TED talk--Do schools kill creativity?

1. Summary

There are three themes that Sir Ken Robinson talks about in this TED talk.The first one is the evidence of human creativity in all people. Picasso once said,” all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Why we get educated out of creativity? This led to the second theme he talks about - education. All kids have talents, but through the process of education, they are squandered. All education systems on earth have the same problem, which is that they focus mainly on academics and think that arts are the less important things, but they should be equal. The third theme is the capacities for innovation that children have. Most kids have lost the capacity by the time they get to be adults. Education system makes us think that mistakes are the worst thing we can make, so we are afraid to be wrong. And the result is that we are educated out of creativity. Robinson said, ''If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.'' 

2. What can listeners learn from this talk?

Robinson shows us an example of Gillian Lynn, who did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera”, to illustrate his idea. When she was a child in school, her teacher told her mom to take her to the doctor for being unable to concentrate and having a learning disorder. The doctor let Gillian sit on a chair in an empty room with music playing and watched through the window with Gillian’s mom. When Gillian danced, the doctor asked her mom to take her to the dancing school, and she then became the famous artist. 

I think listeners can learned from the three min themes that Robinson shares in this talk, and also look inside this example more deeply. What if Gillian’s mom believed in the teacher’s words and thought her daughter as a failure in the process of education? Then maybe Gillian will live an unhappy life and we would lose a great artist. We should avoid being affected by the education system and protect our creativity from being destroyed by it. Or we can make our efforts to change this system and save the future youth.