talk review

Ken Robinson’s conference is about school and creativity. His argument is that every child has an enormous talent, but this talent is wasted in school. Robinson claims that creativity is as important as literacy, and in that way, it should be treated with the same status.

The problem with grownups is that we loose the possibility of thinking that we may commit an error, that we can be mistaken. In Robinson’s words “we stigmatize mistakes, and when running our national education systems, where mistakes are the worst thing you can do”. In that line, we can’t be original if we don’t think of other possibilities than the established ones. Children loose that capacity of being wrong as they grow up in the educational system, “we’re educating people out of their creative capacities”.

To understand this phenomenon, we must keep in mind that every educational system has the same hierarchy of subjects to be studied: in the top mathematics, languages then humanities and at the bottom the arts. The arts at the same time have a status: first plastic techniques and music, then, dance and drama. So the importance that the educational system gives to the arts has as a consequence that must be thought from the abilities that it establishes. We are taught how to speak, how to think, how to move, etc. In fact, Robinson claims that children are taught from the feet up, and as they grow up, the important part of the body becomes the head and the rest can be forgotten.

The purpose of the public education is, is this professor’s words, to create academics, or university professors. And they are the living proof that the body is more a mean of transport than a part of us, as important as the head. The educational system is based in the academic capacity, and the paradox is that it was created by de universities, in a way in which its fundament is to enter to them. In that way, the ones that aren’t smart enough to get to the university are the ones that aren’t successful in the academic world (of course), and they are also the ones that in school liked a subject that was stigmatized.

The debate then is centered in a fast changing world, in which the fundaments of the education are changing with it. We’re experiencing a “title inflation” that shows this change in a way that we, as projects of professionals (students) must keep in mind and start worrying. As the human specie, we must take care of the human ecology with a new conceptualization of the richness of the human capacities. Thinking these new concepts is a way of learning how to teach our children in order to live in a better world.