Do schools kill creativity?

About the need to let schools be more organic, to work with movable people and start the shift and to give students space for mistakes.

Interview with Sir Ken Robinson

Robinson:
There have been changes in England. We had the 10th anniversary of the report this year and I was in London last week for a meeting that brought together some of the original committee members and also one of the ministers who commissioned the report, and we had contributions from other politicians who were around at the time the report was produced. There are a couple of things to say about this. One thing is that if you are interested in creativity, which I am, and I think it is essential, then it isn’t just a question of just adding something on to the end of the school day. It has implications for the curriculum and for teaching and assessment. The reason I say this is that when the government commissioned the report in England, I think they thought that we were going to suggest things they could do without changing the structure in any substantial way. And we don’t believe that; I don’t believe that. You know, we had in Britain, at that time, a literacy strategy, because they prognosticated kids’ leaving school not really being able to read and write as well as they should. So the government developed a “literacy strategy” and part of that was something called a “literacy hour”, which is a time every day during which teachers were required to go through certain materials that had been produced by the curriculum council with the kids. And I am sure that some members of the government thought we would recommend something like a creativity hour – where kids would go crazy for an hour on a Friday. My argument at the time was that when you are serious about creativity, and you should be, then we do need a strategy for it. And the report set out a strategy but it had quite power-reaching implications. So when we talk about the response ten years on, you have to differentiate among those who responded to it. The teaching profession loved it; we had a fantastic level of response and approval. Head teachers loved the report; they believed that it expressed things that they felt they wanted to do anyway. We had fantastic responses from employers. You know that “London Times” ran an article and said that even if it was a report about education, it was also about the economy. The London Times said this report raised some of the most far-reaching issues for business in the 21st century. A lot of things happened. There was also a project set up called “Creative Partnerships”.

So this is also a result of what you recommended in your report?

Robinson:
Yes. There were changes made to the curriculum by the national curriculum council.

What kind of changes?

Robinson:
There was more freedom in the curriculum. One of the problems we had at the time was that the government had introduced a curriculum in England in 1988 and it was just too full, far too much going on. And teachers were under tremendous pressure to get through this material. It was also supported by a really, I felt, draconian system of school inspection, you know, where schools could be penalised for not reaching the right standards, You know, it is a long and difficult, complicated issue, this matter of countability. But the result was that schools and teachers were fighting to do something that was outside of the national curriculum. So it had a long-term affect on the “Creative Partnerships”, and the curriculum has been relaxed – I don’t want to say just because of our report, but it was a big influence. The school inspection system now is lighter, and it refers specifically to creativity and it did not before, and I think it deeply affected the language of education in Britain. You know government reports now always refer to innovation and creativity and to personalised learning. I am not saying all of this is because of the report, but it had a major influence, I think, and that’s what came out of last week’s meeting. Minister Susan A. Blain was saying in regard to this report that these things probably would not have happened in this way. But I think the problematic is that it is a process. We were recommending things that the government did not really want to hear but which they needed to hear. If you say things governments like, you get implemented more quickly; if you say things they don’t like you may not have any influence at all, which is why we worked a lot with people outside the government to try and make it happen. I don’t think it is all about the government – that’s the thing. It’s about getting schools to change, about getting cultural boundaries to change.

Who needs to be smart in your experience, in the sense of where should one start to get things going? At the moment there are conferences in Austria that are dealing with different levels at which change could be effected.
At a personal level this means teachers at the schools, on a more structural level it means the school system and the government. What would you recommend with regard to where to start first; what is the next step? In most cases it stays the “same old story”. What would you consider is a reasonable place to start?

Robinson:
Well, all systems are different; that was what I was hearing last night, as we spoke about it. As I understand it, head teachers in Austria don’t have that much authority over the curriculum or over whom they hire or how the teachers are trained, so you have to figure out where the change points are in your system. In England we felt that you need a theory change and the government has some role in that. The role of government is to help to create a climate and to offer permission to do these things. It’s not to have all the ideas. It’s like with your project here, you don’t go into this project in schools thinking “we have got to have all the ideas”. The kids have got ideas already. They may not know they have got them but they have them. What you do is create a climate of permission where they feel they can contribute their ideas, so we wanted the government at least to endorse this agenda and to do something that they could do. There were some funding issues that we wanted them to address, for example.
But really, the big change we wanted to happen was actually in the schools. We wanted teachers to realise that they have some freedoms that they did not appreciate. You know, there are some things that go on in schools in Britain – I have learned it’s true here, too – that are mandated and people think they have to be. You know: that you have to have 10 periods a day with 40 minutes each, that you have to have a lunch break of a certain length, you have to have a bell ring, you have to do the same thing every day. Actually, there is a lot of freedom in organising a school culture if you appreciate it. So we made recommendations to lots of different groups. But the other thing is to emphasise what people often talk about: “How do you take this to scale?” A lot of the language you use for education is drawn from manufacturing: how do we standardise this, how do we replicate the model, how do we scale it up, and it’s a bit like we’re trying to produce the same kind of thing: it’s like producing motorcars. I think we need a different metaphor for education; we need more of an agricultural metaphor. Really, schools are much more organic. Farmers know that you can’t make anything grow; it grows itself – you just create the conditions for it. And that is what you are doing in schools: you create conditions where people can flourish in a different way. What we also know is that therefore every school is different; they are all unique and we should value that; we know that in the arts all the great orchestras are different. They have different people and characteristic sounds. All the great bands, all the great painters are different. We don’t value them because they are all doing the same thing; we value them because they are all doing different things. They might cover the same repertoire and they all play the notes and they all know how the instruments work, but you value them because of what they uniquely bring their performances.
And schools should be like that. They are human communities, so you want them to develop their own cultures while covering the things all schools have to cover. So part of it is creating those sort of missions, and I think it also comes down to pedagogy. If teachers see their role as passing on information and then checking whether the kids have heard it or not, you never have a creative culture. The real key to this is a different sort of teaching style. And that is a long-term business. This is why the artist programmes are good. Because certainly the ones I have seen know how you create space for people to think creatively. They sold them high standards and that is not incompatible. But they know how to give people room, to ask open questions, to create learning situations where they bring different approaches to solving problems. So what I want to say is, I don’t think there is a single starting point; you have to know your system. If I worked in this system, I would want to spend a bit of time working out what the sticking point is.
If you are looking at an individual school, there is always something. I remember years ago I did a review of a college of performing arts, and the president of the college was having problems. And I was asked to go in and help sort out the problem. I spent a week there with an outside group of consultants and we came to the conclusion that the problem was the president. She was the problem. I just told her. It wasn’t that she was the problem in every way, she was actually good in many ways, but there were some things she tried to do that she should have had somebody else do. She needed a good deputy. She was overstretched. And therefore she could not help people’s anxieties because they could see she was not managing. So we said you solve this with a structural shift. Sometimes the building is the problem, sometimes the head of science is the problem; there is always something that is the problem. So it’s about knowing what the principles are but then getting people to personalise and customise: troubleshooting, you act as the director. So to me, taking it to scale does not mean replicating it, it means spreading the principles and helping people understand how to apply them in their respective setting.

Obviously some schools have learned how to manage to get more space and how to get things done that they want to do and they are good practice examples, and you can have those “stars” that are good examples for the others. And then again you have the turning point: where is the critical mark, what time does it take to have enough schools so that you can say, well now it’s the system that does it. Just now it is only single schools that from time to time find ways to do it.

Robinson:
And, by the way, that is a big challenge. It took two hundred years to establish the system the way it is now. It’s a big shift. And there is a lot of invested interest in that and keeping it the way it is. There are unions, there are parental pressures, there are ideological ones. One of the biggest ideological issues is the grammar school and the secondary modern issue. You know, “Hauptschule” and “Gymnasium”. That’s a big issue that people are deeply committed to, a certain view of intelligence. And that takes a big shift. But what I think is, you have to get on with it; you know it might take 30 years, but we should at least start on it.
I have been involved in arts education most of my life. I moved to California eight years ago and one of the first things I had to do was speak for a public hearing by the state government in Sacramento on arts education. And the name was “Artistry Day”, the aim being to argue for improved provision for the arts. So people walked up, they stood up – actors, writers, dancers, some famous people – stood up and said how important the arts are and that we should have more of the arts at school, and I remember thinking two things: First of all, that you could have taken the transcript of that meeting and put any date on it in the past 30 years and it would not have made any difference. We spend our lifetime saying that stuff and we are not the first. People were saying this before we were born, before state education began, people were saying “this is not right”. We always had a radical fringe to education, be it Montessori or Fröbel or Steiner or Child-Centredness in Progressive Education; I mean, some of the great reforms have come from this part of the world. The great movements have often retraced it in this part of Europe. The trick is to get them into the mainstream. And I think that is about time and tide, and I think the time may be coming, because this system won’t persist like this, it can’t. It won’t be successful for much longer, it won’t take many more parents to have their kids coming out of university with expensive degrees and no jobs, it won’t take many more kids dropping out to school saying: “We don’t need to go anyway; we have got the Internet.”
I do think the time for the shift is coming. But the other thing about the struggle is that at the same time nobody ever goes to a math conference or a math hearing to explain why math is important. Here you always have to say how you can make it better. And that shows the depth of the problem. We are living in a world that has been characterised by the enlightenment of romanticism, its division in the 18th century between arts and sciences, and we are still living it.

And also, what I think is still true, is that in an average school, at least in Austria, pupils are mostly trained to be right, you and I say if we are not prepared to be wrong you will never come up with anything original. So what kind of suggestion could you give to bridge this gap, because on the one hand people understand that it is necessary to make mistakes and to be wrong, on the other hand the whole school system is building on being right and giving the right answer.

Robinson:
Well, to me, part of this is giving people real life examples of how creativity works. One of the people on this commission in the UK was a man who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; his name is Harry Kroto. He’s one of the world’s distinguished chemists but he also is a professional designer. We had long conversations about his processes and I asked him one day how many of his experiments failed – this is a man who won the Nobel Prize  –and he said: “I don’t know, about 90%”. But he said failure is not the right word for it; you are finding out what does not work. All creative processes are like that. If you are involved in a creative process, you have to be prepared for it to be a process. Try to create original ideas, try to pursue possibilities, and it won’t all work. I wrote the book “The Element”, which also talks about Richard Feynman the physicist. He was one of the most spectacular men of the 20th century. There is a story he tells about winning the Nobel Prize and he said it started because he was in the dining room of Cornell University and a student was walking past him with a plate full of food and he fell and this plate went into the air, and in Cornell they have a blue logo and it was on the plate, and Richard said he saw this thing going up the air and he was fascinated by it because the plate was spinning round and this thing was wobbling, and the wobble of the Cornell logo seemed to be going at a different speed than the plate and he said: “It just struck me”. That interested me to start with. Most people would have been more concerned about the student falling on the floor but he is not even looking at the student; he says: “Look at the wobble, that’s nice”. The thing is, we would have never even heard about that incident if Richard Feynman had not been there watching it. So he just jotted down some notes on the laws of motion on a napkin. He did not think much about it and went back to work and a few days later he found this napkin again and started playing around and then it occurred to him that this was a similar problem to the rules of motions of electrons, which is the thing he had been working on, and there was an analogy. And he started playing around with it for fun and then over the next weeks suddenly things started to unfold. “All these equations started rushing out of me,” he said, “like champagne out of a bottle, and I eventually wrote down the laws of motion, for which I won the Nobel Prize.” I found that really fascinating. But there was a whole process between the guy falling over and Feynman going to Stockholm. And there were lots of false starts. It’s like directing a play. It would be highly unusual for a group of actors to walk on stage and then do the performance that they are going to do that night and never change it. It’s like composing a piece of music and that is what I mean. I don’t mean that to be creative you have to get it wrong. I mean getting it right is an explorative process and you have to be willing to endure lots of false starts and experiments and trial and error. So if you want to encourage the capacity for creativity, you have to allow that and you do that in pedagogical terms by not starting with the position “I know the answer and you’ve just got to figure that out and here it is.” You give people the opportunities to work with open-ended questions. I’ll give you one quick example: I was in a university where there is a guy who runs a creative course within the science and engineering department. He said, we gave the group this year the question to work out how many petrol stations there are in Indiana. Nobody knows, obviously there is a number but the interesting thing is not that they come up with the right number but how they go about answering that question. And they do so in all kinds of ways. They have to go find out things they do know, like what is the population of Indiana, on average how many cars get sold to how many families in America, how far apart are the towns, what is the average mileage for a family car. They cover it from all kinds of different angles: how many freeways are there, how many tires are sold in Illinois, completely head-banging stuff, and he said it’s not so much that they are coming out with the right answer, what we are really trying to do is to get them to think how would you arrive at an answer like that. And he said, we get them into ten groups and they all come back with an answer and what astonishes them all is that all ten groups choose completely different routes. They probably don’t all have the same number, but to do what they need to do they need really solid mathematics skills and they need to think divergently to get to it. It does not mean that to be creative you have to be mistaken; you just have to be prepared to fail some along the way. 

What strikes me is that 50% of the schools are totally fine with what you say, and trying to do that, but when teachers are really under pressure and you recommend that they open up the space and give time to develop and they just can’t, how can you reach them?

Robinson:
They can, but there’s a quote from Benjamin Franklin; I’ll paraphrase it: He said there are three classes of people, those who are immovable, those who are movable and those who move. And I think you work with the people who are movable and the people who move, and people who are immovable just are immovable, and there always will be people that are just downright immovable. Live is too short. Let’s go to the place where you can make it happen; it won’t be with everybody immediately, and sooner or later they will retire.
You have to be pragmatic. It’s a process of lighting fires. At the moment I am involved in a serious of issues in America. In education in America there is a federal government but the real policies are made at the state level, so if you want to move the needle, you need to work at the state level. They have 50 states and in some of them you are wasting your time. Pennsylvania, California, Illinois, New York State, you know they are too big, unless you are the governor and even then, they are too big, too populated, too complicated, too encrusted, but there are 35 other states, most of which have populations of fewer than 5 million people, but they are states. So I was approached by the state of Oklahoma about four years ago and they asked me if I’d help them; they wanted to become the state of creativity. I worked there for a couple of years, but the thing is, in Oklahoma there are three and a half million people, which means you get all the main policy makers in the same room. I did the whole structure in Northern Ireland as part of the peace process [editor’s note: Sir Ken Robinson was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development for the Northern Ireland Peace Process]. Well, Northern Ireland is notorious but there are fewer than 2 million people living there. So if you get the right five people you can really move the thing. So I have been working with Oklahoma and now we have got Wisconsin who wants to get involved in it and two other states who want to get involved in what we are calling the “Creative States of America”. But there might be so many who don’t want to have anything to do with this, but okay, we work with the ones who do. I gave a speech to the national government association a few years ago and it was interesting because the Governor of Oklahoma Brad Henry found himself surrounded by the governors at the end of the speech saying: “What do you do? How is this working?” And that is partly how I think it works, and then probably two more get involved and you grow it. That is what I mean, I think it is organic. You have to grow it organically. You can’t impose it mechanistically because if people want to move, they will.

The Interview with Sir Ken Robinson was conducted on the occasion of his lecture at the Talks of I Like to move it move it/Linz 09, which were held in Cooperation with KKA.