Lectures for a New Year: How Schools Fail Creative Kids

Sir Ken Robinson is an educator (a former professor) who believes that the fundamental principles we use to educate our children are wrong. In this talk, he lays out a series of anecdotes (most of which are hilarious) about education, kids, and how we're doing it wrong. This is a terrific talk for parents, educators, and kids themselves -- have you ever felt that school didn't nurture your creative instinct? I sure have. If you're like me, you'll find this talk instructive.

Topics: dinner parties, the unpredictability of everything, what God looks like, the capacity to be wrong, Shakespeare at age 7, the hierarchy of subjects in education, disembodied professors, multitasking vs. cooking, a story of dance, and what we owe our children.

For: everyone.

Representative quote: "All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them. Pretty ruthlessly. .. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."

Viewing note: you can watch a higher-quality video on the TED site via the Download button.

Further Reading

Sir Ken wrote a book on this topic: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. I haven't read it, but the Amazon reviews are pretty glowing. He also wrote The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. Anyone care to comment on these?

He also did a second TED Talk four years after the one you see above.

Transcript

TED provides an interactive transcript as well as subtitles, downloads with subtitles, and so on.

Suggest a Lecture

Got a favorite lecture? Is it online in some video format? Leave a comment and we’ll check it out! Thanks to reader Charlie for pointing out this one.