Do Schools kill creativity?

The Problem

There would be very few educators who haven’t heard of the late Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken became a worldwide phenomenon with his 2006 TED Talk (viewed more than 76 million times), “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”
Everyone is born with a creative mindset. Think back to when your child, or one you knew, was a toddler. Their imagination was vast. They could spend hours with a cardboard box, playing endless games with an imaginary friend.

But the moment that child walked into school that beautiful mind, and all the dispositions necessary for creative, innovative and entrepreneurial thinking, started to be conditioned out of them. By necessity, that child quickly learned that they had to conform to the standardised system and produce what their teacher asked of them if they were going to see success (an “A”). This wasn’t an issue during the industrial age when we needed workers for production lines in factories, but it causes massive problems now, with the advent of the AI era.

We have entered a time like none other. Technological advances driven by Moore’s Law mean that we are living in an “Age of accelerations” Not only is the world changing, but it is doing so at an increasing rate.

With automation and AI, jobs we know of today are being massively transformed if they continue to exist at all. The new jobs that are emerging need high levels of emotional intelligence and the ability to think creatively; the things AI cannot replicate and never will.