Tuesday, October 19, 2010

We All Have the Capacity

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

~ Ken Robinson

“This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award.”