This is yet another passionate and informative TED talk. Here, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the importance of cultivating our natural born creativity – that deep innate capacity we are all born with is vital to life, not only for ourselves but also for economic and cultural reasons.
It is very sad but very true that dominant approaches to education are suppressing creativity – too many of children’s natural abilities are being squandered, and too many adults are in jobs or living lives without true passion or heart.
This movement to favour and value more ‘conventional’ subjects such as mathematics and science was born out of the need to meet industrialism in the 19th century. It was here where we learnt to steer ourselves away from doing the things we like; hearing and believing that we could never get a job doing what we enjoyed. As Ken suggests, it is indeed a travesty that so many brilliant, highly talented people think they are not, just because academic ability dominates our view of intelligence.
We are well past the Industrial Revolution, it is time to start valuing and nurturing the natural gifts that people are born with. As adults, we do not need to spend our lives doing something we dislike, and as parents we must learn to trust, honour and nurture whatever our children show a natural propensity for.
We must shift living from a place of fear and control, to living where we embrace our intuition, follow what feels good, what excites and brings joy.
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“Current systems of education are failing to meet the challenges we now all face and they’re working furiously to create alternatives….As the rate of change continues to accelerate, building new forms of education on alternative principles is not a romantic whimsy: it’s essential to personal fulfilment and to the sustainability of the world we are now creating” – Sir Ken Robinson.
TASHA BE 