When Schools Ruin a Good Thing

I've been looking for ways to integrate different communication skills into the curriculum, and the TED talks stand out to me as a great example of powerful communication in multiple media, so I've been watching some of the popular ones. The talk below, entitled "Schools Kill Creativity" makes no use of digital tools other than the microphone, but it's a wonderful example of effective personal presentation. Ken Robinson uses humor as a fundamental piece of his presentation style, but his comments are deadly serious.



You can download a podcast of the talk or a transcript by navigating to its page.

I listened to this talk at my desk, and I listened to it twice more as a podcast on my way home from work that day. I was absolutely startled to find a 2006 talk that so neatly pierced the heart of one of the issues I struggle with. I wrote on this topic back in July, and Robinson takes the concept a whole step further.

Here, I think, is the salient passage:

What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

If we accept that the premise here is true and that we stigmatize mistakes all the way through our educational system, and that we crush the creativity out of many (clearly not all) of our students, we have a massive task to engage in. Instead of testing kids constantly and punishing their teachers and schools, we ought to be considering a fundamental reinvention of the way we structure education.

That, however, is a topic for another day. What I'm interested in today is how much damage I can undo in my own classroom, while still operating within the curricular and conventional guidelines prescribed by my job.

This whole blogging project with my 10th graders seems like a good start. They can speak freely and theorize without fear of punishment or having the wrong answer. They're judged entirely on their level of engagement with the prompt and process of each post. Still, I find the students have a very, very hard time being truly creative in their approach to a topic or a task. That fear of mistakes runs very, very deep, and it's hard to really convince them that experimentation and engagement are more important than right answers and grades. They'll agree with that if you ask them, but their behavior belies a real terror of being wrong and getting bad grades.

I wonder if I can do more than simply stop reinforcing wrong-answer-avoidance and nurture creativity. I wonder if there's something truly subversive I can engage in here.