Daniel Im

IB Lang 11

Moosman 3

Ken Robinson TED Talk Reflection

Robinson starts off talking about the amount of creativity there is and how that the future

is unpredictable. Robinson says that everyone is interested in education and makes jokes about

people who work in education. It is very important to people like religion. Education is very

important because it ready’s people for the future but the problem is that it is hard to predict the

future. Robinson then adds how children have a lot of creativity and how it is being shut down

by modern education. He says that we need to take creativity in more. He then tells a story about

this little girl who was drawing god and the teacher told her no one knew what god looked like

and she replied that everyone will now. This shows the creativity and confidence children have

when they are young. He tells another story where the message behind is that they aren’t afraid

of being wrong. Mistakes are important for the future but modern forms of education teach that

being wrong is a bad thing and heavily pushes that idea on to kids. Children start to grow afraid

of mistakes and because of that lack the ability to better educate themselves on the things that

they fail. Robinson then talks about the time when he moved from England to America. The

biggest thing he realized when he traveled was the hierarchy of education. Core classes like math

and science are prioritized and are at the top while at the bottom, art lays there being seen as

something that isn’t important and even the bottom has a similar structure where music and

visual arts are seen as the top form of the arts while dance and theater are at the bottom.

Remember that this is similar to all other nations in the world. It is like the main goal of schools

is to produce college professors because they are seen as the top in jobs. The problem is that they
are seen as the most important job but the problem is that their humanity is in their head.

Robinson literally says that professors are people where they exist only in their head and that

their body is to transport their heads to meetings. He moves on talking about how education was

developed to help with the industrial jobs so the best form of academics was the ones that would

help a lot more with these factory jobs. Not only that but it seems that the main goal of education

is also to get you into a college. The problem with all of these is that people who are actually

really good at other things are brought down because they are taught that this thing they are good

at and enjoy is completely useless and should just forget about it. The denial of creativity has a

negative effect on the people and society in general because of how it forces people to focus

more on things that are unenjoyable and old fashioned instead of something that is enjoyable and

possibly even helpful. Robinson then talks about intelligence and how it is something that isn’t

really something that is wrong because it matters the situation, the person and other factors. He

then tells a story about a woman named Gyllian Lynne. Gyllian wasn’t performing well in school

and wasn’t able to sit still so she was taken to a doctor. The doctor took the mother out of the

room and turned on the radio and told the mother to just watch. To her surprise, she was dancing

to the radio and the doctor said that she was a dancer and should be taken to a dance school.

When Lynne’s mother took her to a dance school, Gyllian Lynne was happy because she was

able to be around people that was like her. She then was able to develop and be able to make a

company, helping people and was able to become a millionaire. Education is like strip mining,

taking out all of the minerals and resources that are deemed important exhausting the world, to

the human brain. Even though now there isn’t a big effect, it will need to change or the future

may be harmed severely. Creativity is something we need to promote and celebrate and by
reforming education to a better state will drastically help all humans on Earth and future

generations of people.