OUGD502 - Studio Brief 01 - TED talk - Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

I just watched the 'most watched' TED talk on how the education system is killing our creativity, favouring subjects such as maths and science in schools and only preparing children for university degrees in those subjects and subjects similar. Telling children from a young age to pick academic subjects as they will never get a job doing subjects they love. This really struck a chord with me as this is something I have heard countless times in my life but have never let it deter me in pursuing a creative career path. It is something that I have had sleepless nights over before and this TED talk reassured me and made me proud of the choices I have made. Here were the most important points from the talk:

• Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2076 and nobody will have a clue what the world will look like then, yet we are meant to be educating children to prepare them for that.
• Children have a huge capacity for education and talent. 
• We squander children's talents and creativity.
• Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it that way. 
• Kids will take a chance, if they don't know they'll have a go. They're not frightened of being wrong.
• If you're not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original.
• Society stigmatises mistakes, and after university people are afraid to be wrong. 
• Mistakes are viewed as the worst thing you can make. 
• This is educating people out of their creative capacities.
• Picasso once said: all children are born artists, the problem is to remain an artist once we grow up. We get educated out of this.
• Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects, with arts at the bottom. 
• No education system teaches dance as a compulsory subject like maths, yet we all have bodies tat move. 
• If you explained education to an alien then the purpose of it would be to produce 'university professors'. 
• Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability to meet the needs of industrialism.
• We are steered away from things we like when we're young as 'you will never get a job doing that.'
• Academic ability is designed based on university entrants. 
• Highly talented creative individuals think they're not academic as the thing they were good at in school wasn't valued as worthy or was actually stigmatised.
• Degrees are now not worth anything. you now need an MA where the previous job needed an BA.
• We need to radically change our views of intelligence. 
• Intelligence is 3 things: Diverse, dynamic and distinct.
• Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. 
• Our only hope for the future is to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity, changing our education system to stop favouring a particular commodity. 
• What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. 
• We must see our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.
• We must educate our whole beings for the future that is in store for us.