---
title: ▍Do Schools Kill Creativity?
created: 2025-10-27T13:32:30
modified: 2025-11-18T19:29:49
draft: false
category: TED Talk
author: Sir Ken Robinson
url: https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY
---

> My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

> If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

> Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education before the 19th century. <mark>They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.</mark> [^1] So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
> Number one, that <mark>the most useful subjects for work are at the top.</mark> So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds 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 design 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 <mark>the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative 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.</mark> [^2]

Intelligence is **diverse**, **dynamic**, and **distinct**.

> 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.

[^1]: 一週工作 40 小時也是工業化時代的遺跡。
[^2]: _“It is more important that I have a disobedient child than an obedient child. It is fundamentally that disobedience that allows the creativity to come up with new ideas, and it is that creativity that separates us from the robots.” — Naval Ravikant_