Our Education System Is Killing Creativity
Employers need innovative minds, but this talent is increasingly hard to come by, because people are discouraged to think outside the box throughout their lives.
It all starts with our
We recently came across a 2012 NPR interview with Robinson, where he spoke about how the current education system chastises those who break out of the mold, because in order to do that, you have to be prepared to be wrong.
In our current system, making a mistake is stigmatized, even though making mistakes and taking chances is the only way we can come up with new ideas. He says that many people lose the fearlessness of their youth as they get older:
"Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. They're not frightened of being wrong ... What we do know is if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity ... And we run companies like this ... And now we're running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is we're educating people out of their creative capacity. Human communities depend upon the diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability."
Robinson said there's too much of an emphasis on "the one right answer" and this might not actually exist in the real world today.
Around the 19th century, the education system around the world was invented to center around the needs of that time: Industrialism.
We've since gone through several cultural waves, and we're now in a knowledge economy. The essential value of our time is entrepreneurialism, which requires us to use our brains in entirely different ways. In order for companies and countries to stay competitive, we need to take a hard look at how we're teaching children — and adults — to think.
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