Great talk by Ken Robinson on creativity and education

Excellent talk, here are a few most interesting and witty quotes from this wonderful, highly entertaining speaker.

- Creativity is as important as literacy

- If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original

- We are educating people out of their creative capacities

- All children are born artists (Picasso). The problem is that we are educated out of it.

- How annoying would that be, to have a 7 year old Shakespeare in your class : stop speaking like that, its confusing everybody!

- Our son had a girlfriend, Sara, a love of his life.. he has known her for a month. He said: “I will never find another girl like Sara”. We were rather pleased about it. Actually she was the main reason why we were leaving the country.

- Professors look at their bodies as transport for their heads. It s a way to bring their heads to meetings.

- We have to radically rethink our view on intelligence. 1. Intelligence is diverse – we think about the world in all ways we are experiencing it: visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. 2. Intelligence in dynamic – intelligence is interactive: creativity (i.e. having original ideas that have value) comes through interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

- Women are better at multitasking. This is true: if my wife is cooking a meal, which is not often (thankfully), she is also dealing with things on the phone, she is talking to kids, painting the ceiling, she is doing an open heart surgery. If I am cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, if she walks in, I get annoyed- I say, ‘Terrty, please, I am trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break’.

- If the tree falls in the forest, and nobody seen/heard it fall, did it actually fall. If a man speaks his mind in the forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

- Most people would describe her (Jilian Lynn) rather fugitive behaviour as ADHD nowadays, but it was in 30s, and ADHD was not invented yet, it wasn’t an available condition, people were not aware they could have that.

- The doctor said she was not sick but she was a dancer. She was taken to a dance school where she met people like her, who had to move in order to think. She entered Royal Ballet School, she graduated and had a wonderful dance career, she was involved in the world-known musicals. She is a multi-millionaire now. Somebody else might have put her on medication (when she was young), and told her to calm down.

- We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.

- "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." Jonas Salk

Hermann Hesse

I just cannot get enough of him.. his mind is like mine.. for the first time in my life there is that feeling that someone might understand, might have same thoughts, feelings as myself. Deep down there, there is that desire to see it as a sign, as myself finally moving in the direction, making the right decisions towards finding the Self and maybe finding that happiness that all philosophers and thinkers seem to be talking about, and peace.

This is one of my favorite poems of his: beautiful, sensual and very close to my heart

Rain (from Wandering 'Farm')

Soft rain, summer rain
Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees,
Oh, how lovely and full of blessing
To dream and be satisfied.

I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be lead elsewhere.

I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.

Heart, how torn are you,
How blessed to plow down blindly,
To think nothing, to know nothing,
Only to breathe, only to feel.