Judge a Book By it's Cover

School Kills Creativity

I stumbled upon the TED website before and when it was mentioned in class, I couldn't help but return to this speech. Ken Robinson, an ex-professor, discussed how creativity is not only being eliminated from society, it is highly discouraged in our school systems on the grounds that "you can't get a job in that". For the past few years, I've had a growing passion for art: drawing, painting, photography, you name it- everything that I "can never get a job in" So here we go.

His primary argument is that as a society focused on education, and industrial education at that, we lean away from creativity and emphasize on math and science. What was interesting about his speech was the pathos he created in his audience with his non-traditional method. Not only is he extremely informal in his word choice, but he told his entire speech in the form of quirky short stories and anecdotes. A particular favorite was a story about a little girl who was drawing a picture of God. When her teacher told her no one knew what God looked like, the little girl quickly replied "Well they will in a minute!". He used short stories like this one to get close to the audience. We all love a joke, and we all love cute children. By relating these two things to creativity, the audience can relate to Robinson with more ease. 

For the first half of the speech, the audience sees Ken Robinson as average - his casual diction and joke telling would hardly reveal that he was in fact a professor. By withholding this information, he creates strong pathos to build up his point that math and science are not the only important things in the world. When he reveals his profession, he creates ethos. He begins to produce statistics about how "in the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history" and about how he met Gillian Lynne - creator of Phantom of the Opera, and that she had a personal story to justify his claim. Suddenly Ken, the average joke teller has a multi-millionaire backing up his claim that school almost destroyed her creativity. Even with all his gained pathos and logos, in the end, he bows to the growing generation as hope for the future.

I like these quotes :)

"the body is important. we all have bodies. ... but we train ourselves to see our bodies as a form of transport for our heads- it gets our brain to meetings""you probably stay benignly away from things you liked on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that""many talented people think they are not because what they are good at wasn't valued in school""you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? I mean, he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be?"