I just watched this interesting TED talk on how schools need to nurture creativity. He doesn't really say how they should do this effectively. Implementation is a bitch. Still, it's a thought provoking talk. He also makes jibes at academics who he says are all brains. Their bodies are merely vehicles for getting them to conferences.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
For my husband: Honey, check out this TED talk by the Mannahatta author.
Apt. 11d 
LOL! I just showed this very video to my students yesterday. I’ve been using TED Talks as writing prompts. I ended up with a great essay from one of my students about how she gave up her dreams of dancing to enroll in college and do a business-type of major.
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Add a love interest for her, some random ass telling her she’ll never amount to anything, and have her end-up running a dance studio and you’ve got a movie. Probably only made-for-cable, but still.
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I saw that movie the other night on W. For reals. Dance studio, dreams forsaken. Dead mother and re-discovered father for the melodrama quotient. I only saw a little bit of it, though, so I don’t know what her major was.
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I’ve watched that talk twice, and I don’t remember him saying that _schools_ should nurture creativity. Does he actually say that?
I’m not sure they can in anything like their current incarnation. Have you seen John Taylor Gatto’s stuff? http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/bookstore/dumbdnblum1.htm
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He says creativity is just as important as literacy and we should treat them both as equally important. He also says many creative brilliant people are told they’re not because they’re trained by the public education system not to see themselves as successful because the “important” subjects are math and languages. Our task is to educate the whole child, he says, not just the parts that will benefit the working word (based on the needs of an industrial economy, which is how the system of public education was formed).
I think what he’s saying is that schools should move away from schools based on churning out workers for an industrial economy and move towards promoting creativity.
You’re right–our current incarnation of schools cannot do this. Part of it is that we still have an idea of how schools are supposed to work and we (meaning we, the people here, even) can’t see how a changed system could be “good” and “rigorous.” We still have such an emphasis on certain types of skills.
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“He also says many creative brilliant people are told they’re not because they’re trained by the public education system not to see themselves as successful because the “important” subjects are math and languages. Our task is to educate the whole child, he says, not just the parts that will benefit the working word (based on the needs of an industrial economy, which is how the system of public education was formed).”
I haven’t watched the thing, but I don’t think he appreciates the current popularity of the so-called Crayola Curriculum (i.e. Laura’s celebrity assignment and the bedazzled pillow book report). Unfortunately, if you say “creativity,” people tend to think “Michaels!”.
Katharine Beals’ new book Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World (which I’m going to blog one of these days) takes basically the opposite position. She argues that in a world where everything is a poster or a diorama or some other kind of “project”, left-brain creativity is stifled and left-brain children are unfairly disadvantaged, even in subject areas that should be their home turf. Beals also blogs at oilf.blogspot.com. She has a regular feature called “Autism Diaries” where she sometimes talks about the frustrations of “creative” assignments for a bright, autistic child (i.e., her son gets marked down for writing about ceiling fans when he’s given an open ended assignment and asked to write about something important to him).
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I doubt very much you can teach creativity–at most you can provide space for it and be friendly to it.
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I suspect what Robinson would say is that there should be more art and dance classes, not just math/science/writing skills. The point is not to turn math into an art project but to have a space for art. That’s what I got out of it.
We have one K-5 art teacher and one K-5 music teacher per district. They switch off; my kids have art now and will have music starting in January. But not art *and* music at the same time because they’re doing so much math, English, and other skills-based stuff.
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I object to conflating “creative” with art, music, dance, etc.
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