The school "kills creativity," said Ken Robinson in a 2006 TED talk that, to date, accumulates more than 66 million views. That conference, which made the already influential British pedagogue and advisor to a dozen governments famous, has been remembered again on social networks as a result of his death, at the age of 70, due to cancer. A claimed lecturer and bestselling author, he became an obsession to defend a radical reform of an educational system where, in his opinion, creativity is restricted with a very limited vision of what intelligence is.
Sir Ken proudly carried that knighthood that Elizabeth II granted him for his work in promoting the arts, whose disciplines he considered neglected in schools compared to other subjects cataloged by other experts as more "useful", such as mathematics or mathematics. languages. Her defense of a school environment that fostered creativity, rather than being reduced to academic knowledge and especially to success in exams, was caricatured by the Orthodox, but it also won her a cohort of followers.
Originally from Liverpool, the city in the north of England where he was born in 1950, Robinson lived his last years between London and his home in Los Angeles, where he died on August 21 surrounded by his family. Leave a wife, two children and a granddaughter. The endless tributes to his figure that have occurred since then on social networks highlights a pioneering spirit that was forged in his years at the university, where he studied English language and theater before obtaining a doctorate with a thesis on the importance of teaching of dramatic art in secondary education. In that project is the genesis of what was his body of work, the vindication of theater, dance, music or painting to encourage children to discover their talent in an educational system stripped of their strict corsets. Corsets that work according to the old industrial production system, which provides the same teaching to all students without taking into account different learning needs.
It is with heavy hearts that we announce Sir Ken Robinson died peacefully yesterday, 21st August 2020, surrounded by family after a short battle with cancer.
We will be following up with a further update as we begin to follow Sir Ken's wishes and honor his legacy. pic.twitter.com/IS3HsgeSXl
For 12 years he worked as a professor of arts education at the University of Warwick (north of London) and his proposals for change ended up seducing the Labor Government of Tony Blair, who in 1998 entrusted him with the so-called “Robinson report”. He also advised the Home Rule Government of Northern Ireland on a creative and economic development strategy integrated into the peace process, or the Singapore authorities on their project to create a creation hub in Southeast Asia.
Robinson always denounced the type of educational management prevailing in the developed world and, in this line, despised the PISA tests (and its prestige derived from the endorsement of the OECD) because he considered that it was reduced to a mere competition between countries to position themselves in the ranking international education and thus justify its policies. The interests of the students, he argued, remain in the background and above all all those children who will never go to university are left in the gutter, when what it would be about is to help them explore their potential, their absorption capacity and risk, to invite them to choose from a wide range of creative possibilities.
- Ken Robinson: "The school has a very limited vision of what intelligence is"
As a successful author, Ken Robinson reflected his ideas in books Element: Discovering your passion changes everything (Clave), translated into 23 languages, or the most recent Creative Schools (Clave). But the best compendium of his proposals for a drastic reform of the obsolete educational system may be in that TED talk from 14 years ago, brimming with humor, amenity and pedagogy. Also from passion when it comes to denouncing how Western culture has devalued, or directly ignored, the tremendous potential of creativity. Most kids carry it inside, he claimed, until their wings are clipped at school.
