Do Schools Kill Creativity

Educational systems reward the knowledgeable data seekers and penalize the creative outside-of-the-box students. Education overall, has grown to be more about conformity than creativity. Sir ken Robinson states in his Ted talk, “If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance.” Robinson’s words reflect the fact that today the whole point of education is to teach things in a particular way to get certain results from students so that they can have a bright future. But what the educational systems fail to recognize is the students who are meant to flourish in a more creative future than what is normally being taught on a day-to-day basis. The best educational system should be producing a population of individuals more intelligent and versatile compared to the previous generation, yet they continue to do the opposite.

Educational institutions are primarily focusing on the STEM fields because this is “where the action is,” (193) according to Sanford J. Ungar in The New Liberal Arts. The systems are not giving any value towards the liberal art subjects for example, dance, music, and photography. The STEM fields consist of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. These fields are what many educational institutions consider the most successful fields of work to go into. Many creative thinkers get through high school and go onto college. But, often these same students are building up their future to do something they never truly wanted to do. The reasoning behind this can be explained by Sir Ken Robinson, he states, “Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.” These people end up changing their entire life because educational systems have set up basic standards about the correct way to do things.

Diversity between people would diminish if all the out-of-the-box students changed their futures based on what the educational systems teach and believe. The up comings of different generations call for a variety of people do a vast amount of things. The world is consistently changing and evolving therefore, creative thinkers as well as people who go towards a STEM field in life are all needed to keep everything running. If everyone thought the same way and followed the same path in life, how would different subjects be able to advance? Sir Ken Robinson explains the way humans think by saying, “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.” Each person thinks in different ways and by bashing down a particular type of education might in time; impact the diversity among human beings.

The educational systems have evolved to basically set students’ up for their futures. What they fail to recognize is that education shouldn’t only deal with the grades students’ make or their ability to get things correct. Education is also about students exploring themselves, enlightening their interests and becoming the person they really want to be in life, not just what their teachers, classmates, nor what the system expects from them. Educational systems expect everyone to follow the same rigorous schedule of learning putting them into a specific category without allowing them to find themselves first or understand who they are and what their set out to do in the world.

Works Cited
Robinson, Sir Ken. “How Schools Kill Creativity.” TED Talk. February 2006 Ungar, Sanford J. “The New Liberal Arts.” They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing. Ed. Gerald Graff. Cathy Birkenstein. Russel Durst. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 190-197. Print.