By Sir Ken Robinson

[Excerpted from DishyMix podcast interview by Susan Bratton.]

Susan Bratton: So, Sir Ken, you have worked all over the world, you started out in the UK, worked a lot in Ireland, you’ve worked for governments, you’ve worked for international organizations, Fortune 500 companies.

What you have always worked on is innovation and creativity and a lot around education. Can you just fill our listeners in on a little bit about who you are?

Sir Ken Robinson: Yes, well I am originally from Liverpool in England. I suppose my way into all of this was not really creativity generally, but the arts; and that was the area that always interested me.

Particularly, the importance that the arts have for kids growing up and in education, and it developed from there really to a bigger interest in creativity and how that might be of importance in not just education, but in the cultural sector and the corporate sector.

So, I suppose it has been a process of organic development, from one set of core interest into a much broader set of interest.

Susan Bratton: So, when I saw you speak at Ted, you were really focused on the fact that creativity has been leached from the educational process.

Primarily based as I understood it on the industrial revolution and creating factories for the education of our children.

You called for a change to that process. I would like to hear what your idea of how we should be educated. What is that?

Sir Ken Robinson: Well, education has to do several things. One is, to enable people to lead a life that has meaning and purpose and has some economic independence and to contribute to economic development.

The other is to help to build communities, and to help to promote cultural understanding. I think that’s all fairly clear for education.

The problem is that we have in most of our countries, a very narrow form of education, and it’s getting narrower.

That’s my big concern, that education is meant among other things to develop people’s natural abilities, and I believe it really doesn’t do that. In many cases, it divorces people from their natural talents.

Susan Bratton: So, instead of learning critical thinking and learning how to tap our native creativity, we are being forced to learn memorization and rote skills and heavy up on math and reading, and not enough in the arts. I think that’s your position, is that accurate?

Sir Ken Robinson: Well, I’d want to quantify that honestly, because this isn’t an argument against math or against science. I think math and science are tremendously important, and potentially tremendously courageous.

It’s a twofold thing. One is the force of education reforms has been to narrow education, so it only focuses on certain sorts of disciplines including math and science. It doesn’t encourage them to be taught very courageously.

So, the net effect is that some disciplines are pushed out completely, like the arts, and the ones that are left tend to be taught in a very narrow sort of a way.

For both reasons, I think we have to really think fundamentally about what we are doing in education, because these things are completely, in my view, against the interests of individuals and of countries.

Susan Bratton: How many children are in school in just the U.S. right now?

Sir Ken Robinson: I don’t know what the exact figure is. I can tell you for example, where I live now, LAUSD, the LA Unified School District, there are something like 800,000 kids in public schools just in this part of the country.

Susan Bratton: So, if I let you just take those 800,000 kids and completely change U.S. LAUSD, I think I got that right. What would Sir Ken Robinson’s school would be like? Take me to school, take our listeners to school.

Sir Ken Robinson: Okay, well, there would be some major differences. One is that the curriculum would be much more broadly based.

You would certainly be doing science and math and technology, but you would be doing them in different ways.

There would be much more emphasis on project work, on discovery, but you would also be doing art and music and dance and theatre.

You’d be doing interdisciplinary sessions, where you would be learning math through theatre; you would be using math as a way of enhancing learning and dance for example. So, that would be a much more dynamic curriculum, much more broadly based.

Secondly, it would be much more tailored as you are getting older to your particular interest, because people have very different talents and abilities.

I think they should be allowed to focus on them. In the traditional school setting, very many brilliant people are weaned away from the very talents that excite them.

I’m sure people listening to this have had this experience of being pushed away from doing certain things like art or music, because there’s a belief that these things aren’t very useful for getting a job.

Susan Bratton: Right, you can’t earn a living as an artist. How many times have you heard that?

Sir Ken Robinson: That was true once, it’s not true now. It’s completely untrue as it turns out.

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Excerpted from DishyMix podcast interview by Susan Bratton at Personal Life Media.

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Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. Now based in Los Angeles, he has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations.

He is author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative.

TED conference video.

Also see TEDblog 27 June 2006.

[TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design]

Related post: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

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