DOES EDUCATION KILL CREATIVITY?

An entertaining but serious and moving talk by Sir Ken Robinson

No, true education doesn't kill creativity, but nurtures it. Besides, we are ordinarily creative. Some of us may be extra-ordinarily creative.

But what officially and usually passes for education most often suppresses the natural creativity that is inherent in human beings, and nurtures conformity and risk-aversion instead. This is why it's difficult to be creative or original in most schools. You are not only not expected to be creative, but are often punished for being so. Remember that schools as we know them now evolved from schools designed to turn out docile and therefore safe and trouble-free workers for the growing capitalist economy.

Although the capitalist economy now increasingly demands a labour force that is trained to harness the inherent creativity of the human mind, our schools are still stuck with psychometric multiple choice testing for assessing the quality of learning. This is almost like using a ruler to measure the temperature of a lake.

The processes of real education are not inherently measurable. But real education can produce results that are.

WHY THIS BLOG?

The purpose of this blog is to record my reflections on alternatives to schools as currently constituted. These are premised on my realization - acquired through being a teacher for almost twenty years in "good" private schools - that most schools are badly designed for the purposes which they claim for themselves. I would like to reflect on whether society could create more active, concerned and productive citizens for democracies through better schools, or whether we need schools at all. Are schools the best way to create good learner-citizens? Are they the only way? My purpose is not only to look for and think about better design for schools, but better designs for the learning process itself, whether in school or outside.

As human beings, we have evolved to be active learners. Why then does so much of our learning in schools induce so much passivity? What can I as a teacher do to promote active, responsible and reflective nourishment of curiosity and of learning rather than passivity? What can I as an adult do more to encourage learning by the younger generation? How can I foster my own continuous learning?

Just as I am convinced about the need for promoting learning in society through other instruments than schools, I am almost equally convinced that at least in a transitional phase, we would need schools, but with better structures more suited to their purposes for preparing students to learn, and to learn to sustain learning throughout life. Until we reach a stage where society itself becomes a vast school (in fact, in some senses, it already is, or can't help being if only to survive into the future), I don't think we can abolish schools altogether. Schools as we conceive them now might morph into learning spaces or learning networks, but society will always need some arrangement for the deliberate attention to the learning process itself.

Part of my growing conviction that schools as we know them are obsolescent stems from the possibilities offered by new digital information and communication technologies for social networking. Myspace, Facebook, Orkut, Quechup and other web-based technologies of social networking have opened up possibilities for creating learning communities on-line. Second Life - a rapidly expanding virtual world created by its "citizens" - is an example of an on-line community, but I would like to imagine an educational analog of Second Life, or explore the educational potential of such communities.

Notice that I am here speaking of education as almost synonymous with learning. But of course education encompasses more than just a cognitive process. There are political, ideological and moral dimensions in education that are ignored if one focuses solely on the processes of cognition in learning. Indeed I don't see how we can conceive of learning as a social process in isolation from these other dimensions.

On a lighter note, here is a look back from a digital age at the marvel of technology that we now call the book.