TED Blog 1

Sir Ken Robinson describes how in present day the focus on areas that people do not necessarily excel in are required and the areas that some do are not valued so people are discouraged from pursuing what they love in the TED talk titled “Schools Kill Creativity.”  He speaks about creativity’s importance by saying it should be treated with as much gravity as literacy.  The youth of this current generation are being educated for the future.  Nobody knows what it truly holds so educators are forced to take an educated guess at what needs to be given to the youth to give them the keys to excel and improve the world’s future as a whole.  Robinson conveys his point’s seriousness by continuously looking out into the crowd.  By sprinkling the element of humor occasionally throughout his speech, he contrasts the gravity of the topic with a lighter feeling and provides a deeper level of interest for the listener.  The combination of his speaking style and consequential subject encourages the urgency of including more arts in education and it would be what brings us into the future.

In the TED talk “Schools Kill Creativity” Sir Ken Robinson correctly called attention to the matter of the lack of creativity in learning because education will be what takes us into the future.  He says a lot about the large capacity children have for learning.  In “Changing Education Paradigm,” a video made by Robinson, he speaks about how people do not believe their potential because they are being measured to the standards from the industrial revolution based on the enlightenment period which only focus on intelligence rather than creativity.  This greatly discourages children because the fear of failing to match those standards would mean the would fail to succeed in the system that people from the past have created.  There was a study about creative thinking where kindergarten children were asked what they could do with a paperclip and they were tested again ten years later.  Robinson says “... They’ve become educated.  They’ve spent ten years being told there’s one answer...”  Being fed this idea for ten years of their lives it becomes what they know so they lose the aspect of creativity in their thinking.  Creativity is important for the future as well as intelligence in math and sciences, however our societies around the world are being driven into an age where it takes more than just math and science to succeed.  The future will require both creativity and intelligence to thrive.  Daniel Pink provides an abundance of information supporting that idea.  Pink talks about how important each side of the brain with both types of thinking are independently but also how crucial they are to each other.  Recognizing the importance of the human capacity for creativity and maintaining it for the future is Robinson’s charge to his audience and to the world.