Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Sir Ken Robinson and Creativity
Sir Ken has a lot to say about education. I have heard some of his anecdotes in the past and generally enjoy his views. In this talk, he touches on the importance of creativity to education. He claims that creativity is as vital now to education as literacy is. His idea is that creativity can be taught, although he doesn't even begin to explain how. He does claim that it is lost as children mature. He tells the story of a six year old girl who is drawing a picture of God. Her teacher asks how she can do that as no one knows what God looks like, to which she responds that in a minute they will. Ken then makes the comment that children have great confidence in the way they view their world and that they lose that confidence as they age. On the surface one might agree that this is true, but why? Children have confidence in the way they see things because they don't know any better yet. They don't have enough knowledge to know that much of what they believe might be wrong. The more a person learns the more they realize how little they really know. I think that knowledge and literacy are a base for creativity, not the other way around. And they certainly aren't on equal footing. Rather, knowledge gained becomes a foundation upon which to build. Literacy is absolutely vital to sparking creativity. Creativity is essentially a manipulation of information. The old proverb, "there is nothing new under the sun," is applicable when pondering creativity, because it takes one concept or idea to spark another. Nothing is made completely from scratch. We don't create ingredients, but acquire them. In the same way, creativity springs from gathered information and literacy is essential to gathering information. Consequently, in my mind imagination is not as essential to education as literacy. Knowledge and literacy come first. A good example is this class on technology. Without the basic tools of technological literacy, it is impossible to create anything using a computer. Once a student has acquired some basic skills, he can manipulate what he knows in a way that might appear creative.
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Harmony:
ReplyDeleteYour comments were enjoyable to read and I happen to agree; literacy would seem to be more important. Also, it occurs to me that there are countries other than the US that are busy with manufacturing because items can be produced cheaply and wages are low. I doubt those in the lower classes can afford to be "creative" in those joba, nor would it be permitted by the overseers.
In a less dramatic way, perhaps Sir Ken is suggesting that we move away from working in isolated "silos" where departments do not engage with one another. I definitely support that idea.
You made some great observations about there being nothing new, and how our creativity is more like putting the same old building blocks together in a new way. I would like to contribute my two cents in that while literacy and numeracy are some of the building blocks, we could really use some new ways of thinking in our world, and including creativity in education would be a shift from a kind of skill learning and hoop jumping system, to an inteligence building and personally empowering system. This would imply a focus on something other than people as workers, which is how we tend to look at things.
ReplyDeleteWhen you say the more a person knows they see how much they dont, I have to say good point, and I enjoyed reading your post because your points are clear and thought provoking, thank you for that.