Creativity – a key part of the educated mind

http://www.edutopia.org/media/videofalse.swf

Another excellent presentation from Sir Ken Robinson, this time featured on the Edutopia site, and were recorded on April 10, 2008, at the Apple Education Leadership Summit, a gathering in San Francisco of more than one hundred school superintendents from around the world. In this he poses three propositions and challenges educators to respond:

  1. We are engaged globally in a revolution – the things that are shaping this revolution have no precedent so we have no way of anticipating the outcome.
  2. In order to meet the challenge of this revolution we have to thing differently about our use of resources.
  3. We have to do something in our education system, not to reform it, but to transform it.

The key to this, Robinson argues, is creativity. He argues that we must move to make this the centre-piece of our educational endeavours, considering it in the same way as we do for literacy and numeracy etc. He defines creativity as “the process of having original ideas that have value”and claims that everyone has this capacity – it’s just that in our school systems we stifle it.

Enough from me – watch and listen yourself. There are some extremely important messages here that, while they may make us uncomfortable and perhaps even overwhelmed, deserve our attention, debate and action if we are to have any chance of seeing our education system develop as it must to meet the needs of the 21st century!

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