TED Q & A with Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity, Critical Thinking and Logic

I just wanted to share Sir Robinson's response to this question.  This guy is brilliant, and he is extremely interesting.

TED and Reddit asked Sir Ken Robinson anything — and he answered

For the first in a new series of community-driven Q&As, TED and Reddit joined forces to ask creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson any question. TED fans converged on this article on Reddit to post their questions, and to vote on questions posed by others. Today, we asked Sir Ken the 10 questions with the most votes. Here are his answers:

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What specific actions do you recommend taking to overhaul, say, public education to maximize how we identify and nurture creativity? And what place do you think things like critical thinking and logic (also noticeably absent) have in basic education?

Sir Ken: The basis of my argument is: creativity isn't a specific activity; it's a quality of things we do. You can be creative in anything — in math, science, engineering, philosophy — as much as you can in music or in painting or in dance. And you can certainly be involved in the arts in ways that are especially creative. And so it's important to emphasize that it's not about creating some small space in schools where people can be creative, and particularly not if that means just tacking on some art programs on a Friday afternoon. It's about the way we do things.

And that really has a couple of implications. One of them is, if you want to encourage creativity in education, there are a couple of ways to think about it. One is that there are skills of creative thinking that can be taught. I think of this as general creativity. You can help them think productively, generate ideas effectively, help them to think of alternative approaches to issues and questions. So there are very specific skills that can be taught, and in a metaphorical sense, it's kind of like a grammar of creativity. It's a series of processes, not an event. And helping people understand how that works is an important part of being creative. You wouldn't expect people to become literate just by hoping it'd happen. There was a time when people argued seriously that it was difficult to teach working class people to read and write — that they didn't have the capacity for it. This was before the beginning of public education. But now we know that most people — we take it as axiomatic and ethically important that most people can be taught to read or write. But they have to be taught. They have to be given tools and techniques for it.

And I think it's true in many areas of creative thinking that people can be helped by learning techniques and processes. So there's a sense in which you talk about creativity in a general way. But I also think of it as a personal process, too. That's what this new book I've written, The Element, is all about. It's about people finding their particular, individual creative strengths, because we all have very different strengths and capacities. There are different types of intellectual strengths. Some people are very visual. Some are very verbal. Some people are good physically. Some people are good at mathematics, kind of naturally.

So that's the first thing: Creativity can be facilitated in any sort of activity. Secondly that we can think about personal and general forms of creativity. When it comes to education, it has implications in three big areas. One of them is the curriculum. A lot of what I argue for in schools is we need to re-think the school curriculum. It has major implications for what it is people are meant to learn and understand, which is what the curriculum is. The second big piece of education is teaching, or pedagogy. There's a question later on about this, so I'll come to it there. And thirdly, there's assessment — what we reward and the form the reward takes when we come to judge the work.

I did a big report for the British government called All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education. It's available online. The British government put together a national strategy to promote creativity in education. I also published a book a few years ago, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. The idea is you have to make the idea of creativity clear and operational. Like we have done with literacy. And when you've done that, then the practical tasks become clearer.