There is extraordinary evidence of human creativity all around us.
At the same time, we are in a transformational period where we have no idea what’s going to happen in the future.
Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2080. None of us has any idea what the world will look like in just five years’ time, yet we’re meant to be educating them for it.
We have a huge vested interest in education because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.
All kids have tremendous talents, and we crush them ruthlessly.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
What all kids have in common is that they will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong. We know that if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.
By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity for trying something different. They have become frightened of being wrong. So the reality is that we are educating people out of their creativity. We don’t grow into creativity, we get educated out of it.
Every education system in the world has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts.
And there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.
There isn’t an education system in the world that teaches dance every day to children the same way we teach them mathematics. Mathematics is important, but so is dance.
Our education system is based on the idea of academic ability. It came into existence to meet the needs of industrialism.
The current educational hierarchy is based on two ideas.
Firstly, that the most useful subjects for working in a 9-5 job are at the top. So you were probably steered away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the basis you would “never get a job doing that”.
“Why do music, you’re not going to be a musician?”. “Why do art, you won’t be an artist?”
Secondly, pure academic ability has come to dominate our view of intelligence. If you don’t have high grades, then you are “not intelligent”.
And the end result is that many highly talented, creative people think they’re not intelligent because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
Right now, the whole world is engulfed in a technological and social revolution. As we enter the information age, technology and its transformational effect on work and social interaction via social media platforms have grown to the point of no return.
Suddenly, a degree isn’t worth anything. Now students with degrees are heading home to carry on playing video games or getting jobs in fast-food restaurants because a degree carries no guarantee of a decent well-paying job.
We need to radically rethink our view of education.
We do know three things about intelligence.
One, it’s diverse.
Think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.
If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. In fact, creativity, which can be defined as the process of having original ideas that have value – often comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s unique to each individual. A great mechanic does not have to be good at languages. A great artist doesn’t need to know maths.
Our education system has ruined our children in the same way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular mineral. If we have to face and build a new future, then we have to build a new and better education system to serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we educate our children.
Our children have the gift of the human imagination.
We have to cultivate this gift so that we avert some of the possible disastrous scenarios that currently face us. The only way we will do it is by recognising our children for the hope for the future that they are.
Our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. We may not see this future, but they will.
Our job is to help them make something decent and worthwhile of it.
Please join us in our efforts.