Research:

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

We decided in order to further pull apart our project and enhance certain aspects of it, that it was important to research children's creativity and imaginations. I found an amazing Ted Talk by Ken Robinson in 2006 about how we don't grow into creativity, rather we grow out of it. Here are some important points I pulled from the talk:

• We have no idea what the world will look like in  years, and yet we're supposed to be educating kids for it
• We all are aware of the amazing talents and innovative capacities children have, and yet we squared them ruthlessly
• Creativity is JUST as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status
• Kids will take a chance. If they're sure they'll have a go anyway. They aren't scared of being wrong. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original". By the time kids grow up to be adults, they've lost this capability.
• We stigmatise mistakes. Educational facilities literally discourage mistakes. Mistakes are the worst thing you can make. As a result, we're education children out of their creative capacities.

"All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up." - Picasso

• We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it.
• We're constantly steered away from studying the things we love because "we won't get a job in that area" (effected by industrial revolution. We're stuck in this rutt)
• Intelligence is 1. diverse 2. dynamic 3. distinct. 

1. We think about the world with how we experience it visually, with sound, kinaesthetically)

2. Intelligence is interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. "Creativity often comes about through interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things."

3. How do people discover their talents?

At 17:39;

"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." - Ken Robinson

"If all the insects were to disappear 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." - Jonas Salk