TED Talk: Sir Ken Robertson

Today we watched a video in class called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” by Sir Ken Robertson from the series TED Talk. Here is the video:

Sir Ken Robertson is talking about children being creative and the structure of schools is killing that creativity. He states “we don’t grow into creativity we grow out of it”. Schooling is very structured. He also states that “the purpose of education is to produce university instructors”. Therefore, we are losing creativity and making everyone the same. He gave an example of Gillian Lyn who as a young girl she had trouble sitting in her desk and concentrating. Then her parents put her into a dance school and she did very well. Now-a-days if a child has trouble sitting in class we diagnose them with ADHD and give them a whole bunch of drugs. If children are not doing well learning in the structural school setting then there must be something wrong with them. The school setting is hindering some children’s learning. I think applying creativity into schools will help improve student’s grades. I think applying creativity to my college education would be helpful and may help me be a more positive, happy person, as I could expand the ideas I am learning in class and try to think outside the box. I think I may do better in school, as I could be more creative in my projects and hopefully understand the material more. I think applying creativity in my classroom in the future would make learning more fun and interactive for my students and also help students learn that do not learn in the normal lecture style of teaching. I think this blog assignment is a good example of this, as we are able to do whatever we want to do with it. We can be as creative as we like with this blog assignment. We can make videos, put pictures up and state our opinions. The blog assignment is not structured very much, as we can do whatever we want to, be creative with it and we are able to think outside the box. This kind of scared me at the beginning, because throughout my schooling everything has been structured, as the teacher tells us what to do and what they expect and that is what I do, but with the blog assignment the teacher did tell us what he expected and what he wanted, but it was still up to us where we take it and what we want to do with it and that is different than many assignments I have done in the past.