Are we educated? Congrats! The creativity is probably suppressed long ago… / Prophylactic self-isolation series. Day 214th.

In memory of Sir Ken Robinson (1950-2020), a British author, speaker, expert on education, creativity and innovation, education reformer.

Sir Ken was the most watched speaker in TED’s history, with his 2006 talk ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ being viewed online over 60 million times and seen by an estimated 380 million people in 160 countries.

Have you watched it? I am watching his 20-min speech now for a forth time.

‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ by Sir Ken Robinson

And I found the translation of the speech to Spanish:

Sir Ken Robinson PhD died peacefully at at the age 70, on 21st August 2020, surrounded by family after a short battle with cancer.

Some bright excerpts from the talk of Sir Ken Robinson (arranged by blog’s author)

• Creativity is as important as literacy
• Being wrong is not the same as being creative. But if you are not prepare to be wrong, you will never come with anything being original.

But if you are not prepare to be wrong, you will never come with anything being original

• We stigmatize mistakes, children/adults are frightened to be wrong. The mistakes (according the existing educational system) is the worst that you can make. The result – we are educating children out of their creative capacities.
• Anywhere around the world the art is on the bottom of the educational system.
• In education, we focus on their (children’s) heads and forget about the bodies! Dancing is not welcome at the same level as mathematics, why?
• Generally, university professors are the top achievement of all educational system, they live in their heads, bodiless creatures!

university professors live in their heads!

• The whole system was invented round the world where there were no public education before XIX century, it came as a need of industrialism.
• Academic inflation: before you needed a bachelor degree, then master, now you need a doctoral degree for the same job.
• Intelligence is dynamic: we think in movement, visually, in sounds.
• If a man speaks in a forest and nobody hears him, is he still wrong?…:)

External links:

Sir Ken Robinson’s website