killing creativity

Aaron Noice
English 100
Reading Response 6

Do schools dampen creativity? Do they teach you to think logically only without the slightest hint of being creative? Sir Ken Robinson thinks so, and in a funny but intriguing lecture, he believes that we are all born into creativity and schools squash it out of us. In his lecture he is advocating for a change in our schools, that they need to fuel the creative thoughts and not hide them away. As he so boldly puts it ‘all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, ruthlessly’ and that ‘creativity now is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it as the same status.’ He pushes that we are born with creativity and as we go through our education it is silenced. That our world is now a place where you can’t be wrong, were that is not an option. Through this he claims that through school we learn not to be wrong, and that in order to be creative, you have to be willing to take that chance of being wrong, in order to think up something original. This is done through a global problem with schools, that every education system throughout the world has the same standards for education, that math, reading and science with arts at the very bottom, that even within the arts, only music and drawing as being important, with drama and dance at the lowest. He supports this by saying that ‘there were no public systems before the 19th century, the all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism’ and that the ‘most useful subjects for work were at the top’ so for most you would be turned away from what you liked, that the creative parts of life weren’t useful and there were no jobs for it.
This, is crazy, after hearing Ken Robinsons lecture, I was immediately brought back to my early school years, from kindergarten onwards. For me, what he says is surely right, my early years of education is where I can remember having the most creative classes, before 5th grade there was music and arts classes, a lot of drawing as a young kid, but as I got older, and my mind was able to comprehend math and reading and logic, it wasn’t long before I had forgotten all about art and music classes. The further into school the more time I had to spend with reading and writing, when Ken Robinson talked about how art classes were on the bottom of the education priority, it clicked with my own schooling. The only times I could have art classes were the few electives I got each year, which was maybe 2 at most, compared to 4 other classes of English, math and science. Each semester in high school I had one art class, and thinking back, I feel like, as Ken Robinson put it school has had my ‘talents’ and they were ‘squandered ruthlessly.’ Now I play music, but that wasn’t something I started until I was around 12, just getting into middle school where I opted out of the music classes already, I was persuaded to start playing by my friends, which is where I felt like I learned most of my ideas and creativity, which was far away from school.