So for our final Tech Task we had to write a response to a video about Education. For mine I watched a Ted Talk Video from Sir Ken Robinson. The video was about how current education systems don’t value creativity, and why it’s important to start making the move toward embracing creativity in schools instead of undermining it.
Robinson explains that creativity is just as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. The thing about children is that they have this capacity whereby they’re not scared to be wrong, or make mistakes. But as we grow up it’s as if mistakes are the worst thing we can make, and we grow out of creativity.
In school there is a hierarchy of subjects, and at the bottom of the hierarchy are the arts. The subjects that are the most valued in schools are the maths and sciences, then history and language, last are the arts. And even more discouraging is the hierarchy within the arts in school. Music is usually more focused on, visual art like drawing and colouring is somewhere in the middle, and theatre and dance are often ignored.
Robinson says that we are often steered away from subjects we like based on the fact that it wouldn’t gear us towards a job. Think of all the creative people out there, actors, dancers, singers, musicians, and artists etc, who have all been discouraged from doing what they love because it’s not enough to make a living. So kids are stigmatized at a young age to believe they aren’t creative, and they shouldn’t be creative.
It used to be that if you got a University degree you were guaranteed a job. But suddenly degrees are hardly worth anything. What’s this telling our children? You can’t be creative, and you have to be highly intelligent just to survive. Robinson reminds us that there are multiple intelligences, and that not everyone is strong in their mathematical intelligence for example, some people are kinaesthetically intelligent, and actually need to move to think. Take for example the choreographer of Cats and Phantom of the Opera, a man who after a long career in choreography is now a millionaire. Imagine if his creativity had been suppressed.
So if children all learn from the multiple intelligences then why is the most of the time spent in classrooms focused on language arts an average of 300 minutes a week and math 200 minutes per week, versus dance and visual art which receives a bleak 50 minutes a week each. Robinson goes even further to argue that teaching crafts isn’t art, and there is a huge difference between arts and crafts. Art begins with an idea and has more to do with the process of exploring the idea. Craft begins with outcome of the project already in mind. Sorry to tell you, those traced hand Turkey’s you made for Thanksgiving in Grade 1 weren’t art.
As a creative person myself, I would have to agree with Robinson whole-heartedly. But as pre-service teachers we shouldn’t be isolating ourselves to creative content and creative lessons in the classroom. Let’s encourage art, not craft and creativity will thrive.
I couldn’t embed it so here’s the link:
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
