“…We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?”, asks Sir Ken Robinson in his TED Talk about schools killing creativity. Both Robinson and Daniel Pink, the author of A Whole New Mind, see and agree that the left side of the brain (the logical and analytical half) has to this point in history been defined as the more important hemisphere in public education. In A Whole New Mind, Pink argues that “…the PSAT, the SAT, the GMAT, the LSAT, the MCAT…They’ve created an SAT-ocracy—a regime in which access to the good life depends on the ability to reason logically, sequentially, and speedily” (Pink). Success in life and school has been dominated by logical, left-brained thinking. For example, in schools all over the world, subjects are categorized from most to least important. Math and language (left-brained) are at the top, followed by social studies (also left-brained), and finally, at the bottom rung of the ladder are the fine arts. The education system’s sole use and acceptance of the left hemisphere of the brain has poisoned young children’s creative minds and withered the once healthy and strong tree of limitless imagination, capabilities, and ideas. How might you ask? The seemingly simple lesson of right and wrong. Robinson defines creativity as, “…the process of having original ideas that have value”. He also says that, “…if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original…” This is the very essence of how creativity is choked; if the fear of being wrong is ingrained into children’s minds, as it is currently, they will lose their potential to try things, to be creative, and to learn on their own. Mistakes should be hailed as learning experiences that kids need to learn from, so that they can improve themselves for the next time. This is especially true in my life. For example, after I had recently acquired my learner’s permit, I was driving with my mom, and I flew, and I mean FLEW, through a left turn (yes, the light was green…), forcing everybody’s cheeks to squish against the window and their blood pressure to sky rocket. I still remember my mistake to this day and have not made the mistake again…it was a learning experience. As the next generation is poised to take on an unpredictable but revolutionary future, “…creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status” (Robinson).
Robinson relates his idea by being a fun and comical, easy-going, yet intelligent speaker. He artfully blends in stories, jokes, and rhetorical questions to create more than a boring speech on stage about how something needs to be done about education; his technique instead penetrates the audience’s minds to make this idea, perhaps the most important idea to the future of the world, to stand out, to be remembered, and to stick. This insures that this issue, unlike many others, will not be forgotten, and will be dealt with. The destruction of the very thing that makes all of us human, creativity, cannot continue.
