Courtney Points

Pettay
Dual Enrollment English 111
21 January 2016
Schools Kill Creativity
Ken Robinsons TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity, hit the nail on the head as to the
core reasons why public education systems around the world need to change. Robinson spoke of
the foundation on which public education is built, the problems that have sprouted from those
fundamental principles, and what needs to change. He contends that schools kill childrens innate
capability for creativity, to which I cheered inside because an adult finally agreed with how I see
the system of education. Not only is Robinson an adult, but an ex-professor. Having once been a
professor, I would not have guessed this would have been his position. I would have assumed
that he was not only gung hoe for education but also for the status quo. Having a former
professor just as frustrated with the education system as I am had me feeling as if someone else
finally saw what I see and truly gets my frustration. The education system is not educating. As I
listened, I could not stop cheering and thinking, Yes! Robinson is right. Education has created
a hierarchy of subjects and values which degrades the subjects at the bottom and strenuously
training students to its design which is reinforced by stigmatizing mistakes, all of which undoes
childrens creative abilities.
Education is a means to an end. It is a process meant to build and create a product
useful workers for the future. According to Robinson, public education was introduced in the 19th
century to create workers that met the needs of the industrial revolution and our education
systems have grown from there. I did not like thinking of myself as a product destined for a
factory line being assembled and shipped out to serve the world but I think there is great truth in
that. School values mathematics and languages first, followed by the humanities, and arts always
come in last. Public education is designed around this hierarchy and it steers children away from
the lesser subjects. While many schools offer classes or programs for the arts, they are not
respected. When a student expresses an interest in these areas, especially a desire to pursue them

as a career, they are told no, that they will not be an artist, a dancer, or an actor, and they are
steered to the more practical subjects. This guidance does not stop at subjects, degrees, or careers
students should pursue but goes in depth right down to programming how students do things.
Students are carefully trained on how to do things to the point where students become
dependent upon the very education system that was meant to, as Robinsons says, take us into
the future. From day one, a teacher creates a guideline as to how as assignment is meant to be
done. Younger students receive instruction on every single detail with little room for personal
interpretation or their identity to show and as students progress through the grades they tend to
get slightly less instruction. By the time students are nearing the end of their education, either
seniors in high school or college students, they finally have more freedom in their assignments.
With this new freedom, students cast lost eyes upon their teachers and it incites panic and stress.
Freedom means no guidelines and requires creativity. For at least the past decade, the students
have been told exactly what the teacher wants and they do their best to deliver; the teacher
practically draws a step by how-to picture of what the assignment should look like and the
students do their best to replicate that. That process and way of educating leaves students little
room to think no room to create. With time, this ability to create disappears like the weakening
of an unused muscle. To this, Robinson quoted Picasso, Children are born artists. The problem
is to remain as artist as we grow up, and Robinson asserted, We dont grow into creativity, we
grow out of it. This is why students struggle when they are not given strict guidelines for
assignments. They have been educated out of their creativity because of not only excessive hand
holding, but the stigmatization of mistakes.
Students are taught that making a mistake is the worst possible outcome not that
a mistake is a learning opportunity. After years of the education systems grooming, students
become paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake. This fear makes students hesitant and unsure
of themselves. People are not born this way, though, but rather become this way. Robinson
reminded me, Kids will take a chance. If they dont know, theyll have a go. After twelve,
almost thirteen years of school, I have grown so dependent on guidelines and rubrics that I
cannot even remember back when I was little and was not afraid to be wrong. This assignment is
the perfect example of how the system of education has killed my creativity. I have never written
a response essay before mostly because personal opinions and individual thought have little

place in school, and I had no idea how to write this. I got so caught up in not knowing how to do
this novel type of essay that I could not start; I did not want to be wrong. I was finally given
more freedom, more room to be creative and I realized I had forgotten how. I am lost without a
manual because the education system taught me how to read and interpret, replicate, and
regurgitate information.
The education system is failing its students. With a hierarchy of subjects that places little
to no value on the arts and socializing students to a particular mold, the education system leeches
out students creativity and pumps them full of facts to memorize but not understand or
contemplate and which positions to take on issues, but not the freedom to form their own
opinion. Education not only leaves little room for creativity but actively destroys it by teaching
students what to think instead of how to think.