education is killing my creativity

After watching Sir Ken Robinson’s lecture on changing education paradigms, complete with animation, I found myself a bit lost in the absolute brilliance of it. Not only was his accent amazing, but what he said with his awesome accent was just as equally amazing and awesome. Granted, I always tend to focus more when there are British accents involved but that’s beside the point. I even decided to give some of his other lectures a go, thank you Youtube.

In this video he explains how education is being reformed based on economic and cultural reasons. How we “educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21^st century,” while maintaining “cultural identity.” Yet instead of progressing, the educational system still works according to its structure that was created in the period on enlightenment and during the industrial revolution. Sir Ken Robinson believes that “schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches… we put them through the system by age group… why is there this assumption that the most important things kids have in common is how old they are… it’s like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture.”

This reminds me so much of Brave New World, where the entire system is pretty much based on industrialization, on factories, on assembly lines. The people are no longer created but are instead manufactured and drown according to the expectations of the leaders. There are eggs “on a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another, rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred.” They were being manipulated to fit the expectations set out for them. They underwent the Bokanovsky's Process, “bokanovskification consists of a series of arrests of development. We check the normal growth and, paradoxically enough, the egg responds by budding.” Similar to Sir Ken Robinson’s explanation of educations, people in the Brave New World were created in batches and this was what defined them they were created into Gammas, unvarying Deltas, Epsilons. The person lost their significance; it was merely the title that was important. They were like toys being assembled, easily manipulated and dispensable and easily replaced by the next batch. There was absolutely no guarantee of one’s importance, since they could be replaced.

Sir Ken Robinson’s tells us how “we are getting our children through education by anaesthetising them,” we “shut [their] senses off and deaden [them] to what is happening.” To allow them to get through things we simply shut off all distractions by trying to minimize the senses. Just like in Brave New World infants are conditioned to hate books and nature so that they would not deter from society’s basis on consumption or fight against their designated position in life. And as they grow they take soma, a drug with “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol; none of their defects” it was “euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant… one cubic centimetre [of soma] cures ten gloomy sentiments.” Instead of dealing with issues and all negative thoughts, they instead turn to soma in order to desensitize themselves and shut off all of their senses with the exception of a perceived “happiness.”

Now I’m going to end on a happy note, back to the British guy. I really liked what Sir Ken Robinson had to say. I find his arguments to be very logical and very truthful. I also agree with him when he says that education kills creativity. Education is not bad, far from it, education is actually brilliant; however, when education decides itself to be superior and in turn disregards the importance of creativity then we will fall into a downward cycle. Without creativity there really isn’t much knowledge in the world since knew knowledge comes through innovation and creativity. Without the ability to be creative, then how can knew knowledge come about?

“If a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?” - Sir Ken Robinson