Practice 10. Do schools kill creativity?

Analysis of Ken Robinson's Ted Talk

1. What’s the topic of the TED talk? What’s the main idea? When does the speaker introduce his idea? How? The topic is education. The main idea is creativity. He introduces his idea saying that creativity should be treated as important as literacy. He tells a joke of a little girl who only paid attention to the art classes.

2. What are the means of support used by the speaker to convince us that his opinion is right? Provide examples. He uses jokes, personal experiences and sarcasm to convince us. One of the examples could be when he mentioned a boy who improvised at the Christmas play. He also tell us the story about a girl that teachers thought to have a disorder because she just concentrated when she listened to music, and at the end of that story, he said that girl is now a famous dancer.

3. What’s the speaker’s conclusion? How does he “conclude”? He concludes giving us an advice that consists in letting young students having creativity to become what they want.

To begin with, I would like to say that I completely agree with the idea of Ken Robinson. He talks about creativity, but in schools while we follow the educational system. I think we need a very drastic change in our educational system because schools are killing students creativity. In my opinion, subjects as Mathematics shouldn't be on the top and the ones like Art of Music, at the bottom. I believe that there are students that are more capable to learn a formula or to do very difficult algebra problems, but others can't do it. So, I would try to change that hierarchic educational system that thinks that Maths are more important than Art History, Music or Drama.

I will give you an example of a student: a kid doesn't like Mathematics, Physics or Biology because he want to be a musician and he knows he won't need all those unnecessary concepts for him. Do we have to obligate him to study all that subjects and don't let him spend his time on what he really wants? Another example could be a girl who always fails in Maths but she is an amazing pianist. Maybe, she could have less classes about Maths and more support on his Music class, because that way, she could be an excellent pianist in the future. To sum up, I would like to say that not all people have the same qualities and we can't all be doctors, Mathematicians or Biologist. You can be whatever you want and you should reinforce you good skills to be better in that. To finish, I sincerely believe that educational system around the world needs a huge change to not kill students creativity anymore.