Sir Ken Robinson said many things that resonated with me during his Ted Talk.
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." He also talks about how creativity is something we grow out of, or are educated out of. It's as if the goal of education is only to produce university professors. The consequence of the current system, he argues, is that creative and brilliant people think they're not creative or brilliant. He suggests that education should celebrate the gift of human imagination and see the creative capacity of others for the richness that it is. One of the things that I thought about as I watched this TedTalk was that in my own education I never felt creative or innovative enough (as a chemist) that I could one day have my own ideas to explore in the lab, potentially because I was never given the opportunity to ask any original questions of my own. Since I felt that I did not have the capacity for original thought it made sense for me to abandon my idea to be a chemistry professor. It's sad for me to think about that now because I was a bright student, top ten in my class, who cared more about school than anyone. And yet, I left high school not really knowing myself and my own creative capacity. As a high school chemistry teacher, I spend so much time talking about the great minds that came before: Boyle, Curie, Mendeleev, Avogadro, that I leave no time for students to come up with their own ideas! There's this push to cover EVERYTHING in the book and by the end what have we really done? What do they really know other than sets of facts that already exist on the internet? What about the ideas and ways of thinking that are not "googleable?" I want to nurture THAT.
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