Do schools kill creativity?

"Creativity is as important as literacy and should be treated with the same respect"

I think that is spot on... In my opinion anyway... The video is good, makes a good point and entertains... enjoy..

Do schools today, kill creativity? (Ken Robinson, TEDTalks)

Info. On Ken Robinson
His Biography



[edit on 18-4-2008 by ElectricUncleSam]

Oh most definitely. I remember pretty far back, to even before pre-school. I rememberbeing really good at drawing, and all of that was lost after a few years of school. They encourage scribbling mindlessly in pre-school. My mom would tell me stories about jmy first few months in pre-school, and the teachers would come up and show her a picture I scribbled because that's what everyone else was being encouraged to do, and my teacher was like "Isn't it good?" and my mom doesn't lie. She was like "No! He used to draw THINGS, and now he's just scribbling!" Haha she got so pissed. She always wanted to put me in private schooling, but I was so in love with being liked by everyone. It's mostly an acceptance thing. School encourages uniformity, and eventually, so do all the pupils. Mindless programmed uniformity.

I can't tell you how many times I got Fs on great essays I wrote, just because I always approached it in a very abstract yet honest style... and there's all these rules they teach you about HOW you should write, HOW you should create art... when it's not theirs to decide how you create your own art, nor do they have the authority to tell you how smart you are by grading you and forcing things down your throat. Man, I almost died because of all the high school BS, and maybe I would've been another Mozart or a Picasso if I had never been programmed into wanting to be just like everyone else and go to public schools.

The only true artists are the ones who did horribly in high school. Haha.

Ya wanna know what else kills creativity? Focusing on material gain. Just look at some of the great rock bands, and how, the richer they became.... the more crappy music they made for the sake of material gain.

I think that's kind of the music industry's agenda, is to kill creativity.

It's not just art, but it's problem solving, as well. You have to think outside the box in order to get around previously unchallenged ideas.

The powers that be think creativity is a huge huge threat. They're into destruction, not creation.

Originally posted by indierockalien
The powers that be think creativity is a huge huge threat. They're into destruction, not creation.

Yes maybe, more likely afraid of free thinking... Free expression which includes creativity, plus creativity brings new ideas and ways of thinking... We wouldn't want that now would we? They didn't steal my creativity I can tell you that...

Schools (At least in England) kill creativity right from the start with school uniforms which provide no use.

The supposed "if you get lost someone can see where you come from" excuse is untrue as everyone I knew could name their infant school when they were in it; it is not needed for any other reason.

This is why I refused to go to public high school. I knew I wouldn't be able to stand seeing all those kids being herded around like mindless sheep.

So I went to private school which isn't much better. Then I got homeschooled.

And as it turns out college is exactly the same thing, we just learn whatever the government wants us to learn.

Maybe in the schools is where we need to begin challenging the system? If it's in the schools the government brain washes us that is...



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[edit: removed unnecessary quote of entire previous post]
Quoting - Please review this link

[edit on 1-5-2008 by 12m8keall2c]

oddly enough, i think school might have made me more creative...
all those rules and all i could do was think up ingenious ways to circumvent them

I have been homeschooling my 7 yr old since novermber last year..... for so so many reasons..... and yes i believe 100% that school kills creativity, there have been times where ive set my son some work, and then he has an idea and wants to go with it, instead of me saying 'no we have to stick to guidelines bla bla' he has the freedom to go with his ideas which makes him more proud of his work and lifts his confidence..... he has no time limit until the next lesson etc, if he has a great piece of work and wants to spend all day on it, he can, its amazing.... best thing ive ever done...... i once read that there are 2 things needed to make a genius - a keen interest, and lots of time to spend on that interest..... in schools if your good at art, you are not allowed to spend all day painting, if you love music, your not allowed to spend all day composing music...... which i think is wrong, obviously i understand a school cannot attend to each childs interest, and thats why i homeschool!!!

reply to post by cosmicstorm


i'm not intending to attack your idea, but how will your child deal with structure when it's imposed?

reply to post by madnessinmysoul


Just because hes homeschooled doesnt mean he has no structure??....

Getting expelled from secondary school was probably one of the most fortunate things that ever happened to me. School was a complete and utter forced indoctrination facility, and a mass deadening of thought processes.

"Repeat what we tell you. Repeat what we tell you (If we catch you actually trying to think for yourself you will be penalised)."

I may have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever, now, due to being forcibly removed before my GCSE examinations, but at least my mind was not destroyed. I recently met with some old friends on Face book who were successful at school, got plenty of qualifications, and went off to well paid, important sounding jobs. I was shocked. They nearly all type as if they were children. Their grammar is violently disfigured, and their vocabulary starved half to death. All they seem to do is go to work, come home and watch endless hours of television, then go to sleep. They repeat this process until the weekend, when they may go to a trendy club, or bar, to stand at it in designer clothes and buy overpriced beverages -- engaging in a petty banter with whoever will listen.

It's not at all like I'm some brilliant writer with an extraordinarily exciting and important existence -- trying to appear better than these people. I'm not. My writing is only the base literary standard, and my life is pathetic. It's just that I recognise very clearly the effect this society is having on these people -- these people with "lives," and felt the need to say something. We're only all 25 years of age, not really that long out of "education," and the matrix within a matrix has trapped and almost completely destroyed these people already?

Take a look around you. What's happening? What's going on? Has somebody been taking the Taoist ideal of “keeping the population simple” a little too literally?

reply to post by Sir Francis Bacon


yes i can totally relate to what your saying! im also 25, and also met up with old friends on facebook and noticed the exact same thing!...... i have good qualifications and loved education, but i honestly feel i done all my learning AFTER i left school!..... i chose to move abroad when i left school with family, so i didnt do the whole uni thing, and im glad i didnt, at school your learn what you need to learn to pass exams, not what you find interesting or what you get a buzz off.......

John Taylor Gatto, author of “The Underground History of American Education,” was New York “Teacher of the Year” for the 3rd time in 1991 when he quit his 30 year teaching career saying that he was “no longer willing to hurt children.” He wrote,

"I feel ashamed that so many of us cannot imagine a better way to do things than locking children up all day in cells instead of letting them grow up knowing their families, mingling with the world, assuming real obligations, striving to be independent and self-reliant and free …I don’t mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling made people dumber, not brighter; made families weaker, not stronger … The training field for these grotesque human qualities is the classroom. Schools train individuals to respond as a mass. Boys and girls are drilled in being bored, frightened, envious, emotionally needy, and generally incomplete. A successful mass production economy requires such a clientele. A small business, small farm economy like that of the Amish requires individual competence, thoughtfulness, compassion, and universal participation; our own requires a managed mass of leveled, spiritless, anxious, familyless, friendless, godless, and obedient people who believe the difference between Cheers and Seinfeld is a subject worth arguing about. An executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected ‘to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.’ You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.”

“The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered … Advertising, public relations, and stronger forms of quasi-religious propaganda are so pervasive in our schools, even in ‘alternative’ schools, that independent judgment is suffocated in mass-produced secondary experiences and market-tested initiatives.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education”

Scientifically subjecting young children to factory-style seating, standardized testing, and government textbooks bring “order out of chaos,” and make for manageable populations. Modern schools create uniformity, while suppressing skepticism and creativity. They over-develop competitive spirit while undermining compassion and curiosity. They promote cliques, gangs, small group mentalities, and “small-picture” thinkers. Grading and testing procedures hinder “big-picture” understanding of any subject and force students to focus on more simple, gradable aspects. True education and mastery of the subjects at hand are not encouraged or even feasible. Students are merely required to memorize trivial information like names, dates, places, events etc. just long enough to regurgitate for standardized multiple-choice tests. Then after examination, the trivial info stored in their short-term memory disappears along with their superficial understandings of each subject.

“We are students of words; we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

“That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.” –H.L. Mencken

“A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government…it establishes a despotism over the mind” -John Stuart Mill, “On Liberty”

It has been demonstrated if you read the brain-waves of a typical American, left-brain neurons are constantly more active than right. And with the constant suppression of creativity and right-brained sympathies, we crank out a population of students who want to be musicians, actors, artists, painters, and poets, but are forced into the “real world” jobs of accounting, business, economics, advertising etc.

“The Brotherhood has also structured the ‘education’ system and the media to lock people in what I call the left brain prison. The left brain is the area which deals with the physical world view, ‘rational’ thought and all that can be seen, touched, heard and smelled. The right brain is our intuition and our connection with higher dimensions. This is where you find the artist and creativity, inspired by our uniqueness of thought and expression. The education system and its offshoots, like the media and science, are designed to speak to the left brain and to switch off right brain thinking. This is why spending on the arts in schools is being cut back all over the world and rigid, left brain programs imposed. ‘Education’ fills the left brain with information, much of which is untrue and inaccurate, and it demands that this is stored and then regurgitated on the exam paper. If you do this like a robot you pass. If, however, you filter the information through the right brain and say ‘Hey, this is $h1t’, you won’t pass" -David Icke

[edit on 4-5-2008 by freight tomsen]

“What's the difference between a bright, inquisitive five-year-old, and a dull, stupid nineteen-year-old? Fourteen years of the British educational system.” –Bertrand Russell

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” –Vladimir Lenin

”Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” –Joseph Stalin

“Schools have not necessarily much to do with education. They are mainly institutions of control, where basic habits must be inculcated in the young. Education is quite different and has little place in school.” –Winston Churchill

“A tax supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.” –Isabel Paterson

Every day all over the world, millions of bright young minds are spending the best years of their lives being herded around by governments like cattle, responding to bells, whistles and other Pavlovian/Skinnerian conditioning. Millions of children are locked into this program Monday to Friday from 9-5 performing boring/arduous tasks against their will because society has deemed it necessary. Just like the workplace, only unquestioning compliance is rewarded and your only reprieves are snack breaks and lunch time, which are withheld from you like salivating dogs until the bell rings. Meanwhile you anxiously sit in rigid rows all facing the big boss and the blackboard, focused on fantasy objectives, conditioned to view other students as competitors and hindrances.

“By bells and other concentration-destroying technology, schools teach that nothing is worth finishing because some arbitrary power intervenes both periodically and aperiodically … Love of learning can’t survive this steady drill. Students are taught to work for little favors and ceremonial grades which correlate poorly with their actual ability. By addicting children to outside approval and nonsense rewards, schools make them indifferent to the real power and potential that inheres in self-discovery reveals. Schools alienate the winners as well as the losers … By stars, checks, smiles, frowns, prizes, honors, and disgraces, schools condition children to lifelong emotional dependency. It’s like training a dog. The reward/punishment cycle, known to animal trainers from antiquity, is the heart of a human psychology distilled in late nineteenth-century Leipzig and incorporated thoroughly into the scientific management revolution of the early twentieth century in America. Half a century later, by 1968, it had infected every school system in the United States … Each day, schools reinforce how absolute and arbitrary power really is by granting and denying access to fundamental needs for toilets, water, privacy, and movement. In this way, basic human rights which usually require only individual volition, are transformed into privileges not to be taken for granted … [school] teaches how hopeless it is to resist because you are always watched. There is no place to hide. Nor should you want to. Your avoidance behavior is actually a signal you should be watched even more closely than the others. Privacy is a thought crime. School sees to it that there is no private time, no private space, no minute uncommanded, no desk free from search, no bruise not inspected by medical policing or the counseling arm of thought patrols.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (245-6)

“It seems to me that much of what we call education is really socialization. Consider what we do to our kids. Is it really a good idea to send your 6-year-old into a room full of 6-year-olds, and then, the next year, to put your 7-year-old in with 7-year-olds, and so on? A simple recursive argument suggests this exposes them to a real danger of all growing up with the minds of 6-year-olds. And, so far as I can see, that's exactly what happens. Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.” -Marvin Minsky

“There has never in the history of the civilized world been a cohort of kids that is so little affected by adult guidance and so attuned to a peer world. We have removed grown-up wisdom and allowed them to drift into a self-constructed, highly relativistic world of friendship and peers.” –William Damon, Stanford University Center on Adolescence

“Don’t let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and preachy music suffocate your little boy or girl’s consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (298-9)

Does all this age-graded, childish “edutainment,” serve to make education more fun, or more trivial and superficial? As cute as they may be, are Disney, Barney, Sesame Street and others what are best for our children? Are textbooks with bright color pictures helpful or distracting?

“Men had better be without education than be educated by their rulers.” –Thomas Hodgskin, 1823

“Take at hazard one hundred children of several educated generations and one hundred uneducated children of the people and compare them in anything you please; in strength, in agility, in mind, in the ability to acquire knowledge, even in morality - and in all respects you are startled by the vast superiority on the side of the children of the uneducated.” -Count Leo Tolstoy, "Education and Children," 1862

(This excerpt taken from my new book The Atlantean Conspiracy - free link in my signature)

reply to post by freight tomsen


Excellent 2 posts, star for each!.......

One obsevation i made whilst living in Spain was how different the school structure was to here in the UK..... my son started at a spanish school and i also had a sister in high school in spain too, they are so much more liberal, no uniforms were required, no seating in order or such like and very little written work was done, they were allowed to call their teacher by the first name and in general the work and attitudes seemed more creative and fun, they were not subjected to tests so there was none of that pressure, needless to say, the kids were happier, and there was significantly less bullying...... im only 25 so i remember school quite well, i gained good grades, yet i remember very little of what i was taught..... because it was so mundane, boring and rigid...

It is very important for both governments and corporations that schools constantly churn out unquestioning, uninformed sheeple crushed of creativity and individuality, who are emotionally needy, respond in group-think patterns, and find their only reprieve in materialism/advertising. As Gerald Bracey, leading promoter of government schooling wrote in his 1991 annual report to business clients, “we must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” Lifetime Learning Systems, a new corporation helping advertisers infiltrate our schools, said to its clients, “School is the ideal time to influence attitudes, build long-term loyalties, introduce new products, test-market, promote sampling and trial usage – and above all – to generate immediate sales.” Suzanne Cornforth of Paschall and Associates public relations consultants was quoted in the New York Times on July 15th, 1998 saying, “Today’s corporate sponsors want to see their money used in ways to line up with business objectives …This is a young generation of corporate sponsors and they have discovered the advantages of building long-term relationships with educational institutions.”

George Washington attended only 2 years of formal schooling in his life. Abraham Lincoln had only 50 weeks of schooling and even that was seen as a waste of time by his relatives. In 1840 the rate of complex literacy in the US was incredibly high, between 93 and 100 percent. The Connecticut census showed only 1 of every 579 people was illiterate. Over a century and a half later in 1993, the National Adult Literacy Survey reported that 1 in every 5 Americans was illiterate! The 1993 survey represented 190 million US adults over age 16 with an average school attendance of 12.4 years. 42 million were completely illiterate, 50 million read at a 4th – 5th grade level, 55-60 million read at a 6th – 8th grade level, 30 million at a 9th – 10th grade level, and less than 10 million at a University level.

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.” –Sir Walter Scott

“Samuel Johnson entered a note into his diary several hundred years ago about the powerful effect reading Hamlet was having upon him. He was nine at the time. Abraham Cowley wrote of his infinite delight’ with Spenser’s Faerie Queen—an epic poem that treats moral values allegorically in nine-line stanzas that never existed before Spenser (and hardly since). He spoke of his pleasure with its ‘Stories of Knights and Giants and Monsters and Brave Houses.’ Cowley was twelve at the time. It couldn’t have been an easy read in 1630 for anyone, and it’s beyond the reach of many elite college graduates today. What happened? The answer is that Dick and Jane happened. ‘Frank had a dog. His name was Spot.’ That happened …There are many ways to burn books without a match. You can order the reading of childish books to be substituted for serious ones, as we have done. You can simplify the language you allow in school books to the point that students become disgusted with reading because it demeans them, being thinner gruel than their spoken speech. We have done that, too. One subtle and very effective strategy is to fill books with pictures and lively graphics so they trivialize words in the same fashion the worst tabloid newspapers do - forcing pictures and graphs into space where readers should be building pictures of their own, preempting space into which personal intellect should be expanding. In this we are the world’s master.” -John Taylor Gatto, “The Underground History of American Education” (252)

“In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, ‘I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?’” -John Taylor Gatto, “The History of American Education”

Dr. Seuss, the children’s author, wrote many best-sellers admittedly using a controlled "scientific" vocabulary supplied by his publisher. He said in a 1981 interview that,

“I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the twenties, in which they threw out phonics reading and went to a word recognition as if you’re reading a Chinese pictograph instead of blending sounds or different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country. Anyway they had it all worked out that a healthy child at the age of four can only learn so many words in a week. So there were two hundred and twenty-three words to use in this book. I read the list three times and I almost went out of my head. I said, ‘ I’ll read it once more and if I can find two words that rhyme, that’ll be the title of my book.’ I found ‘cat’ and ‘hat’ and said, the title of my book will be The Cat in the Hat.”

“Far from failing in its intended task, our educational system is in fact succeeding magnificently, because its aim is to keep the American people thoughtless enough to go on supporting the system.” –Richard Mitchell, "The Underground Grammarian"

From what I've read so far from you guys and gals, is something I have to put education together with the current system and the elitists... Think about this, if you are a big wig, run the USA and need workers to carry on with all the brainless day to day jobs, what better than a school system to create them?

[edit on 6-5-2008 by ElectricUncleSam]

Yes, throughly agreed. Having been molded by the public education system of America, you come out changed, and you get put into society such as a part of a puzzle may be put together. There is no more creativity any more. I dug out some of my drawing I did when I was in Kindergarten/Pre-School, and I was amazed. I never realized that there could of been so much to a blank paper and a crayon.

Beeing grateful to have gone to the top High School in the State, in the best public school system in the nation, I feel extremely privileged. Looking back now, I relize, what was the administatration thinking?! That is why I have considered becoming a teacher, and changing a few things.

Anyways our education has gone down the drain, it starts and it ends with standardized tests and the No Child Left Behind Act. That in my mind was Bush's biggest mistake, even bigger than the 'War on Terror'. He changed the public schools system forever by requiring schools to pass certain standarized test, or they will not get their funding. Now schools across America are spending every class minute preparing for these tests.

The education has never really mattered, now it will never matter. The best things in life are learned through your own learning and thinking process, because, you really cannot learn something until you've experianced it, and applied it outside of a classroom.

I still cannot see why our society does not value education, it is what will save us in life. The teachers are extremely unpaid! We are trusting these teachers for our child's education, putting a extreme burden on them, and we pay them the leftovers.

The schools are used almost as a 'test' center for the goverment. They start trying their future policies on them, and see how they react. They force a narrow viewpoint of our verison of history, which is, by the way, inaccurate. I cannot say how many times I had to correct my current events teacher in high school because of his blindsidedness on the current situation of '9/11', 'War on terror'. What angered me even more was that I was refered to my dean, because I caused an uprising in my class over the factuality of the 9-11 Commsion and the REAL facts.

I could rant about my hate for system, but since I can feel that you have the same hate for it, I will not.

Education should be something that happens everyday, every minute, and every thought process we have. Education is not something taught to us in a desk, Education is something taught to us by ourselves. Education is something, only ourselves, can find out and discover. Society as we know it is based upon a false impression of a history and false view of our actions and rights.

Being a victim of the public high school system currently I have to agree with school removing something out of a person, creativity might not be it but it is definitely not doing me any good. Yes I've got the basics of life from school (read, write, social interaction,etc.) but these last three years (I'm a junior) have completely drained me and I have barely been scraping along with my grades. All of the information taught in classes that are highly recommended for college is of no importance to me, just seems like it will not help me live a enjoyable life, but instead I'm forced to learn this garbage so I score high on the standardized tests to make the school look good and probably raise funding for the district, and right about now (just after standardized testing) the quality of education just craps out because we were taught to the test and took the test, so now there is no more benefits for the school so why teach???


Just a side note to add for support of my belief that the public schooling system is a very crooked and shaky business-my school is a upper echelon school and they claim that we have a 0% drop out rate, because we send all of our near drop outs to other schools to drop out there, a complete scam and it makes me sick. And I will conclude my little high school rant, hope it makes sense!