Do Schools Kill Creativity?

When I attended primary/elementary school, there was little room for creativity.

Instead, my teachers concentrated on processes such as memorization. On many of my tests teachers have written that the answer that I had given was "technically correct" but was not the answer they had given us to give back to them. What they would have preferred was to have me regurgitate the exact information they had given me in previous classes.

 Why was creativity not seen as more important? In Sir Ken Robinson's TED talk titled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" Sir Ken Robinson explores this question and gives his take on the subject. He believes that children as a whole have an extraordinary ability to be creative, and that through going through our education system this ability is stripped from them. Ken gives many reasons for why he believes this to be the case.

Sir Ken Robinson believes that the ultimate goal of the school system is to create students prepared to enter university. The subjects valued in university are subjects such as math, science, and literature. Subjects in the arts, that revolve around creativity, are seen as much less valuable by our society. Students who excel in the arts are often to feel as if they are stupid because they do not do well in the subjects that are seen as important, and they're not given the opportunity to work with what they are good at. These students are taught that what they're passionate about, or good with, is insignificant and the child abandons their talent and struggles with what the education system has deemed as important.

In the TED talk video, Sir Ken Robinson talks about a particular case of a young girl who is a dancer. The child is hyper and fidgety in class, and doesn't excel at the core subjects, so the parents and her teacher assume that the child has something "wrong" with her. Luckily, the doctor she was taken to realized that her talent laid in her ability with movement, and she was able to attend dance school. This is an important lesson to me as a future teacher. If a child is struggling in the "core" subjects than instead of assuming the student is effected by a learning disability, I will attempt to find where this child's intelligence lies. If a child is hyper, I will find out if the child works well with movement, rather than giving them a diagnoses of a hyperactive disorder.

Sir Ken Robinson talks about the diverse and dynamic nature of intelligence. Although we're aware as educators that these different intelligence exist, we're often guilty of not putting this theory into practice. As a future teacher I will do my best to support all of my students talents to the best of my ability in the rigid school setting I will be working in. I will try to teach in a way that is valuable to all types of learners, and I will support my students in the pursuit of doing what they love to do, and exploring where their talents lie.