Blog response: For your blog this week, please watch Sir Ken Robinson's lecture on "Are schools killing creativity?". Please write a response to this video. Do you agree or disagree with Sir Robinson? In the video, he makes some pretty serious statements such as "I feel creativity should be as important as literacy in today's schools." Do you agree or disagree with this statement. Why or why not? What have your experience with creativity been in the past? How do you express yourself?
After watching Ken Robinson’s proposal about schools killing the creativity, I agree with him to a certain extent. As he stated, schools pay far more attention to the core subjects, such as math and science and tend to leave the arts out of the mix. He referred to this as a “hierarchy” within the school system, where the core subjects were at the top, followed by humanities, and the arts left behind. As schools and educators within the schools, I believe that it is our job to prepare the children for jobs of the future. The problem is that no one knows what these jobs will be, so it makes more sense to focus on all of the subjects equality, rather than concentrating more on certain subjects that may be out of date by the time that these children are ready to enter the job market.
The quote, “I feel creativity should be as important as literacy in today’s schools,” can be argued both ways. I feel that all subjects and learning styles should be on the same level when it comes to schooling our children because we really have no idea what the job market will call for by the time these children will be ready to get jobs. Because we are training our students for jobs we don’t know exist, we should focus on presenting a wide range of materials and subject matter to the student, rather than the current narrow focus of math and science. I also agree that we need to encourage creativity. As Mr. Robinson states, some children cannot sit still and learn, then need to move to be able to think. Different children learn differently and have different learning styles that we as teachers need to pay attention to and honor.
A lot of my creativity experiences in the past align up with what is being talked about in the video. Art, plays, and drama were not offered on the same level as the core classes. A lot of kids chose not to be involved in these types of creative experience because they were not required or offered on the same level. I am a very active person, so I express myself through sports and physical activity. I agree with the quote by Robinson that, “You will never come up with anything original if you are not prepared to be wrong.” Originality is something that comes from creativity, and creativity needs to be focused on and implemented in schools and in educating the future.
This speech has really evoked strong responses from students in our class. I can't wait for our class discussion on Tuesday.
ReplyDeleteCreativity is something I feel strongly about and something that I spend a lot of time on with my students just because of the subject I teach. Music is a logical place to allow students to express themselves. One thing that I feel strongly about is that students need to be able to express themselves creatively in ALL subjects. When students are allowed to be creative, they are applying concepts that they've learned and then they create something new. They are innovative! That is very important because those jobs that we don't know exist yet have to be CREATED!!