Creativity vs Education

Creativity vs Education

           Now days the world is pretty much crazy about creativity. Companies, colleges, governments, and even high schools are looking for creativeness. Why has creativity come to so much importance?

           Before the modern times we live in, educated people that specialized in certain jobs were very scarce. However as the industrial revolution swept the planet, high level public education has become wide spread and just a part of normal life. As this occurred, the value of high level education dramatically went down due to the increased supply of educated people. Now even after the long years of school life, it’s hard to make a living out of it.  Creativity now comes in to differentiate these people who have suffered academic inflation. The people with new bright ideas who can think differently than most people are preferred most where.

           Ken Robinson, speaker in this TED video, explains that our precious creativity demanded everywhere is destroyed during the process of education. He argues that schools has become like factories assembling students as mere products. “We are educating people out of their creativity” he says. My opinion is that I definitely agree. The current public education in Korea actually has become like assembly lines creating student products while killing their uniqueness and creativity. Now all students care is their rank in class and nothing else. When students graduate they have become machines that only know how to score 100% in a test. I agree with Sir Ted Robinson completely here but I must ask him, then what must be done to solve this?

           Through most of his speech he introduced numerous errors in the system of education. For example, schools focusing on certain subjects such as math and science, anesthetic ways of education in school, and the separation of students by grades. However how must we solve this? And is it even possible for such education?

          During the industrial revolution numerous factories have been built for one reason, mass production. Though mass production destroys each item’s uniqueness, it saved a lot of money and time. This means that if we are to change our current education from mass producing factories to creativity enhancing centers, it would take massive amounts of time and money. Some mass education for young students is just inevitable in our society. If the students wants to pursue their interest later on in life there are colleges and graduate schools which are much more like the education that Sir Ken Robinson is explaining.

Also I think creativity and knowledge learned by education is sort of a trade off. When students are taught what they don’t want to be taught or in the speakers words “anesthetically taught” some damage will done to creativeness for students However as a advantage it gives them useful knowledge and intellect in the field that they are not interested in.

        Creativity comes in many forms. A child believes he can fly, that could be counted as being very creative. But to prevent him from jumping off a building, someone has to teach him that his belief is wrong, completely killing his free imagination. Now this shows that there has to be a balance between free thought and knowledge of the world. Now the problem is how do we know what thought to kill and not? Thus some loss of creativity is inevitable in the process of education.

           I agree with Sir Ken Robinson that a change must be made in our system of education. However the problems that he stated in his speech can only are solved by complete home schooling, which is also called no public education. In our current worlds state I don’t think a method exists anywhere that could really help to thrive one’s creativity while educating them. So thank you Mr. Sir Ken Robinson for making the public aware of this problem but knowing is just different then doing.