Creativity in public schools? Not so much!

So, this is a twenty minute lecture by Sir Ken Robinson concerning the lack of creative programs in schools today. While twenty minutes sounds like a considerable amount of time, he's quite funny (I chuckled a few times at his jokes) and very engaging. I listened to it while I was knitting, and I think I will listen again soon. His thesis here is basically that the arts (music, drawing, painting, dancing, etc.) should be taught with the same emphasis that one would give English or math.

He focuses a lot on public schools, but I must admit I had pretty much the same experience in my six years of private school as well. When I was in elementary school, I was fortunate enough that my teachers realized I was mostly right-brained, so I was thrown into the "gifted program" which I went to once a week instead of "reading comprehension time." I was encouraged to journal and create my own projects about things that inspired me. One year, we were asked to invent something. The next, we were charged with writing and illustrating our own books. My parents also put me in a dance school once a week, but I was frustrated there because none of the other kids took it as seriously as I did.

Then I got thrown into private school (my parents were concerned that I wasn't making friends at public school. Hilariously enough, I didn't really connect with people in private school until about tenth grade). We had art class twice a week in seventh and eighth grade (it was really more like an arts-and-crafts class), and then nothing creative until senior year, when we could take an art class. I spent a lot of time writing fiction when I should've been paying attention in geometry class -- math never really got through to me anyway. It was awfully frustrating for me, because I was just utterly incapable of sitting down in a classroom taking notes during a lecture. I guess this is why I always gravitated towards science as a kid -- I could learn by using my hands and observing.

Sort of towards the end of his lecture, Ken Robinson shares this story of Gillian Lynne, this really famous choreographer and dancer. She wasn't doing so well at her very academic school when she was growing up, and after her teachers insisted that she had a learning disability, her mother took her to a doctor. The doctor requested to speak to the mother alone outside the room, and he had turned the radio on when they left. When the adults left the room, Gillian got up and started dancing. The doctor turned to her mother and observed that Gillian was not having a problem in school, and she was simply a dancer. So her parents enrolled her in a dance school and she obviously flourished. "Somebody else would have put her on medication and told her to calm down." Indeed.

Okay, I'm going to go back to my knitting (bad unproductive me!). I think I will attempt to watch this video during my frenzied knitting marathon today: