Creative capacity and hope in our children.

Thank you for taking the time in chat finding out how to post youtube videos.

Thas enlightend me and raised my spirits Thank you.

Daniel

While I believe schools should try to help children be more creative and pursue their interests which could possibly lead to a career in the field of things they're interested in I think that similar programs should be available for adults. I think everyone has the capacity for creativity. I just think people don't feel they can be creative because of all of this stuff going on with their work and their social life. It makes it harder for them to think of new ideas because they feel like everything they think of has been thought of so they feel like they can't think of anything new. It's more of a cultural thing. There are too many people that think creativity is something childish.

The "No Child Left Behind" act is destroying creativity. As school system are evaluated by the results of the standardized tests, they increasingly teach the test at the expense of learning. I am a science teacher in Texas. Everything is now based on the TAKS test. Passing the TAKS test is now the only thing that matters.

This is just another legacy of Ted Kennedy and George Bush.

This is an excellent 20-minute talk. The speaker, Ken Robinson, really knows how to keep an audience interested -- he's very funny, and constantly mixes incisive points with amusing personal stories.

Really, watch this video -- it's worth it for his jokes alone. I jotted down some quotes:

"Creativity is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status."

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything creative."

"We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Rather, we become educated out of it."

"If you think about it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of University entrance."

"Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. The whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet."

"Creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about from the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things."

"Our education system has mined our mind in the way we have strip mined the earth, for a particular commodity. And for the future it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children."

His point about how the world is changing is a very interesting one. I think it could be developed a lot more, though. The analogy of strip mining (which he builds up from the origins of the 20th century education system as a tool for creating industrially-useful workers) is very valid.

Rote assembly-line worker are becoming less and less valuable, ever since the late 20th century advent of automated production and highly-refined industrial techniques. The true value of an educational system is creating the gems of creative minds, those that are capable of shifting entire paradigms, rather than simply fitting within existing frameworks.

The current educational systems, worldwide, does not encourage this. They encourage conformity and compartmentalization of talents and skills. Creativity, as Robinson says, is an emergent result of mixing the previously unmixable, finding relationships where none were apparent before. We need an education system that encourages this positively, not as a result of alienation and desperation.