Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.This episode originally aired in 2006.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Do schools kill creativity? It's a question that has made today's talk a classic, one of the most watched TED Talks of all time.
So for back to school season, we are sharing author and educator Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk, which for all of you TED nerds out there was one of the first talks we ever published online. where Sir Ken makes the profound case for why creativity is vital to our world and why creating an education system that nurtures rather than undermines creativity is a necessity.
It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. There have been three themes, haven't there, 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 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. 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.
If you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back curiously. That's distracting me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, what do you do, and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They think, oh my God, why me? My one night out all week. But if you ask people 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 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. 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, Serena 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. 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.
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