Sir Ken Robinson: The Importance of Creativity

In this video, Sir Ken Robinson exposes the non-encouraging attitude towards creativity. Children have an awesome imagination and they express their creativity through drawings, writings and play time. Two examples that he gives are the little girl who draws God and is asked by her teacher how will they know who it is since no one knows what God looks like and the little girl responds to her by saying that they will know in a minute [when I finish drawing]. His second example was in reference to a nativity play where the third king said that Frank sent this instead of saying frankincense. Children are not afraid of being wrong. Creativity brings about originality which is what an artist requires. By criticizing a student for being wrong, we are missing out on the modern versions of Bach, Shakespeare and da Vinci. In the classrooms, students are creative in their approach to solving problems. There may be a standard way to solve a mathematical problem but there are infinite number of ways for a student to reach a solution.

Sir Robinson also speaks about the hierarchy of subjects; math and language at the top and the arts at the bottom of the system. Within the fine arts system, drama and dance are at the bottom. He makes reference to the Industrial Revolution and how certain subjects were emphasized as they related to the time period and those that did not relate to the way of life were deemed useless. Now where has this way of thinking left us? We, as a people, need to see that creativity should not be put on the back burner. It is an important tool to possess in the classroom for both the students and faculty like Vicki Davis who uses technology in a fascinating way in the classroom. She had to be creative in planning lessons for the year in order to come up with the things she did. The same goes for her students who are responsible for their learning the new technology and what to do with it.