Ken Robinson's TED Talk

Ken Robinson's concept that we should assign the same importance to creativity in schools as we do literacy is something I agree with. The school system should be fostering student's talents and unique intellectual and artistic abilities rather than squandering such eccentricity. Robinson mentions that today we are teaching children to fear imperfection and greatly magnify the consequences of a single mistake. Our education system runs on the notion that making all of the right decisions at the right time and executing them perfectly will lead to a future worth aspiring to. This, however, is not the case. By teaching kids that there is right and wrong in every aspect of life results in "growing out of creativity." We become more and more concerned with the idea that what we are creating or showing to the world is defected, or exhibits a weakness of some kind. The lack of education of the arts is an out growth of the education system's desire to foster the mind and produce people that are prepared to take on common careers. This focus ignores the ability to create widely-cultured, intellectually-rounded, and culturally-aware individuals that would be able to take on the world at a much higher level of intellect and understanding. Robinson makes the point that throughout school you may have been exposed to some arts or sports that you may have gotten great enjoyment out of but were given the impression that these facets of education were not grounds to build a career on. School makes the mistake of teaching children that things that they are interested in that do not lead to 9 to 5 desk jobs are not worth pursuing, even if it is at the expense of one's happiness. Academic ability dominates our sense of success in today's society and unfortunately this is largely in part to the structure of education.