Creativity

In his speech on the power of the imaginative mind, Sir Ken Robinson argues that schools “are educating people out of their creative capacities.”* Having learned the central lesson that they must find the right answer, students renounce creativity, trial and error reasoning, and their own natural curiosity. They fear being told that they are wrong. But 21st century teaching acknowledges creativity as an essential skill that we teachers must encourage and nourish. As Daniel Pink urges, “The most creative among us see relationships the rest of us never notice. Such ability is at a premium in a world where specialized knowledge work can quickly become routinized work – and therefore be automated or outsourced away.”** When we fear being wrong, we limit the possibility of new discoveries. We must teach our students to seek connections, patterns, nuances, and the undiscovered wherever possible.

* http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
** Pink, “A Whole New Mind,” pg. 135.