A Creative Club attendee recently sent me a TED video from 2007 of Sir Ken Robinson explaining why he thinks our education system is killing creativity. Like most TED products, it’s a fascinating argument and because “everyone has an interest in education”, I thought it would make a good focus for today’s discussion.

Robinson’s contention is that creativity should be as important to education as literacy but the reality is that we’ve been educating people out of their creative capacities. The reason for this centers around the idea that we stigmatize mistakes, which is a mistake in itself because “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original”. But more importantly, he adds, our education system has not evolved from its earliest iteration which was created before the 19^th century to meet the needs of industrialism. Thus, we are discouraged from pursuing what was once considered more frivolous pursuits, like the arts, because of the industrial-centric perception that arts do not produce productive workforce members.  Academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, discourages creativity and “the consequence is many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not because everything they value at school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized”.

This last line resonated deeply with me because it spoke to my own experience in academia. As early as kindergarten, my parents were told that I was ‘gifted’ but behavioral problems had prevented me from my ‘true potential’. It became a familiar storyline for the rest of my academic life until I eventually became convinced that I was not intelligent at all, but apparently good at giving off that impression. This made sense to me as I never seemed to meet expectations and I found myself far more interested in people and getting involved while than I was with class.  In fact, I loved school for these exact reasons and when I entered MBA School at Wilfred Laurier University, I strongly believed that greatest thing I was going to accomplish there was making friends.  After two decades of being in education, this seemed to be the thing I could do best so my expectations were set accordingly.

I was an odd-ball in the program, partially because of my views and partially because I was one of a few arts students among a sea of primarily business and engineering folks (which is nothing against them).  The school’s philosophy and the people produced an encouraging environment to be different and factors like the not so difficult evaluation scheme (something I think is prevalent in most MBA programs) also encouraged me to try different approaches and make mistakes.  The turning point for me was in a mandatory finance course where I purposely flunked the exam so I didn’t have to spend time studying for it because I knew I could re-write it with the same questions later.  I’m not encouraging this approach, but in hindsight that was my creative solution to adhering to education’s non-creative ways while enabling me the time to explore new things. I never did something quite like that again (well I never took a finance course again) but that’s probably because I began exploring things which suited the way that I thought – something that had been very foreign to me.

This is my personal example and relating back to Robinson’s argument, our constructs for education are simply not conducive for creativity.  He makes a great case for why we must change the system for children but for those well past this point, all is not lost. Many people have clued in on the importance of creativity in education. If you’ve decided that going back to school is a recession-solution for yourself, you should heavily consider what type of school is best for you before you decided on a program. My guess is that if you’re reading this, you would probably benefit from a school like the Institute without Boundaries, which is based in Toronto.  In one sentence, the Institute brings together mature students from various disciplines to collaboratively and creatively obtain a forward thinking education. Their final output, a “menu of options for neighborhood renovations”, is on display from June 4^th to July 26^th and I highly recommend you attend the opening or check it out at a later time.

Creativity can’t be forced, but it can always be nurtured.  We’ve advanced in almost every way from the industrial age, education should not be the one left behind.