Do Schools Kill Creativity? Ken Robinson's TED Talk: Summary and Key Points

Why people still watch it

Recorded at TED in 2006, this is one of the most-watched TED talks of all time. Robinson, an education adviser, argues with a lot of humor that schools teach children out of their creativity. Teachers and education students are often assigned it, so many people search for a summary before an essay or class discussion.

Key points

• Creativity is as important as literacy. Robinson's central claim is that schools should give creativity the same status as reading and writing.
• Children aren't afraid of being wrong, and schools teach them to be. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." Because school systems stigmatize mistakes, we are "educating people out of their creative capacities."
• Every school system has the same hierarchy of subjects. Mathematics and languages sit at the top, then the humanities, with the arts at the bottom, and dance below music and art. That hierarchy was built in the 19th century for the needs of industrialism.
• Academic ability isn't the same as intelligence. Intelligence is diverse (we think visually, in sound, in movement), dynamic (the most creative ideas come from combining disciplines) and distinct to each person.
• Gillian Lynne's story. A girl who couldn't sit still in school was taken to a specialist, who watched her dance to the radio and told her mother: "Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer." She became the choreographer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

Detailed summary

An unpredictable future

Robinson opens by noting that children starting school that year would retire around 2065, and nobody can predict what the world will look like even five years ahead. Yet education is supposed to prepare them for it. Children's capacity for innovation is extraordinary, he says, and we squander it.

Being wrong

His stories of children (a girl drawing a picture of God because "they will in a minute," a nativity play where the three kings bring "frankincense" as "Frank sent this") show children having a go when they don't know. Being wrong isn't the same as being creative, but without being prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original. Adults lose that capacity, and companies and schools punish mistakes. He quotes Picasso: all children are born artists; the problem is remaining one as we grow up.

The hierarchy of subjects

Across the world the hierarchy is the same: maths and languages, then humanities, then arts. Nobody makes children dance every day the way they do maths. The system, he argues, was designed to produce university professors, and treats the body as a way of carrying the head to meetings. With degrees now everywhere, "academic inflation" means a degree is worth less than it was, while many brilliant people think they aren't, because what they were good at wasn't valued at school.

Rethinking intelligence

Intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct. It doesn't come in one shape, it works through interaction between different ways of thinking, and every person's is unique. The Gillian Lynne story makes the point: in a different era she might have been put on medication and told to calm down. Instead she found her talent through movement.

What he asks for

Robinson closes by saying our only hope for the future is a new conception of human ecology, one that values the full range of human capacities. Education should help children use their gifts wisely and face the future, even if we will never see that future ourselves.