Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[♫ Music ♫]
[Education]
[Adobe & Education]
[Why is creativity important in education?]
[A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson]
[Sir Ken Robinson, Author, Creativity Expert] There's an assumption that's often made, which is
simply not true, when people think about education.
And the assumption is that life is linear,
that you can anticipate and foresee and predict
the lives that people will have.
And that assumption shows itself
in the way that the school curriculum is managed,
how it's narrowed to certain disciplines that are thought to be more useful.
It shows itself in the obsession with standardized testing, for example,
where all the emphasis is on conformity.
When you talk to politicians about why
schools are like this currently,
often they'll say it's in the interest of the economy.
This strikes me as very ironic, because if you speak to business leaders,
they say they want people who are creative,
who can innovate, who can think differently,
who can work in teams and who can communicate.
All the things which are not now being taught in schools
that have to submit to these rather standardized programs and policies.
So the economic imperative for creativity is absolutely clear.
There was a report published by IBM,
which was based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs around the world.
And they were asked what their priorities are as they face the future.
What are the things that wake them up at night?
The thing that came at top was creativity.
They said, how do we run businesses systematically
with creative thinking and creative achievement and innovation?
Of course, they're now being faced with a generation of students
coming through from schools who haven't been encouraged
to develop these abilities at all.
So the economic imperative for teaching creativity
systematically in schools, I think, has never been greater.
And that requires a transformation in the way that schools work,
because they weren't designed to do it, so they have to be redesigned if they are to do it.
But there's a big cultural imperative here, too, because
the world is getting more complicated.
It's getting more connected; it's becoming more challenging.
And many of the challenges that we face, collectively as a species,
are cultural as much as they are environmental.
Finding ways to live together in a world
that's become more nuanced, more interdependent,
more dynamic, more connected,
is really a task for education.
The third big reason, I think, to promote creativity in the schools is personal.
In the end, it's about people finding fulfillment
in their own lives, lives that add up to something
that have purpose and have meaning,
and that people feel are helping them find
their own course in life, one that matters to them
and to other people.
For all these reasons, creativity, to me, is not an option.
It's an absolute necessity.
[Adobe®]
