Many thanks to good friend Paul Brown for putting me on to this passionate, challenging and entertaining address by Sir Ken Robinson to an education conference in 2006 (it lasts about 20 minutes, but it's well worth listening to!). In it, he contends that schools kill creativity and urges the need to nurture creativity in education. Here are a few quotes:
“We get educated out of creativity”.
“The Arts are at the bottom of the pile as far as the education system is concerned”.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”.
“You’ll never get a job doing that”.
This very much reinforces my concerns at the attitude towards “Design and Technology” at our school. Whilst Art and the Performing Arts are well catered for (indeed there’s a new dance teacher starting in September), Design and Technology seems to be regarded as something that the “less able” students opt for (which, as a former architect, gets my blood boiling!). Indeed, from September, Design and Technology will cease to be a faculty in its own right (if I understand things correctly) and subject options are to be palmed off to various other departments or wound down. I’m not at all impressed.
Wearing my architectural hat, I particularly like this quote from Sir Ken: “Creativity…., more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things”.
“We get educated out of creativity”.
“The Arts are at the bottom of the pile as far as the education system is concerned”.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”.
“You’ll never get a job doing that”.
This very much reinforces my concerns at the attitude towards “Design and Technology” at our school. Whilst Art and the Performing Arts are well catered for (indeed there’s a new dance teacher starting in September), Design and Technology seems to be regarded as something that the “less able” students opt for (which, as a former architect, gets my blood boiling!). Indeed, from September, Design and Technology will cease to be a faculty in its own right (if I understand things correctly) and subject options are to be palmed off to various other departments or wound down. I’m not at all impressed.
Wearing my architectural hat, I particularly like this quote from Sir Ken: “Creativity…., more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things”.
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