Ken Robinson

My contention is that creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Ken Robinson

Kids will take a chance: if kids don’t know, they have a go, am I right?
They’re not frightened of being wrong. I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What I’m saying is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time we get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity: they have become frightened of being wrong.
We run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. The result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso said “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or rather, we get educated out of it.

Ken Robinson