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Weve come publicly to confuse raising standards with standardizing.You can have high standards without standardizing.

Sir Ken RobinsonInternational expert on creativity and innovation

Why We Need To Change Our Thinking About Our Schools And Some ThoughtsOn How

Sir Ken Robinson is blessed with a wry sense of humor and comedic timing assets he putsto good use in delivering a serious message. Education as a whole industry is beingthwarted, Robinson suggested. Not by attempts at reform, but by certain assumptions, suchas what the basics really are. I want to talk about that, he explained, and invite you tochallenge some of the things in education that we take for granted.

Robinson speaks from experience. In 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair asked him tolead the effort to come up with a national strategy on creativity. He was also the central

figure in developing a strategy for creativity and economic development as part of the peaceprocess in Northern Ireland and served as a key advisor to the government of Singapore indesigning its strategy to become the hub of Southeast Asia. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth IIknighted Robinson for services to the arts. He now lives in California, consulting withnumerous leaders from around the world on how to make creativity a new basic skill.

Highlights

Robinson shared three propositions with the group:

Education globally is engulfed in a revolution.

In a global economy, redoing student performance standards has become an economicimperative. The world is changing, Robinson observed, yet we are educating everyone tomeet the demands of the old economy.And the current standards movement is making it worse.

One of the great ironies of the school reform movement, he explained, is that thepressure to narrow the curriculum is being done in the interest of business, but this is notwhat business wants. Robinson added, The competition (for global markets) is becomingconsiderable at a time when we are standardizing ourselves. In a way, America is giving upits birthright.

If educational professionals are to engage successfully in the revolution, theymust challenge some basic assumptions.

According to Robinson, policymakers in many countries assume that raising standards isonly about getting back to the basics, which they take as givens. The problem is that these

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subjects are not so basic anymoreand some subjects not previously considered basic, havebecome so.1

To make his point, Robinson described the following hierarchy of subjects. At the top areEnglish, math and science. Next come the humanities history, geography, and social

studies considered interesting, but not crucial. In last place are the arts music, drama,dance, and painting regarded by most cultures as dispensable.

The hierarchy, Robinson argued, is deeply ingrained in the two cornerstones of publiceducation, where schooling has been designed to both meet the economic needs of theIndustrial Age and produce an educated citizenry for a democratic society coupled with theAge of Enlightenment, which places a premium on knowledge verified empirically using thescientific method. And so weve grown up with this idea that science is all about objectivity,facts, and hard knowledge, he explained, and the arts are all about feeling, intuition, andexpressions of emotion.

A second set of assumptions that Robinson hoped to dispel concerns the nature of creativity

itself:

1. That creativity is only about special people folks who wear jeans at work andcome in late because theyve been struggling with an idea of some sort. In contrast,he asserted, creativity is the natural birthright of every individual.

2. That creativity is only about certain subjects. As a result, the arts have becomeghettoized and the rest of the curriculum has become sterilized. In contrast,contended Robinson, everything is potentially creative.

3. That creativity is about letting it all go, kind of running around and kicking thefurniture and hanging out. Instead of being the antithesis of achieving highstandards, Robinson claimed, creativity can be taught and it is how you get to high

standards.

Robinson summarized his thoughts this way. Because we treat creativity and intelligenceseparately, we run our schools accordingly. Its as if we cant do the creative stuff until weget the standards up. Only then can we can start to be creativeon Friday afternoon. Incontrast, according to Robinson, the whole heart and soul of (improving education) isabout reintegrating creativity with intelligence to show that one is a function of the other.

Nobody deliberately sets out to discourage creative thinking, he asserted, but it happenssystematically anyway.

Having challenged these basic assumptions, we now need to behavedifferently.

Currently, observed Robinson, if education promotes creativity, it does so accidentally.Consequently, he continued, we need to adopt an overt strategy. And this can best beaccomplished by dissecting the essence of creativity and innovation as follows:

1 Robinson fully explores these ideas in his book, Out of Our Minds, Learning to Be Creative, Capstone

Publishing Limited, 2001.

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1. Imaginationis the characteristic gift of human intelligence, the capacity to have mental

conceptions visualization that takes us out of existing time and space in order toconceive new ideas;

2. Creativityis applied imagination, the process of coming up with original ideas that addvalue; and

3. Innovationis applied creativity, the process of putting the new ideas into practice.

Robinson shared his own experiences in the United Kingdom as a potential strategy ofwhere to begin. At Prime Minister Tony Blairs request, Robinson formed a nationalcommission on creativity, education, and the economy. He brought together distinguishedleaders, including Nobel Laureates, from all walks of life. Their report,All Our Futures:Creativity, Culture and Education2contained recommendations, which were subsequentlyadopted by the British government.

According to Robinson, We have to recognize that the world will become increasinglydiverse, dynamic, and localized as well as globalized, and we need a curriculum that meets

that challenge. His solution is to redo the standards by integrating creativity into thecurriculum. Rather than focus on discrete subjects, Robinson also advocates forconcentrating on the disciplines because this encompasses not just information, butconceptual tools, ways of thinking, and forms of discourse.

Real innovation, he concluded, happens from the intersectionsof the disciplines, not fromthe confines of them.

Captured from the meeting proceedings of the Council of Chief State School Officers fall 2006 meeting onLeading Change: Innovative Opportunities for the 21st Century. Shared with permission from CCSSO andthe presenter.

2 An electronic copy of the report, issued in May 1999, can be downloaded from the following website:http://www.dfes.gov.uk/naccce/index1.shtml .