The future of creativity, education, and intelligence

Every year, innovators and progressive thinkers get together to talk about BIG ideas that can change the world at a conference called TED (stands for Technology Education and Design). At some point soon, I hope to be able to afford the $6000 sticker price of membership, as well as a career trajectory that makes me an a worthy applicant. In the interim, I’m just the glad the’ net allows leaks of inspiration from that annual event.

Sir Ken Robinson gave a great presentation in 2006 regarding creativity, or the lack thereof, in education and the way we define intelligence. It’s a 20 minute talk worth listening to. If you don’t want to listen–he’s got great delivery– you can read his talk here.

To encourage you to stick around, here is one of my favorite quotes from his talk:

Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

His talk is inspirational and full of salient anecdotes that make you think.

I believe 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. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “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.” And he’s right.

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