“Schools kill creativity”- Ken Robinson
Ken Robinson’s views on education has been widely appreciated and applauded. Its quiet possible that you will be lost in his words and understand how creativity cant be tapped. It might make you wonder if the typical schools are using the same guideline to teach all the children without knowing their individual needs and how far it is justified. I have taken some quotes from Ken’s speech and added my perspective.
Ken — “Education is meant to take us to future which we cant grasp”
What I see- The biggest example of unpredictability was the year 2020 and continues to be till this date. Exams are cancelled, schools are closed and students are sitting at home managing exams and assignments from home. What skills would have come handy when students had to sit at home with no social interaction with friends, handling exams and assignments on their own. How many students were prepared to handle online sessions, had schools prepared the students to manage online sessions? The skills that the students needed at this time was knowing the technology enough to be able to attend their classes, submit their assignments online, typing and most importantly being able to manage their work on their own.
Ken Robinson: “Children have enormous capacities for innovation”
What I see — Now that kids are at home, notice them how creative they are when they are on their own, they are pretty creative at the playground as well. They have the capability to create toys, don’t they enjoy playing with sand, old boxes, old random stuffs lying around and making something extremely fun with it. Sometime not having a structure can really help.
Ken : “Creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status”
What I see — As a child we are often reminded to be right, being wrong is not accepted. We train our mind to be perfect rather than accepting that being wrong is part of the learning. Kids are often reminded to do things in the right way rather than helping them to explore the path themselves. As Ken outs it “ we don’t grow into creativity but we grow out if it” , the education system, teachers and parents are worried about the result rather than helping the kid explore the process of reaching somewhere. When the objective to achieve is so dominant the entire focus shifts to achieving the right answer in any possible way. Considering every kid is different the challenge that kids go through is to compete with the other kids in the class and irrespective of their learning capacities are measured in the same scale.
Ken: Art and Music is at a lower hierarchy compared to mathematics and language.
What I see- In most schools we see when there are unexpected holidays or cut in the working days due to some reason, the school cuts off art and music from the time table and replace it with mathematics and language as the later is considered more important. Subjects like maths and language is in the time table everybody compared to music, art or drama which is mostly once or twice in the table table. Students generally end up choosing art and music as after school activities.
Ken: As children start growing, we start to educate them from the waist up and then we focus their heads.
What I see — Slowly in schools, games, art, music is replaced with academic sessions as the students are promoted to higher grades. Parents as suggested by schools to take away sports sessions, dance sessions and the focus just remains on the academic subjects and the children start looking for extra classes even outside the school.
