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Inspiration - creativity

I followed a link this morning, posted to Facebook, about ‘creativity in education’ – which resonates with a talk I went to yesterday by John Smyth, a visiting professor to the uni, about social justice in schools and education in general, and who also talked about the need for rethinking and revaluing creativity. I’ll perhaps write about that later – but the link turned out to be to a TED talk (I’m increasingly seeing links to TED talks) by Ken Robinson on “Do schools kill creativity?”. It’s a brilliant talk – full of humour and passion AND (not but) a profound desire for the reclamation of human creativity as a central value of education. He says, in our society, we cultivate a fear of mistakes, a fear of being wrong, which means that our capacity for creativity is stymied – since, as he says: “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”. He says: “we don’t grow into creativity - we grow out of it; or rather we get educated out of it”. Video is below - watch it. :-) (or follow link)


Two more quotes:
* “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy - and we should treat it with the same status.”
* “I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology - one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 6:11 pm and is filed under Learning, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Inspiration - creativity”

  1. Historybuff Says:
    March 14th, 2008 at 6:41 pm

    Wow, what a brilliant video. Good find Cormac, and it demonstrates that our mantra of “Be bold” at Wikiversity should mean more then just clicking the edit button.

  2. Cormac Lawler Says:
    March 15th, 2008 at 10:51 am

    Thanks Gerald! That’s very interesting you should say this. I wonder how else we could encourage people to “be bold”? However, I’m also concerned with the assumption that people will be comfortable with “just clicking the edit button”. I know - from my own experience, and from too many stories to mention - that it can be an unnerving experience to edit a wiki. And for many reasons too (weird edit interface, changing “someone else’s work”, etc). So I’d love to explore different ways of participating, if that’s what you were indicating. And also, making it easier (or more understandable) for people to show their creativity when they have something they really feel like saying, learning, doing… :-)

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