This is
FIRST INTERVIEW on the PLAYLIST. Sir Ken Robinson was the guest of Amy Azzam.
Sir Ken Robinson, PhD is an internationally recognized
leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources in
education and in business. He is also one of the world’s leading speakers
on these topics, with a profound impact on audiences everywhere. The videos of
his famous 2006 and 2010 talks to the prestigious TED Conference have been
viewed more than 25 million times and seen by an estimated 250 million people
in over 150 countries.
His 2006 talk is the most viewed in TED’s history. In
2011 he was listed as “one of the world’s elite thinkers on creativity and
innovation” by Fast Company
magazine, and was ranked among the Thinkers50
list of the world’s top business thought leaders.
See below:
September
2009 | Volume 67 | Number 1
Teaching for the 21st Century Pages 22-26
Teaching for the 21st Century Pages 22-26
Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir
Ken Robinson
Amy M. Azzam
Creativity: It's been maligned,
neglected, and misunderstood. But it's finally coming into its own. Here,
creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for creativity as the
crucial 21st century skill we'll need to solve today's pressing problems. Sir
Ken led the British government's 1998 advisory commitee on creative and
cultural education and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His most
recent book, The Element (Viking Adult, 2009), looks at human creativity
and education. He is also the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be
Creative (Capstone Publishing Limited, 2001).
Both creativity and critical thinking have been
flagged as essential 21st century skills, yet some people think of them as
being as separate as oil and water. What's your take?
It's interesting that people see creativity and
critical thinking as being opposed. It's partly because people associate
creativity with being totally free and unstructured. But what we really have to
get hold of is the idea that you can't be creative if you don't do
something.
You can be creative in math, science, music, dance,
cuisine, teaching, running a family, or engineering. Because creativity is a
process of having original ideas that have value. A big part of being creative
is looking for new ways of doing things within whatever activity you're
involved in. If you're a creative chef, for example, then your originality is
going to be judged in terms of cuisine. There's no point applying the criteria
of modern jazz to somebody who's trying to create a new soufflé.
A creative process may begin with a flash of a new
idea or with a hunch. It may just start as noodling around with a problem,
getting some fresh ideas along the way. It's a process, not a single
event, and genuine creative processes involve critical thinking as well as
imaginative insights and fresh ideas.
But creativity isn't just about coming up with new
ideas; some ideas might be completely crazy and impractical. So an essential
bit of every creative process is evaluation. If you're working on a
mathematical problem, you're constantly evaluating it, thinking, "Does
that feel right?" If you're composing a piece on the piano, part of you is
listening to what you're doing and thinking, "Does that work? Is that
going in a good direction?"
What's the biggest misconception people have about
creativity?
One is that it's about special people—that only a few
people are really creative. Everybody has tremendous creative capacities. A
policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, not just a few.
The second misconception is that creativity is about
special activities. People associate creativity with the arts only. I'm a great
advocate of the arts, but creativity is really a function of everything we do.
So education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it.
The third misconception is that creativity is just about letting yourself go, kind of running around the room and going a bit crazy. Really, creativity is a disciplined process that requires skill, knowledge, and control. Obviously, it also requires imagination and inspiration. But it's not simply a question of venting: It's a disciplined path of daily education. If you look at some of the people we most respect for their creative achievements, it's because of the extraordinary insights, breakthroughs, and discipline they have brought to their work.
Why do you think creativity is especially important
right now?
The challenges we currently face are without
precedent. More people live on this planet now than at any other time in history.
The world's population has doubled in the past 30 years. We're facing an
increasing strain on the world's natural resources. Technology is advancing at
a headlong rate of speed. It's transforming how people work, think, and
connect. It's transforming our cultural values.
If you look at the resulting strains on our political
and financial institutions, on health care, on education, there really isn't a
time in history where you could look back and say, "Well, of course, this
is the same thing all over again." It isn't. This is really new, and we're
going to need every ounce of ingenuity, imagination, and creativity to confront
these problems.
Also, we're living in times of massive
unpredictability. The kids who are starting school this September will be
retiring—if they ever do—around 2070. Nobody has a clue what the world's going
to look like in five years, or even next year actually, and yet it's the job of
education to help kids make sense of the world they're going to live in.
You know, for my generation—I was born in 1950—we were
told that if you worked hard, went to college, and got a regular academic
degree, you'd be set for life. Well, nobody thinks that's true anymore, and yet
we keep running our school systems as though it were. So many people have
degrees now that an individual degree isn't worth a fraction of what it used to
be worth. So being creative is essential to us; it's essential for our economy.
I work a lot with Fortune 500 companies, and they're
always saying, "We need people who can be innovative, who can think
differently." If you look at the mortality rate among companies, it's
massive. America is now facing the biggest challenge it's ever faced—to
maintain it's position in the world economies. All these things demand high levels
of innovation, creativity, and ingenuity. At the moment, instead of promoting
creativity, I think we're systematically educating it out of our kids.
Is creativity at odds with a culture of standardized
testing?
We have a major problem with our education systems,
not just in America, but in many of the old, industrialized countries. If you
have a system as in the United States where there's a 30 percent high school
dropout rate—in the African American/Latino communities it's over 50 percent,
and in some of the Native American communities it's nearly 80 percent—you can't
just blame the kids for it. With that amount of waste, there's something wrong
with the system— with impersonal forms of education, with people sitting in
rows and not discovering the things that impassion them or invigorate them or
turn them on.
That's increasingly the case with this culture of
standardized testing. It's totally counterproductive. Looking back at our own
education, we came alive in certain sorts of lessons with certain teachers when
we were given an opportunity to do things that invigorated us. And when you
find things you're good at, you tend to get better at everything because your
confidence is up and your attitude is different.
Too often now we are systematically alienating people
from their own talents and, therefore, from the whole process of education.
This isn't, to me, a whimsical argument, like, "Wouldn't it be nice if we
all did something we liked." It's a fundamental human truth that people
perform better when they're in touch with things that inspire them. For some
people, it's gymnastics; for some people, it's playing the blues; and for some
people, it's doing calculus.
We know this because human culture is so diverse and
rich—and our education system is becoming increasingly dreary and monotonous.
It's no surprise to me that so many kids are pulling out of it. Even the ones
who stay are often detached. Only a few people benefit from this process. But
it's far too few to justify the waste.
People often associate creativity with the individual.
But is there a social dimension to creativity that's particularly relevant in
the 21st century?
Absolutely. Most original thinking comes through
collaboration and through the stimulation of other people's ideas. Nobody lives
in a vacuum. Even people who live on their own—like the solitary poets or solo
inventors in their garages—draw from the cultures they're a part of, from the
influence of other people's minds and achievements.
In practical terms, most creative processes benefit enormously
from collaboration. The great scientific breakthroughs have almost always come
through some form of fierce collaboration among people with common interests
but with very different ways of thinking.
This is one of the great skills we have to promote and
teach—collaborating and benefiting from diversity rather than promoting
homogeneity. We have a big problem at the moment—education is becoming so
dominated by this culture of standardized testing, by a particular view of
intelligence and a narrow curriculum and education system, that we're
flattening and stifling some of the basic skills and processes that creative
achievement depends on.
Look at Thomas Edison. He was one of the most prolific
inventors in American history. He had over 1,100 patents in the U.S. Patent
Office. But actually, Edison's great talent was mobilizing other people. He had
teams of cross-disciplinary groups working with him. They gave themselves clear
objectives and tight deadlines and pulled out every stop to work collaboratively.
So there's no doubt in my mind that collaboration,
diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on other people's achievements
are at the heart of the creative process. An education that focuses only on the
individual in isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.
Can you teach creativity?
Yes. But people think they can't teach it because they
don't understand it themselves. They say, "Well, I'm not very creative, so
I can't do it."
But there are actually two ways of thinking about teaching
creativity. First of all, we can teach generic skills of creative thinking,
just in the way we can teach people to read, write, and do math. Some basic
skills can free up the way people approach problems—skills of divergent
thinking, for example, which encourage creativity through the use of analogies,
metaphors, and visual thinking.
I worked a while ago with an executive group of a
Native American community. They wanted me to talk to them about how they could
promote innovation across their tribe. We sat around a boardroom table for the
first hour, and I guess they were expecting me to get some flip charts out and
show them some techniques. We did a little of that, but what I actually got
them to do was to get into groups and draw pictures of some of the challenges
they're facing as a community.
Well, the minute you get people to think visually—to
draw pictures or move rather than sit and write bullet points—something
different happens in the room. Breaking them up so they aren't sitting at the
same desk and getting them to work with people they wouldn't normally sit with
creates a different type of dynamic. So you can teach people particular skills
to free up their own thinking, of valuing diversity of opinion in a room.
But in addition to teaching those skills, there's also personal creativity. People often achieve their own best work at a personal level when they connect with a particular medium or set of materials or processes that excites them.
My new book, The Element, is about finding your
passion. I talked to many people—gymnasts, musicians, scientists, an amazing
woman who was a pool player. Whether it was music or jazz or the triple jump,
each of them found something that they resonated with, that they had a personal
aptitude for. If you combine a personal aptitude with a passion for that same
thing, then you go into a different place creatively. You know, Eric Clapton
was given his first guitar about the same time I was. Well, it worked out for
Eric in a way it didn't quite work out for me. He got the hang of it, but also
combined it with tremendous passion.
If creativity and innovation are so important, should
we assess them?
You can't assess people—in general—for being creative
because you have to be doing something to be creative. If you're working in
math class and the teaching is encouraging you to look for new approaches, to
try new ways of thinking, then of course you can begin to judge the level of
creativity and imaginativeness within the framework of mathematics as you would
within the framework of music or dance or literature.
I make a distinction between teaching creatively
and teaching for creativity. Teaching creatively means that teachers use
their own creative skills to make ideas and content more interesting. Some of
the great teachers we know are the most creative teachers because they find a
way of connecting what they're teaching to student interests.
But you can also talk about teaching for
creativity, where the pedagogy is designed to encourage other people to think
creatively. You encourage kids to experiment, to innovate, not giving them all
the answers but giving them the tools they need to find out what the answers
might be or to explore new avenues. Within particular domains, it's perfectly
appropriate to say, "We're interested in new and original ways you can
approach these issues."
Whether there would be an individual grade for
creativity, that's a larger question. Certainly giving people credit for
originality, encouraging it, and giving kids some way of reflecting on whether
these new ideas are more effective than existing ideas is a powerful part of
pedagogy. But you can't reduce everything to a number in the end, and I don't
think we should. That's part of the problem.
The regime of standardized testing has led us all to
believe that if you can't count it, it doesn't count. Actually, in every
creative approach some of the things we're looking for are hard, if not
impossible, to quantify. But that doesn't mean they don't matter. When I hear
people say, "Well, of course, you can't assess creativity," I think,
"You can—just stop and think about it a bit."
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