4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 1/17
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Sir Ken Robinson at TED2006
Do schools kill creativity?
00:02
Good morning. How are you?
00:04
(Audience) Good.
00:06
It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.
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English
19:22
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 2/17
00:12
(Laughter)
00:18
There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I
want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the
presentations that we've had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range
of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to
happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.
00:45
I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in
education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you
work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.
01:00
(Laughter)
01:04
If you work in education, you're not asked.
01:07
(Laughter)
01:10
And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to
somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you
can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?"
01:23
(Laughter)
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 3/17
01:26
"My one night out all week."
01:27
(Laughter)
01:30
But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it's one of those
things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in
it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If
you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a
clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world
will look like in five years' time. And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it. So the
unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
02:12
And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary
capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was
a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think
she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a
person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have
tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
02:46
So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that
creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same
status.
02:58
(Applause)
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 4/17
02:59
Thank you.
03:01
(Applause)
03:05
That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.
03:07
(Laughter)
03:09
So, 15 minutes left.
03:11
(Laughter)
03:14
"Well, I was born ... "
03:16
(Laughter)
03:20
I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing
lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly
ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She
went over to her, and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a
picture of God " And the teacher said "But nobody knows what God looks like " And the girl
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 5/17
picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl
said, "They will in a minute."
03:45
(Laughter)
03:56
When my son was four in England -- actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.
04:01
(Laughter)
04:03
If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity
play. Do you remember the story?
04:09
(Laughter)
04:10
No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.
04:14
(Laughter)
04:16
"Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered
this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James
Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the
three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really
happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 6/17
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talked to the little boy afterward and said, "You OK with that?" They said, "Yeah, why? Was
that wrong?" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on
their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the
second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."
04:57
(Laughter)
05:10
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll
have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being
wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be
wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And
by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become
frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize
mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst
thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative
capacities.
05:54
Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an
artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow
out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?
06:12
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to
Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was.
06:20
(Laughter)
06:22
Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where
Shakespeare's father was born Are you struck by a new thought? I was You don't think of
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 7/17
Shakespeare s father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don t think of
Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare
being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was
seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?
06:43
(Laughter)
06:50
How annoying would that be?
06:52
(Laughter)
06:59
"Must try harder."
07:01
(Laughter)
07:05
Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!" To William
Shakespeare. "And put the pencil down!"
07:11
(Laughter)
07:12
"And stop speaking like that."
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 8/17
07:13
(Laughter)
07:17
"It's confusing everybody."
07:18
(Laughter)
07:23
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the
transition. Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my
daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in
England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month.
07:46
(Laughter)
07:47
Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He
was really upset on the plane. He said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were
rather pleased about that, frankly --
07:59
(Laughter)
08:07
because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
08:10
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 9/17
(Laughter)
08:16
But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every
education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter
where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and
languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in
pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are
normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education
system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them
mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important,
but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have
bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
08:59
(Laughter)
09:02
Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively
from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
09:12
If you were to visit education as an alien and say "What's it for, public education?" I think
you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does
everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd
have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce
university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be
one, so there.
09:37
(Laughter)
09:41
And I like university professors but you know we shouldn't hold them up as the high water
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 10/17
And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water
mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. Another form of life. But they're
rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about
professors. In my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads. They
live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal
way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
10:10
(Laughter)
10:16
Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
10:19
(Laughter)
10:25
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a
residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night.
10:34
(Laughter)
10:37
And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.
10:43
(Laughter)
10:45
Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it.
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 11/17
g , y g p p
10:49
(Laughter)
10:51
Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a
reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th
century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is
rooted on two ideas.
11:07
Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably
steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the
grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? "Don't do music, you're not
going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist." Benign advice -- now,
profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
11:30
And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of
intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the
whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university
entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think
they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually
stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
11:55
In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating
through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination
of all the things we've talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and
demography and the huge explosion in population.
12:12
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a
degree you had a job If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one And I didn't
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 12/17
degree, you had a job. If you didn t have a job, it s because you didn t want one. And I didn t
want one, frankly.
12:25
(Laughter)
12:26
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video
games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need
a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure
of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of
intelligence.
12:45
We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all
the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think
kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is
dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a
number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into
compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas
that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different
disciplinary ways of seeing things.
13:22
By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus
callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why
women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research,
but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often
... thankfully.
13:45
(Laughter)
13:48
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 13/17
No, she's good at some things. But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the
phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling --
13:55
(Laughter)
13:56
she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are
out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying
to fry an egg in here."
14:07
(Laughter)
14:14
"Give me a break."
14:15
(Laughter)
14:17
Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, "If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody
hears it, did it happen?" Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which
said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
14:32
(Laughter)
14:40
And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment
called "Epiphany " which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript 14/17
called Epiphany, which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they
discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by
a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of,
Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody
knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be
on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.
15:09
(Laughter)
15:11
Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" It was
interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s,
wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't
concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But
this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available
condition.
15:34
(Laughter)
15:38
People weren't aware they could have that.
15:40
(Laughter)
15:42
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with
her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for
20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at
school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so
on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "I've
listened to all these things your mother's told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here.
W 'll b b k W 't b l " d th t d l ft h
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
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We'll be back. We won't be very long," and they went and left her.
16:16
But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And
when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the
minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a
few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a
dancer. Take her to a dance school."
16:39
I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We
walked in this room, and it was full of people like me -- people who couldn't sit still, people
who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz;
they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet
School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She
eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance
Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most
successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's
a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm
down.
17:20
(Applause)
17:28
What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the
revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to
adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our
conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our
minds in the way that we strip-mine 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're educating
our children.
18:02
There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear
from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared
4/4/2019 Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? | TED Talk
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from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared
from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish." And he's right.
18:22
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that
we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And
the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and
seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole
being, so they can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they
will. And our job is to help them make something of it.
18:53
Thank you very much.
18:54
(Applause)
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