Do schools Kill Creativity by Sir Ken Robinson

The TEDx talk by Sir Ken Robinson addresses the question of whether the school system is destroying students ability to be creative. Children have huge capacities for innovation. "All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them." We take students who are able to do multiplication in 2nd grade and tell them to wait until fifth grade. We take the creativity that young children have and we do not give it a place in the school system. Students are meant to sit and recite with no influence on their own education.

Another main speaking point that the speaker talked about was the inability for us to grasp the future. "The education is meant to take us into a future that we cant grasp" No one has an idea what the world will be like in five years time let alone twenty years and we as teachers are supposed to be educating them for this. How can this possibly be done? Who knows if the standards we teach will be meaningful to the students in that amount of time or if the problems we are teaching them to solve will even be relevant. The one way that I would combat this in my classroom is through teaching problem solving and creative thinking.

"Creativity now is as important as literacy." This is incredibly true. The only way we can truly prepare students for the future is to give them a curriculum that emphasizes creativity and critical thinking. No matter what the future is like, the students will find a use for those skill. They may never need the quadratic formula or the memorization of Avogadro's number but if they are able to see reason and think though those topics than the problems of the future may be much easier to solve.

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