The Time to Stop Mining Young Minds Is Now

Following my experience of watching our class' first TED talk on how education diminishes the creative processes of children, I found myself intrigued by the revolutionary philosophy that the modern education system, indeed, does create a phycological block for creativity, and is a matter that should be approached and looked upon as a great mistake in human processes. The speaker, Ken Robinson, displayed this idea in a very interesting and unique way. Aside from the informative, revolutionary conclusions portrayed by him to the audience, bursts of laughter were also adequately present, keeping the audience well informed while at the same time interested and intrigued. Robinson also used the technique of repetition in his speech to ensure the audience of his main beliefs. One mistake however, was that aside from the jokes and appropriate laughter by the audience, I found his speech to veer off of it's course slightly, especially at the time when he was speaking about Shakespeare's childhood, and what may have been different if his teachers merely told him to "act normal". As he tried to relate this back to the main argument, the audience merely laughed at him as if he was a stand-up comedian. One could easily recognize his stark frustration at his spectators before he was reduced to having to drop the point he was making to return to the original discussion. Robinson, however, did a fine job of rebounding back from this setback, and deliver more hard-hitting examples of  public education being a killer of creativity.  Being a student that has attended school for the past eleven years of my life, one would say that I have the liability to state that, in many aspects, school dulls, or rather suppresses my creativity. I may have a great idea on a school project, and I may start building upon the idea more and more, until I realize that the idea is invalid due to a simple rubric. Also, out of those eleven years of time spent in school, I can definitively say that about, 1.5 years in total have been spent on something creative, such as art or music classes. I can't speak for other students my age, but I could easily guess around the same  fate has been bestowed upon them. In a broad sense, I feel as if schools are lacking in creative education, and focusing too deeply on simple academics. As stated in Ken Robinson's speech, the public education system across the world, although it may not seem like it, is designed around the same principles of putting academics such as math and literature first. Nobody knows for sure what the future entails for people, but if anyone is going to ascend to the challenge of finding out, they will need to exercise and educate their creative minds, and that all starts with changing society's repetive ways. To conclude, I would like to leave-off with a quote that I heard somewhere, "The best way to predict the future, is to create it", and that is exactly what I plan on doing.