Sunday, March 11, 2012

HUMAN CREATIVITY

"Is Education Killing Creativity"?

The TED speaker, Ken Robinson’s speech inspired the audience by keeping them engaged with short stories and real life experiences that everyone in his audience could relate to. Ken’s spoke mainly about how school kills creativity. He built his audiences trust with stories about how all children are born with tremendous creative talents and how children are not afraid to take chances.

The quote that stood out the most to me was“ If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”. This statement gave me a different way to look at things. I am a right-brained person, with highly creative talent since a child. It is common that creative people are chance takers and often ones that go against the normal thinking process.  The most creative people from his stance are people that are not afraid to be wrong. He used his professional background as a college professor to make his facts believable to the audience.

Ken’s idea of human creativity being sabotaged by the world’s education standards, put in place in the 1900’s has made me rethink about how creative people are viewed. Although he told multiple stories, the one that was most relevant was the story about the dancer whose mother thought that she had, ADHD. Soon after a careful evaluation the psycho professionals found that she was a highly functioning dancer who went on to be qualified as a professional creative dancer. Ken’s story gave me a deeper perspective of the children in today’s society and how the education structure for upcoming generations must be re evaluated, because of how much technology has chance our world.

Technology has surpassed yesterdays belief system that math, science, history and literary are the only important subject. Moreover, if human creativity is not added as importance, the world will continue to misrepresent creative as being unimportant or psychotic. Therefore the world may lose innovative and creative human minds to mental disorders like ADHD, Artistic Behavior and other psycho diagnosis that are used to describe individuals’ boredom behaviors.

In my eyes, Ken Robinson’s is on to a new way to redirect hyperactive behavior into more usable and explainable states of sanity. It is true, that humans are different in many ways. We all use energy to express ourselves differently.


Why is it that one must be mentally ill, because they express themselves in completely different ways and are challenged by trying to adapt in a classroom setting? This is my own thought after hearing the story that Ken told about the dancer. As a child I experience this same type of sigma. I found my self-drawing pictures during math class and putting plans together to construct my art during history class. Most often I bummed the test, because I was thinking of a new color pallet for my project. Ken’s speech made me deeply understand that my creative skills steamed long before I realized. I was very creative as a child and my imagination has always been shunned. I was educated and told that I would never be successful in a creative field. Ken’s perspective of “School killing creativity” really has given me insight on this subject and it is true that education need to be re thought out.

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

TED2006, filmed Feb 2006/ Jun 2006

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