Sir Ken Robinson: The Creative Advantage

Creative Thinking and Innovation. A talk by Sir Ken Robinson at the EduTECH Conference in Sydney, 2019.

Sir Ken ambles on stage in his signature understated way. An orator whose razor-sharp wit and impactful ideas about education counterbalance perfectly with his soft-spoken, demure demeanor. 

As though he were just briefly interrupted from his last TED talk, Robinson seamlessly continues his monologue about the importance of children. “Having children reinforces something I always believe. Children are full of astonishing potential and we only tap into a small part of that.” In fact, he believes we all have extraordinary untapped capacities and likens our human resources to natural resources: “highly diverse, often buried, you may overlook them for your entire life and even when you discover then you have to refine them and turn them into natural abilities”, using the example of learning to speak to exemplify our innate potential for the incredible. 

“Children absorb language through their skin because they want to and because they can,” he states matter-of-factly, “There is no natural limit to how many languages you can speak.” It’s all just a matter of context and opportunity. In fact, he says, we can do all kinds of things we may never discover because of where we are and “what becomes of our talents depends a lot on nurture (context).”

Sir Ken has certainly found the right audience for his beliefs. His ideas resonate strongly with a room packed with thousands of educators who are often frustrated with the educational status quo, knowing their students deserve better but are bound by, and constantly pushing up hard against, the stringent perimeters of an outdated system. “The kind of education our children are getting is not fit for purpose - it’s antithetic to the skills they need,” and he admits that parents are part of the problem because they follow in the footsteps of what was done to them, i.e.e the way they were educated. Despite being British and having recently become an American citizen living in California, Robinson seems well-versed on the challenges faced by Australian educators (or are these perhaps just universal issues?) “Our kids and teaching profession are under immense stress all the time”, citing Naplan and standardised testing as one of the stressors.

Nevertheless, he believes there is a solution to the constraints placed on us by the entrenched education system which is failing not only the youth but all involved in the education process. The first step, Robinson tells us, is to recognise the big difference between learning, which is natural and desired, education, or the organised intentional process of learning, and school, which when properly conceived is a community of learners who come together to learn, but is not expressed in this way in modern society. Robinson sees a “massive opportunity to rethink the basic principles of school so that they are more consistent with the natural principles of learning” and part of this process involves our natural capacity for innovation - our ability to change this system.

But how can we change the established education system? Well he believes it is already changing and there are ways we can accelerate the change if we can understand the system. We need to be mindful of these fossilised habits in the system, for example, organising kids by age group, teaching by subject, and so on. “Our kids don’t head off to age-restricted compounds after school so why do this at school?” he quips, which to be fair, is a very good point. Other issues of habits include the aforementioned standardised testing, the linear nature of education (“you begin, go through, and if you’re ‘successful’ come out the other side and go to university”). Robinson believes these habits have cut off “an awful lot of other options”.

However, he remains positive that the key lies in recognising these habits for what they are and the sway they hold over us all, especially politicians. “It’s possible to make changes within the system as it’s a matter of habit not legislation,” and, he says, there are alternatives beyond changing the system, it’s also possible to get out of the system, such as homeschooling or online learning, although he admits these are still limited but still interesting ideas.

Sir Ken then returns to the key concepts of his much-exalted 2006 TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity?, as though these were only espoused yesterday (and let’s be honest, with the partisan audience of today, it’s likely that many in the crowd rewatched all his TED Talks last night in the same way die-hard NRL fans watch reruns of bygone State of Origin games on the eve of another NSW/QLD clash). Robinson believes that “there’s a view that the education system is fixed and intransigent , but it’s not true - it’s based on competition.” The knighted educator then shows a slide of a typical school organisational chart that looks very much like a map of the London Underground system. Despite all its detail, glaringly, children are not mentioned anywhere on it, and the “relationships” are primarily linear.

Life is not linear. Life is essentially recursive, incidental and organic. 

Sir Ken then turns to the ways in which technology is shaping education, specifically social media’s effects on children. He half-jokingly, half-seriously says, “If someone is sitting in a cafe and they haven’t got their phone out, they’re just staring around, people get freaked.” He’s more optimistic about artificial intelligence. “We’re about to be engulfed now in a new wave with AI. AI will not be the apocalypse people think it will be. It won’t be the end of civilisation, but only civilisation as we know it. Some jobs will be swept away but it will create millions of unforeseen jobs.” He urges us to think about the positives that will come out of AI, fifty years from now and to learn our lessons from the past. Remember, they said television would be the end of film, but “people will just adapt and move in new directions”.

Thus, Robinson remains upbeat about the future of education, yet his presentation has a strong undercurrent of a call to action and a call to flexibility. He urges us to look at this untapped human capacity in a new way because “people have become fixed on the idea that it (the education system) is a static system, but it’s not.” Education is a complex, highly adaptive system and if we think about this diversity of human talent in a wholly new way, that will help people to adapt to the way that life is evolving. He says, “We need to have a sense of what’s wrong now, a vision of what the alternative would look like, and what the process is by which we get from here to there.” And this is not a task too far, he believes. He cites the massive swing in views in the US regarding same sex marriage as a clear example of how people adapt and their views adapt with the times.

“People get fixated on fixing the wrong problem,” he notes, using Naplan as an example, and the danger is that if you focus on the wrong problem, you create new problems, so it’s important that we fix the right problem. Because if you fix the wrong problem, you create new problems.

He urges us to think about the purpose of education. For him, the aims of education are “to enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens.” And who can argue with that?

He talks about our inner world, our inner consciousness and the world without - the world that exists and that will continue to exist without our personal existence - and that education exists needs to address both of these, “education as to point in both directions” because for too long it has only addressed the external. This is where he echoes the ideas espoused by another speaker of the conference, Pasi Sahlberg from the Gonski Institute for Education and author of In teachers we trust: The Finnish way to world-class schools. They both believe in the importance of play for learning - that unstructured, get dirty and hang out till it’s dinnertime or till you fall over type of play. “Children don’t play these days, and play is vital,” Robinson believes, “If they’re not encouraged to play it creates all kinds of tensions and then we start labelling kids and giving them all kinds of drugs.”

“If we remove the things that matters, like project-based learning, like play, it creates an issue.This is the issue. The system creates the problem. The answer is to change the system.”

We deeply underestimate our capacities, Robinson says. “There’s a terrible danger in taking a question so much for granted that we forget about it.” “How much do we underestimate cultural construction such as empathy, critical thinking?” he asks. We need to rethink our extraordinary capacities. We need to focus on our natural human capacities, he believes.

Again, Sir Ken returns to the ideas from his much-acclaimed TED Talk. “Dance is as important as mathematic and children should be able to connect across age groups” to foster their capacities. He claims that schools that do that see fantastic results by giving people access to capacities that will cultivate them and giving them the access to broader opportunities. We all have agency and we all work in education, which means that we are the system. He says the old, traditional system is modelled on a linear, industrialist and standardised model. We need a change of metaphor.

And here he comes to the crux of the argument. He believes: “We should be crafting the education system to individual capacities in much more subtle ways.” Instead of looking at it like a mass production model, we should be looking at it like an agriculture system. For decades, output, or yield, has been the focus of the system, but because the system is unnatural, we’ve “had to introduce all kinds of chemicals and the result is eroding soils and spreading diseases.” He says, “We have created conditions which are antithetic to the culture of learning, we have degraded learning.”

Instead, Sir Ken says, we should take our cue from organic farming, where “the key to sustainability is not to focus on the plant, but focus on the soil - if you get the soil right you can grow things far into the future.”

We need to change these conditions for learning. Thus, we need to change the “soil” not the learner.

Robinson is under no utopian illusion as to what is possible, however. He understands the limitations of the system and invokes the well-known Serenity Prayer as he finishes off. In other words, we need to ask ourselves: What can we reasonably do? “The great educators know that they can create conditions within their purview if they take it step by step,” he notes, “It couldn’t be more important that we move in these new directions. We can be the change. But do to do that we need serenity, courage and wisdom.”