TED Talks Daily - Do schools kill creativity? | Sir Ken Robinson (re-release)

Episode Date: August 30, 2025

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.This episode originally aired in 2006.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is sponsored by Airbnb. A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work, and I remember sneaking in a little time to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corners of Canada with Airbnb. Because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m. That's one of the things I love about Airbnb.

You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms, and still stay up with my partner after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting experiences that feel authentically yours, whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula

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Whether you work in government, care about public services, or are curious about what leadership looks like in an era of ralienable. rapid change. This series offers inspiring insights you won't want to miss. Leading into tomorrow is out now. Download today from wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Do schools kill creativity? It's a question that has made today's talk a classic, one of the most watched TED Talks of all time. So for back to school season, we are sharing author and educator Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 talk, which for all of you Ted nerds out there was one of the first talks we ever published online, where Sir Ken makes the

profound case for why creativity is vital to our world and why creating an education system that nurtures rather than undermines creativity is a necessity. It's been great, isn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.

One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all the people here. Just the variety of it, and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education, don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party and you say you work in education, Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. You're not asked.

And you'll never ask back, curiously. That's a... But if you are, and you say to somebody, they say, what do you do, and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They think, oh my God, you know, why me? My one night out all week. out all week. But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall.

Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people. Am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring. in 2065.

Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five years' time and yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability I think is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacities that children have

their capacities for innovation. I mean, Serena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing what she could do? And she's exceptional, but I think think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My intention is that creativity now is as important in education as

literacy and we should treat it with the same status. Thank you. That was it, by the way, thank you very much. So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born. No, the... I had a great story recently. I love telling it of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back drawing,

and the teacher said, this little girl hardly ever paid attention. And in this drawing lesson, she did. And the teacher was fascinated, she went over to and she said, What are you drawing? And the girl said, I'm drawing a picture of God. And the teacher said, but nobody knows what God looks like. And the girl said, they will in the minute. When my son was four in England, actually he was four everywhere, to be honest.

I mean, if we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was for that year, but he was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was a big, it's a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it. Nativity too. But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.

We consider this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents and T-shirt. James Robinson is Joseph. He didn't have to speak, But do you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense, and mare. This really happened.

We're sitting there, and they, I think, just went out a sequence. Because we talked to the little boy afterwards and said, you know, are you okay with that? And they said, yeah, why was that wrong? They just switched. I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down.

The first boy said, I bring you gold. And the second boy said, I bring you mayor. And the third boy said, Frank sent this. What's strange? What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will 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 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.

I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition, you know, this was from L.A. Actually, we lived in a place called Sinisterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born.

Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child? Do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?

Do you understand? Really? How annoying would that be? You know? Really. Must try harder. Being sent to bed by his dad, go to bed now to William Shakespeare

and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. You know, it's... It's confusing everybody. Anyway, we moved, from Stratford to Los Angeles. And I just want to say a word about the transition.

Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids. He's 21 now, and my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life. Sarah, he'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary.

Because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane. He said, I'll never find another girl like Sarah. and we were rather pleased about that frankly because she was she was the main reason we were leaving the country but something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world

every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects everyone doesn't matter where you go you think it would be otherwise but it isn't At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanity is in the bottom of the arts, everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.

There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they're allowed to. We all do. We all have bodies, don't we?

Did I miss a meeting? I mean, I think... Truth of you, what happens is, as children grew up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side. If you were to visit education as an alien and say, what's it for, public education, I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, you know, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, you know, who are the winners? I think you'd have to conclude

the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top and I used to be one. So there. You know. And I like university professors

but you know we shouldn't hold them up as the high watermark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. You know, another form of life. But they're rather curious and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors, in my experience, not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side.

They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. You know, they look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. You know, it's, don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference for senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it,

grown men and women writhing uncontrollably off the beat. Waiting to end so they can go home and write a paper about it. Now, our education system is predicated on the idea of academic, And there's a reason. The whole system was invented around the world. There were no public systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked on the ground you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music. You're not going to be a musician.

Don't do art. You won't be an artist. benign advice, now profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world

is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequences that many highly talented, brilliant, created people think they're not. Because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education

than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination of technology and its transformation effect on work and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.

If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. and I didn't want one, frankly. But now, kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation

and it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement.

Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally, by the way,

there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two hours of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking because you are, aren't you? That's a raft of research, but I know it for my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home,

which is not often, thankfully, but, you know, if she's good at some things. But if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling. you know, she's doing open heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shot, the kids are out,

the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break. Actually, there was, do you know that old philosophical thing? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? remember that old chestnut. I saw a great t-shirt, really, recently, which said,

if a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong? And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany, which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated about how people got to be there.

It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who most people have never heard of. She called Gillian Lynn. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did cats and Phantom of the Opera. She's wonderful.

I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch on there. I said, how'd you get to be a dancer? And she said, it was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school in the 30s wrote to her parents said, we think Gillian has a learning disorder. She couldn't concentrate.

She was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented, you know, at this point, so it wasn't an available condition. You know, people... People weren't aware they could have that. Anyway, she went to see this specialist,

so this oak paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Jillian was having. all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it, because she was disturbing, people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of a.

In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, said, Julian, I've listened to all these things that her mother's told me, I need to speak to her privately. So she said, wait here, we'll be back. We won't be very long, and they went and left her. But as they went out at the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk.

And when they got out of the room, he said to her, just stand and watch her. and the minute they left the room she said she was on their feet moving to the music and they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and he said you know Mrs Lynn Gillian isn't sick

she's a dancer take her to a dance school I said what happened said she did I can't tell you how wonderful it was we walked in this room and it was full of people like me people who couldn't sit still people who had to move

to think who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a solist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, found her own company, the Gillian Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible with some of the successful musical theatre productions in history. She's given pleasure to millions and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put on medication and told her to calm down. Now, I think...

What I think it comes to is this. 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. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we've stripped mine the Earth for a particular commodity,

and for the future it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk who said, if all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years, all life on earth would end.

If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish. And he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities

for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future. By the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

We're here. That was Sir Ken Robinson at TED 2006. The talk was first published in June 2006. If you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, and Tonicaa Sung Marnivong.

This episode was mixed by Christopher Faisie Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balezzo. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. This episode is sponsored by Airbnb. A few years ago, I went to Vancouver for work, and I remember sneaking in a little time.

to wander Granville Island and grab something from the public market. It reminded me how much I love discovering new corners of Canada with Airbnb. Because let's be honest, when you're traveling with kids, sometimes you just need a kitchen at 6 a.m. That's one of the things I love about Airbnb. You actually get to settle in. We can have breakfast together around a table, put the kids to bed in real bedrooms, and still stay up with my partner after. That's the kind of setup that makes trips in Canada so much more fun. You're not just getting a place to sleep, you're getting experiences that feel authentically yours, whether it's a lakeside cabin in Bruce Peninsula where you can literally roll out of bed and into a canoe or a cozy spot in Cape Breton

where you can make your morning coffee and watch the sunrise without anyone rushing you to check out. This summer, when you're planning those trips that matter, the ones where you want to actually connect with your loved ones, check out some of the most loved homes across Canada on Airbnb. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month.

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