SIR KEN ROBINSON – DO SCHOOLS KILL CREATIVITY?

https://bit.ly/2ZBTdlN Logan Abbott

Based on the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY&t=1052s) answer the questions
below (there is no right and wrong answer in this case). Feel free to refer back to the video to answer
your questions.

1. Robinson says “If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.
Nobody has a clue—despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days—
what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them
for it.” How can education prepare children for the future?

Education must prepare people in general to adapt and overcome. They need to set focus on
discovering new things and deciding for yourself if you like them or do not, instead of forcing people
to do things they clearly have no interest in and will get nothing out of. I personally cannot fathom
the amount of things I’ve learned in school that I will never use in real life and how cookie-cutter
shaped the education system is, making everyone do the exact same things and not allowing anyone
to think for themselves.

2. Robinson says “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy,
and we should treat it with the same status.” Do you agree? Why?/Why not?

Yes, I agree. Creativity is like many things in that once you lose them, it is extremely difficult to get
back, sometimes even impossible. Nowadays very few people are creative and inventing, adding, or
improving upon something new and intriguing. The world could always use a bit more creativity but
just like in the video, people are taught to not be creative and it is very true that a mistake is frowned
upon instead of learned upon.

3. Robinson argues that “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with
anything original.” Can you illustrate Robinson’s opinion with an example?

Every failed invention, project, design, opinion ever has been tweaked and manipulated into what it
is today after years of trial and error. Take Coca-Cola in 1985 for example. They decided to change
up their recipe to gain some ground on the competition. This was most likely one of the worst moves
of any business post WWII. It was a huge flop that destroyed their consumer base with only 13% of
people liking the new recipe. This time creativity failed; however, it could have been a great thing,
and nobody could tell until it was done and tested in the real world.

4. According to Robinson, “the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to
produce university professors.” Do you agree? What should the purpose of public education
be?
 Here I can reiterate my point in question one. The purpose of education needs to give opportunities
to people to find out what it is they do and do not like. It should not be to force them into a shoe
that does not fit as that will do no good for anybody and at this point people are simply wasting
their time.

5. Robinson says that “Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a
student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t
want one. . . . But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video
games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a
PhD for the other.” Is this true in China?

A degree is nothing more than an over fantasized piece of paper. It is real world experiences and slowly
acquired knowledge that makes the difference between valuable employees and people who think they
know everything because they went to school. In China people are expected to complete fourteen years
of education, planned by their government and a yearly budget in 2016 of roughly 565.6 billion US
dollars. In 2019 the equivalent of post-secondary education was abolished funding by the government,
instead forcing students to “compete for scholarships” in order to earn a degree. China very much
values education and that is prevalent in the sheer number of top universities they have, and the types
of jobs most Chinese people get in to.