Does Education kill creativity?

School is where we go to learn, socialise and to gain an education which then sets us up for the rest of our lives to find a job. However, does the way we get taught in school turn us into robots who have had lost all their creativity?

You would think that schools would openly try to promote the idea of creativity and what use it can be for pupils but school can leave pupils that are highly creative and intelligent feel that they are not simply because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatised. (Robinson, 2006)

After watching Ken Robinson’s Ted talk “how schools kill creativity” which is embedded onto this post, it has grown my understanding on what is wrong with creativity in schools today.

In the video, Robinson (2006) explains to us how schools kill creativity. He believes that children will take a guess at answers even if they don’t know the answer. This is because they’re not frightened of being wrong. This links with creativity as if you’re afraid of taking the risk of being wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. After going through school where it is taught that being wrong is a bad thing, by the time these children get to adulthood, most would have lost their creativeness. Robinson sees that they have become frightened of being wrong. We stigmatize mistakes in the national education systems, mistakes are seen as the worst thing you can make. Robinson shows that our schools through the way that there is only one right answer that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or as Robinson said, we get educated out if it.

A new education system based on using non-traditional approaches to problems would help us to make new/better connections with each other. This new education system would encourage the importance of an environment which encourages and values creativity and imagination. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1999)

This would lead to more people finding their true talents in life instead of being stuck in a job they chose to do because they were told not to follow their dreams because there were only slim chances of a job.

To lead on to this point, during class we heard a quote from Ken Robinson's book The Element (2009), it was on Matt Groening (the creator of the Simpsons) and why he did not like school. He was told by both his teachers and parents to lead a different career path with his life completely and to make sure he had a solid profession, go to college and got a predetermined destination career. This in which Groening saw as boring. He did not want to do a job he did not want to do and hated to do and instead pursued artistry despite the risks. Our school system does not support people who have vulnerable but incredible ambitions because they see them as to unlikely when instead we should support the artistry of our students. (Robinson, 2009)