Why schools need to embrace kids' creativity | Sir Ken Robinson

My contention is, all kids have tremendous talents.

And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it --

of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.

She was six, and she was at the back, drawing,

and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention,

and in this drawing lesson, she did.

The teacher was fascinated.

She went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?"

And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God."

And the teacher said,

"But nobody knows what God looks like."

And the girl said, "They will, in a minute."

Kids will take a chance.

If they don't know, they'll have a go.

Am I right?

They're not frightened of being wrong.

I don't mean to say that being wrong

is the same thing as being creative.

What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong,

you'll never come up with anything original --

if you're not prepared to be wrong.

And by the time they get to be adults,

most kids have lost that capacity.

They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this.

We stigmatize mistakes.

And we're now running national education systems

where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is that we are educating people

out of their creative capacities.

If you think of it,

the whole system of public education around the world

is a protracted process of university entrance.

And the consequence is that many highly-talented,

brilliant, creative people think they're not,

because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued,

or was actually stigmatized.

And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

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.

We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely,

and the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities

for the richness they are

and seeing our children for the hope that they are.

And our task is to educate their whole being,

so they can face this future.

By the way --

we may not see this future, but they will.

And our job is to help them make something of it.

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