In his video “Do schools kill creativity” Sir Ken Robinson emphasis on the extraordinary evidence of the human creativity and how it is oppressed by a rigid educative system. He firmly contends that creativity is as important in education as literacy and they should be treated with the same status. One of the reasons why he is making this big and potentially provocative claim is because schools have for a long-time-period been oppressed with the idea that certain subjects such as math and science are more important than other humanities subjects such as Arts and dance. I maintain his point as I have experienced the dogmatic structure of the whole educative system myself. In his lecture, he throws in a very interesting example of a little girl drawing a picture of god and the teachers said that nobody knows what god looks like and she answered they will in a minute. If I did this in school in Morocco, I would be expelled from school for it is a blasphemous act to picture god. Since middle school we have been taught how to think about things and how to see them not through the eye of our own human consciousness but through the eye of the system itself, which I think is totally destructive to the human creativity since it orients our minds to an enclosed frame work so that we can be in the box, think from within the box and conform to the economic and even cultural doctrines. This conforming goes far beyond education to reach the socioeconomic status of peoples. It is driven by the inhumane and oppressive conspiracy to conform the masses in order to keep them puppets of the system. They do so throughout threatening our minds with financial insecurity and the illusion of materialism. So it’s us, the people, facing the whole government structured institutions, from Wall Street to military and universities. I put it this way because it’s only when one reflects on it this way that one sees the immense gap that exists between the nature of the human spirit and the way the educative system functions. There is a considerable incoherence between our natural ways of learning and the mindset driving the educative system as a whole.
The famous artiste Picasso said once “All children are born artists; the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”. Sir Robinson strongly acknowledges this quote and adds that we are educating people out of their creativitiy as we grow up in schools we grow out of creativity rather than in creativity for the essence of creativity is always tapped within the human mind. Later on, he states that every educative system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects placing mathematics and languages at the top followed by humanities and in the bottom of the pyramid is placed Art. And within arts there is a hierarchy placing arts and music in a higher state than drama and dance. Is there a rational reason for this unfairness distribution of subjects? Are people who are good in math smarter than artiste? I mean think about the difference between spending an hour dancing then an hour with a mathematical problem. If the goal of a human being is to be happy then what made you happier the first or the second hour? When we look at the output of education, Sir Robinson made a great statement asserting “The whole purpose of universities throughout the world is to produce university professors; they are the ones who come at the top” This concept that places university professors at the top of the human achievement is highly misguided because as Sir Robinson states, it is nothing but another form of life. So to look at the educative system from its historical occurrence, Robinson states that it came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. This is clearly evident as we see it in our everyday life. It is manifested on the fact that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. In order to bring justice to the human spirit, the educative system needs a radical change. We need a change that values the human intelligence and creativity rather than industrialism. We are in the midst of a worldwide human revolution and people cannot be judged or identified by their degree or social status. The human spirit is awakening to a new reality.
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