’re directed to learn as well as you can to go to university one day.
Teachers want kids to be right all the time. But when they don’t have chance to be wrong, how they’re going to develope their creativity. I mean, when they’re in a trouble, but they’re willing to do anything, that could save them from punishment, then they can come up with many creative ways to make the situation better. So now I have to agree with Ken again , we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Also only hope for better future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. We should re-think the ways we are living now, most important the ways we are teaching kids to handle the future. Because like Jonas Salk quoted: „If all the insects were to dissapear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.“
Ken Robinson made this speech in 2006. Right now it’s 2015. In nine years the world has been developed a bit, but not enough to make a future a better place for our kids. Like Ken sayd: „We may not see the future, but they will.“