Do Schools Kill Creativity?
By: Jamie Emerson
Sir Ken Robinson
I watched a lot of TED talks when I became a teacher. I loved them for their celebration of intellectualism, their sense that anything was possible, and their wonder at the world. As a teacher, I valued the diverse topics and helpful transcripts. One of my favorites was Do Schools Kill Creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson. Sir Ken, who sadly died in 2020, was one of the greatest speakers to grace a TED stage. The aforementioned talk has been viewed an incredible 77 million times on the TED website and 23 million more on YouTube.
It’s interesting to watch the presentation now, 17 years since it was given. Robinson’s talk seems looser, more relaxed, and less earnest than today’s talks. It’s funny—truly, laugh out loud funny. Robinson’s delivery seems to me to be very British; deadpan, self-deprecating, intentionally finding jokes, and then making them look unintentional and incidental. He was a truly great public speaker.
As for the content of his talk, the first thing to note is that while the title is posed as a question, Robinson is unambiguous: schools kill creativity. He argues children are inherently creative, and schooling systematically teaches them not to be: “I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”
The reason this happens, in Robinson’s account, is the stigmatization of mistakes. “We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make…the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” The underlying cause of this for Robinson is that modern education systems are the result of industrialisation, created to serve the needs of industrial economies. Children are educated with the aim of becoming productive workers. Creativity is not required for this, and so is not valued.
Robinson posits that this gearing of education for the needs of industrialized economies is reflected in the hierarchy of subjects in schools, with maths and languages at the top, humanities in the middle, and the arts at the bottom. Within the arts, Robinson argues, there is a sub-hierarchy, which values art and music more than drama and dance.
Another element of Robinson’s argument is that modern education systems are built with university in mind. Here’s Robinson: “If you were to visit education as an alien and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’…I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” They therefore foreground disembodied, detached, analytical intelligence at the expense of other forms of intelligence.
Robinson contrasts this with other, more embodied forms of intelligence. Dance is the discipline that Robinson uses as an example case: “There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important,” says Robinson. Starting with a funny joke about the poor dance skills of university professors, he goes on to describe Gillian Lynne, who struggled academically at school in the 1930s (Robinson speculates that, had she been a child today, Lynne would have been diagnosed with ADHD) until a doctor advised her mother that studying at dance school might be the best way forward. Lynne went on to become an eminent dancer and choreographer of hit shows such as Cats and Phantom of the Opera.
Robinson’s mistakes
Robinson gets one very important point right in his TED talk: simply avoiding error is counterproductive to learning. In the language classroom, mistakes shouldn’t just be tolerated but positively encouraged, because they are the source of the feedback a learner needs in order to improve. If a learner is unwilling to make mistakes with their language, then their ability to use the language is never going to develop.
There are, however, problems with Robinson’s argument. First, it is somewhat incoherent. Do schools seek to “meet the needs of industrialism” or to “produce university professors”? The blend of skills and knowledge needed to work in industry is different to that needed to be a professional academic.
Arguably more importantly, there is reason to believe that Robinson’s view of creativity, as presented at TED, is based on a misunderstanding of what creativity is, where it comes from, and how experiences in the classroom influence it.
Creativity and the brain
I was reminded of Sir Ken’s talk recently when I subscribed to Jared Cooney Horvath’s YouTube channel (I’m still watching online videos, all these years later). Horvath promotes the practical application of neuroscience and cognitive science to teaching and learning.
In a video titled Do Schools Really Kill Creativity? Horvath summarizes and builds on the work of Paulin et al. (2020). Paulin and co-authors studied participants’ responses to the Alternative Use Task, which is fun to try: Think of alternative uses for the following items. Spend two minutes on each item.
- brick
- car tyre
- barrel
- pencil
- shoe
- hanger
In the study, three groups of participants were given this task. In addition to a control group of neurologically healthy participants, there was a group of participants with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), and another group with semantic dementia (SD). Sufferers of bvFTD exhibit degeneration in their brain’s frontal lobe, associated with impulse inhibition, attention, and deliberation. Those with SD, in contrast, show degeneration in the anterior temporal lobe, medial temporal, and orbitofrontal regions. These brain areas are associated with memory.
Studying these three groups meant that the researchers could look at creativity (measured by the Alternative Use Task) in healthy brains, brains where thinking is a problem, and brains where remembering is a problem. Before we look at the results of the study, ask yourself: which do you think is most important to creativity: ability to think or ability to remember?
Predictably, those with the healthiest brains did the best at the Alternative Use Task, thinking of the biggest numbers of uses for the objects across the widest range of categories. Surprisingly, however, the next best performing group were those with bvFTD, whose thinking skills are impaired. They did about half as well as the control group. The group with SD, whose memory skills are impaired, did about half as well as the other group of dementia sufferers.
Of course, the Alternative Use Task is only one narrow measure of creativity and this is a laboratory study in unusual conditions. But still, this casts doubt on Robinson’s assertion that schooling subtracts creativity from students; rather it suggests that schools add to students’ creativity by helping build knowledge which can then be manipulated in novel ways.
How does this happen? Horvath distinguishes between episodic and semantic memories: episodic memories are tied to a context of time and place. Semantic memories are the result of extracting the similarities or connections between multiple episodic memories to produce a semantic fact that stands apart from specific instances. Far from being at odds with semantic memories, creativity comes from their manipulation. In Horvath’s words: “People think if you learn too much, you’re going to become too rigid. No…Rigidity comes with the episodic memories. Fluency, divergence, creativity comes when those become semantic memories and now we can start to play with them.”
For example, I have episodic memories about meeting people while traveling: I’ve met people on a walking tour in Spain, in a hostel in Hungary, in a hostel in Spain, in a restaurant in Austria, in a pub in Portugal, on a plane to Australia, in a hostel in Japan, and so on.
From these and others, I’ve extracted a semantic memory: travel is a good way to meet people.
Creativity comes from applying this semantic memory to a new situation: a friend asks for advice about meeting people, and I suggest taking a trip, staying in hostels, and going on walking tours.
This combination of memory and creativity is also seen in dance, which Robinson so passionately advocated for in his TED talk. While undoubtedly a creative enterprise in parts, dance and choreography also rely on repetition, drilling and memorisation. Gillian Lynne’s Cats is executed with military precision. Becoming a ballet dancer or honing a K-Pop dance routine is about rote memorisation as much as self-expression.
Should we encourage students to be creative?
Creativity should be encouraged in the classroom if it is bound to semantic knowledge. The actual creative output might not be impressive. Daniel Willingham writes: “The bottom line is that posing to students challenges that demand the creation of something new is a task beyond their reach—but that doesn’t mean you should never pose such tasks. Just keep in mind what the student is or is not getting out of it.”
Something that students might get out of creative tasks is motivation, because creative tasks are often enjoyable. Another is the opportunity for practice. Crucially, teachers need to design creative tasks that stimulate language practice. This is the essence of task-based language teaching. When I worked in Austria I was tasked with getting my students to produce weekly plays. The language that featured in these plays was really beside the point; in working with me to brainstorm, script, rehearse, and then perform a show in English they were putting their language to good use in an authentic situation.
Tips for encouraging creativity in the language classroom
1. First and foremost, encourage semantic memories.
I once improvised a (very creative) scenario to teach a class the context for the appropriate use of “will” as opposed to “going to” when discussing spontaneous plans. It involved one of the students acting like they had fallen to the floor, me acting like a passerby and loudly announcing: “I’ll help you.” My boss, observing me, commended how creative and vivid this example was.
Our end-of-week test showed how little impact my dramatic explanation had made. If my students created anything, it was an episodic memory. For semantic memories, repeated exposure, in varied contexts, is required. Teachers using textbooks run up against this all the time: we did this is Unit 3, remember? Good textbooks recycle language from earlier chapters, but if students’ attention isn’t drawn to it, then the recycling doesn’t work. A teacher’s priority should be to create the conditions for regular revisiting of material—spaced repetition—described as “one of the strongest contributions that cognitive psychology has made to education” (Weinstein & Sumeracki, 2019).
2. Make the most of students’ creativity.
Tomlinson & Masuhara (2018) emphasize the role of production tasks when asking students to work with texts. This may involve students creating their text with connections to a text that they have just read or heard, such as writing a sequel to a short story. Crucially for the development of semantic memory, students are encouraged to then compare their creation to the original, looking for examples of target language in the original, articulating generalizations about the use of the target language before editing their own text or creating a new one with the target forms. This approach combines a teacher-selected text with the creativity of students to produce an opportunity for guided discovery.
3. Constrain the creativity.
A problem with running more creative activities in language classrooms is that not all students are able to participate in the same way because of their differences in language ability. A way round this is to constrain activities so that a platform is created for all students to stand on, while building in a sense of challenge for the higher level students.
For instance, very short dialogues can be a really useful way of practicing intonation. When working in Austria, I adapted an idea I’d seen demonstrated at a conference. I dictated a very short, repetitive dialogue to the class, with students writing on tiny pieces of paper (about half the size of a post-it note). I read this with minimal stress and equal pauses between words.
A: The sky is so gray
B: Which guy
A: Which guy
B: Which guy is so great
A: Which guy is so great
B: Which guy is so great
A: The sky
B: The sky
A: The sky is so gray
B: Oh. Yes. The sky is so gray,
Once the students had transcribed, the whole group contributed to getting the correct dialogue on the board. I then asked the students to speculate on who the characters were and how they had misunderstood each other, marking on the board some of the phonology on the dialogue.
A: The sky is so gray
B: Which guy (?)
A: Which guy (?!)
B: Which guy is so great (?)
A: Which guy is so great (?!)
B: Which guy is so great (!)
A: The sky
B: The sky (?)
A: The sky. The sky is so gray
B: Oh. Yes. The sky is so gray
The students then acted the dialogue out in pairs. The dialogues’ simplicity lets the students concentrate on their intonation and stress and how these change with the characters’ emotions of confusion and irritation.
‘Six word stories’ are another great example of constrained creativity. At my first language school, we set up a blackboard in the school common area where students could anonymously write stories as long as they were six words in length. We put some examples on there, but it really is an incredibly simple concept that needs little explanation. Students from all of our classes, from A1 to C2, participated. The one burned into my own memory is this:
Where is heaven? Mum is missing.
To which my reply is:
Oh my word. Best story ever.
References
Paulin, T., Roquet, R., Kenett Y., Savage, S., & Irish, M. (2020). The effect of semantic memory degeneration on creative thinking: A voxel-based morphometry analysis, NeuroImage, 220, ttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117073
Tomlinson, B., & Masuhara, H. (2017). The complete guide to the theory and practice of materials development for language learning. Wiley.
Weinstein, Y. & Sumeracki, M. (2019). Understanding how we learn: A visual guide. Routledge.
Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? Jossey-Bass.
Jamie Emerson (MA, DELTA) has taught, designed, and managed English courses since 2012 in the UK, Europe, South America, and Asia. He has written for a variety of academic and trade publications and spoken at numerous conferences. He works for Advance HE, a member-led charity for the Higher Education sector.