Do schools Kill Creativity? Sir Ken Robinson Says Yes.

In this thought provoking and entertaining TED Talk, Sir Ken Robinson (author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything) presents how schools stifle creativity by focusing too much on only a few of the human mind’s many kinds of intelligence.

While not specifically related to language learning, I think Sir Ken Robinson’s suggestions about educational reform apply across all fields of study, especially skill-based subjects like foreign language.

Here are a few of my favorite excerpts:

“My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”

“Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it.”

“…you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you’re not going to be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.”

Enjoy the talk!

Take Action

1. Check out Sir Ken Robinson’s new book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.
2. Read the recent article on CNN about his now world famous TED Talk.
3. If you are a non-native speaker of English, download the PDF of the transcript here.  You can then import the text it into your LingQ account to store any unkown vocabulary.
4. In the talk, Robinson mentions that we are endowed with multiple forms of intelligence.  For more on this, see my post Multiple Intelligences: What Are They and How Can  They Be Applied in Language Learning.

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Copyright © 2010 by John Fotheringham. For more tips, tools, and tech for Mastering ANY Language, go to LanguageMastery.com

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