TED: Ken Robinson & creativity

So I’ve spent some time the last few days looking through the TED talks. For those of you who are unaware, TED is a conference that basically the best and brightest of the world speaking for about twenty minutes to (as JJ Abrams was told) say something profound. They include Al Gore on climate change, The LXD on dance in the internet age, and the aforementioned critically acclaimed director and producer on mystery.

So I’ve been watching, and they’ve been making me think. I’m going to take this chance to share some of the more profound examples of TED with you, and perhaps some of my own thoughts on those matters as well.

The first that I’m going to share with you is a talk by Sir Ken Robinson. In it, his thesis is essentially that creativity is not something that we as individuals grow into as we age, but rather something that we get educated out of as we grow. The following anecdote is a perfect example:

I’m doing a new book at the moment called, Epiphany, which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated about how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who most people have never heard of, she’s called, Julian Lynn.

Have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats and Phantom of the Opera. She’s wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. And eh, anyway Julian and I had lunch together one day and I said, ‘Julian how did you get to be a dancer?’ And she said it was interesting; when she was at school she was really hopeless.

And the school in the thirties wrote to her parents and said, ‘we think Julian has a learning disorder.’ She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD, wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930’s and ADHD hadn’t been invented, you know, at this point, so it wasn’t an available condition, you know. People weren’t aware they could have that.

Anyway, she went to see this specialist in this oak panelled room and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on this chair at the end. And she sat on her hands for twenty minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems she was having at school. And at the end of it (because she was disturbing people and her homework was always late and so on, a little kid of eight) In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Julian and said I’ve listened to all these things your mother has told me I need to speak to her privately so he said, ‘wait here we’ll be back. we won’t be very long’ And they went and left her. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, ‘just stand and watch her.’

The minute they left the room she said she was on her feet moving to the music and they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, ‘You know, Mrs Lynn, Julian isn’t sick she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.’ I said, ‘what happened? She said, ‘She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked into this room and it was full of people like me; people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.’

They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company; the Julian Lynn Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Weber.

She has been responsible for some of the most successful musical theatre productions in history. She has given pleasure to millions and she’s a multi- millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

Just think about that last statement. It really rings true in the grand scheme of things these days, doesn’t it? Education has stopped being about the child, but instead about statistics and funding and numbers. Keep that in mind, and when you’re thinking about how you can change the world, maybe you should just inform someone that you don’t think that’s right. And then do something about it together.

Link: Ken Robinson — Do schools kill creativity?

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