Sir Ken Robinson on Arts in Education
What does it mean to
promote creativity in schools and how does it mesh with arts instruction?
Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized voice in
education, has been a longtime leader on issues of creativity and human
potential. In his latest book, Creative
Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (Viking,
2015), Robinson asks educators to revampthe outdated industrial K-12 education system. He wants to see a personalized
approach that engages students’ individual abilities and creativity in math,
science and the arts – to build their skills for the unique challenges of this century.
In a recent interview with Kristin Hubing, School Administrator magazine’s editorial
associate, Robinson discussed the importance of promoting creativity in
schools, models for excellence in creative education and how school leaders can
rectify common misconceptions about arts education.
Q: Why do you think
that promoting creativity in schools is so important right now? Why has this grassroots
revolution come to a peak at this moment?
A: I think it’s always been important to recognize the
significance of creative work in schools. There are several reasons for it.
Human beings are essentially creative. I was speaking to an education
superintendent in Europe a few years ago, it was in Austria, and I was saying that
creativity is an essential part of human intelligence and he said ‘well,
where’s the evidence of that?’ We’re sitting in a building that had been
standing for about 300 years, a beautifully ornate building; we were surrounded
by intricately carved oak panels in this man’s office. There were leather-bound
books everywhere, we were sitting at a beautiful mahogany table, there was the
latest MacBook on his desk, Mozart was playing in the background, and we were
surrounded by beautiful paintings. And I said how much evidence do you need?
Human life is shot through with evidence of our imagination, our creativity and
our productivity. In science and the arts, in technology, it’s everywhere. In
the languages we speak, in the way we design our environment, in the clothes
that we wear, the food we eat. Human life is creative. So I’ve been arguing for
a long time that we should recognize both the nature and diversity and
importance of creativity in education as a whole, but there’s a real sense in
which if we don’t help young people develop their imaginative powers, their
abilities to be creative across the whole curriculum, then we’re really doing a
huge disservice. We’re not really helping them cultivate some of the most
importance qualities and capabilities they have.
Why it’s so important just now is that the world is changing
very quickly and the ability to contribute, to adapt, to be actively engaged in
the world around us has never been more important and for that we don’t need a
rigid curriculum with a narrow focus, we need a broad-based one that really
does celebrate the full range of our intelligence and our creative capacity.
I’ve been at this for a long time. It was the centerpiece of a strategy I did
in the U.K. before I moved to America. I wrote a book about 12 years ago called
Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative.
I think it’s becoming more important just now because the culture of testing
and standardization in America has become so intense that it really is frustrating
the best efforts of schools and teachers and superintendents to provide the
kind of education that children need. No Child Left Behind hasn’t significantly
moved the needle in terms of achievement. It’s actually frustrated efforts in
terms of instruction and I think it’s time to recognize that it’s not a
successful approach in schools and there are better approaches.
Q: In Creative Schools, you mention that the
Boston Arts Academy has been sustained by its visionary leadership. What impresses
you about how they approach integrating arts into their academic curriculum?
A: The Boston
Arts Academy is one of a number of schools that we feature in the book. And one
of the principles it illustrates is that the way to engage young people is to
seek out their talents and their interests. The core of this is to say that
education is not a mechanical or an impersonal process of mass production. It’s
a personal process, you’re dealing with human beings here, with lives and
biographies and feelings and aspirations and anxieties living real lives in
real communities. Some of the problems that schools face don’t originate in the
schools, they just show up in schools because of the lives kids are leading
outside in their communities, in the streets and with their families. Kids show
up with complicated lives and then to give them a diet of just testing and
sitting at desks all day doing something they’re not interested in exacerbates
the problem so the system itself can cause the problems as well.
At Boston
Arts Academy they are offering a much richer diet of opportunities. They are
seeking out and cultivating the talents and interests and passions of the
students themselves and it’s through the arts, it’s dance, music, theater,
visual arts, but it’s also that they offer a full program of more conventional
academic work. They’re not looking for established prowess in the arts before
they accept young people into the academy. They say “We’re not looking for
children who can dance, but we’re looking for kids who can’t not dance.”
They’re looking for potential. And they cultivate that potential. And what they
find at the academy is firstly they have very high graduation rates. Something
like 94% of the graduates of the school go off to college every year. And it’s
a proportion; they have a very high graduation rate from the school as a whole.
They serve a very diverse range of Boston’s neighborhoods and they offer
collaborative work and they work cross-culturally, they work in a
cross-disciplinary way, but what they also find, and this happens all the time,
particularly when you see schools with big arts programs, is that achievements
of the students don’t just go up in the art discipline, they go up across the
board. They find that they’re more engaged in other parts of the curriculum as
well. So it’ a real win-win, I think. And for me it’s common sense that we should
be adopting these sorts of approaches because the results are so spectacular.
And it’s not mysterious that they should be because we’re tapping into the real
creative energy and passions of the kids themselves, rather than depressing
them.
Q: How can educators
demonstrate the benefits of art education without limiting it with the endless
evaluation that kids are put through in other subjects? How else can it be
measured?
A: There are
different areas of the arts. For example, I was a professor of arts education
for some years in the U.K. and I wrote a whole series of curriculum guides on
the arts and sometimes people conflate creativity with the arts, so if you say
are you creative they often say they’re not, and what they mean is they don’t
think they’re artistic. Creativity is a much bigger idea. It takes in science
and technology and math – the whole curriculum. But if you think of the arts in
particular, there are several aspects to a balanced arts education. The first
is it should cover a range of disciplines. It should cover visual arts,
performing arts, literary arts. Secondly, the arts are not just forms of
recreation or leisure. And I always want to oppose the idea that they’re
somehow categorically different from the sciences. The sciences are ways of
organizing our understanding of the world around us. And they’re rigorous and
they’re objective at their best and highly creative, too. But the arts are
rigorous and highly disciplined and creative too and they have more to do with
understanding the world within us and how we can relate to the world around us.
That’s what music and poetry and dance and theater are all about. Understanding
our experiences in the world, our personal experience, our relationships with
other people, our own perceptions of the world around us.
I was on the board of
the Royal Ballet. If you look at dancers rehearsing, if you go to orchestras,
if you look at players in rehearsal, if you look at the techniques in lighting,
these are very rigorous and demanding technical processes. We wouldn’t expect
young children to be experts in any of these areas any more than we expect them
to excel in calculus when they’re 5 years old. It’s a process, it’s
developmental. So as soon as we’re clear that there are techniques involved,
that there are issues of value and judgement involved, the quality of the work,
it becomes very feasible to put together a supportive and proper schedule of
assessment criteria and we’re doing it. Art schools have been doing it for years.
It’s perfectly feasible and actually necessary that we should do it.
Q: What would you say
the biggest misconception that people have about creativity in schools is and
how do you think school leaders can help change that view?
A: There are
various misconceptions about creativity. One is to say that people conflate it
with the arts and think it’s only about the arts. Now I’m, as you can tell, a
committed advocate in support of the arts in schools. I think if you don’t have
a balance in schools between the arts, the sciences, the humanities, physical
education, mathematics, languages, then you’re not doing education. You’re
doing something else, but you’re not giving people a proper full and balanced
education. And I’m not saying the arts are more important than the sciences,
but they’re just as important. And actually there are a lot of interactions
between them. There are some wonderful cross-disciplinary projects between the
arts and sciences as well, which I’ve seen in schools. So creativity firstly is
not only about the arts, it’s about the whole curriculum. It’s important and
necessary to develop creative capacities in the sciences, in mathematics and so
on. In technology. And we’re surrounded by the fruits of that form of creative
thinking.
Secondly, there’s an assumption, a misconception, that only special
people are creative and that it’s a rather rare commodity and it’s not. Human
beings are born with immense creative capacity. But we have to cultivate it. So
a creative curriculum, a creative school, involves everybody as well as the
whole curriculum.
And the third misconception is that creativity is just doing
what you like. You know, just kind of brainstorming and coming up with random
ideas and without having checks and balances and that somehow it’s the opposite
of factual learning and discipline. And that’s a complete misconception. You
can’t be creative in writing or in music or in science or in dance without
having progressively better control over the discipline of it. It’s a developmental
process, but discipline isn’t a hindrance to creative work, it facilitates it,
properly conceived. But that’s a delicate pedagogical issue. I mean I know
people who spent years learning to play the piano who never want to pick up the
piano again because they were so put off by it. You know it’s about kind of
feeding in techniques and encouraging techniques in the service of producing
interesting work. And that’s what great art teachers know. I suppose the last
thing is that there is therefore an assumption that creativity can’t be taught.
It absolutely can. It means having a clear definition of creativity and also
understanding that teaching is more than direct instruction. That teaching is
mentoring and coaching and encouraging and critiquing and it takes in much more
than factual instruction.
So I have a definition of creativity which is a process of
having original ideas that have value. It’s about coming up with fresh
thinking. It doesn’t have to be new to the entire planet, but it certainly has
to be new to you. And it’s about critical judgment. Critical judgment isn’t the
opposite of creative work, it’s an integral part of it. You look at people
designing scientific experiments or writing a piece of music – there’s a
constant process of checks and balances. Does this work? Does this feel right?
And then when the work is produced of course people form their own views of it.
So I’ve never wanted to divorce critical judgment and values from creativity.
The challenge for educators is to understand how these things connect.
Q: Could you provide
an example of successful collaboration between the arts and the sciences at the
pre-collegiate level?
A: There are
many, and one of the ones that we talk about in the book, which has become
quite well-known now, is the work of High Tech High. But Boston Arts Academy is
worth mentioning as well. They have a lot of activity and disciplinary work and
of course the arts themselves involve lots of technical work. High Tech High is
an interesting case in point because they do a great deal of work obviously in
technology, they do technological projects, they assign students tasks which
combine the exploration of scientific principles, the application of them to technological
projects, which also intersect with the humanities. So for example in the
documentary film that I gave an interview for, called Most Likely to Succeed, students are asked to look at why some
cultures grow and develop and survive and others don’t. And that involved a
close look at the interaction of technology, the agricultural practices and
industrial practices. But the thing about High Tech High is the vast majority
of the work is project based, collaborative. So they don’t break the day into
periods like conventional high schools do, they don’t ring bells all the time,
they’re not asked to put their hands up with questions. The whole place has a
workshop atmosphere, rooms where they are working collaboratively on projects,
creating models, doing presentations; it’s like a vibrant workspace. And of
course there’s a huge level of engagement.
That’s a big part of my argument
here is that kids love to learn. They are natural learners, we’re all born with
an appetite for learning and we achieve extraordinary things like learning to
speak in the first few years of our lives. You couldn’t teach a child to speak,
it’s far too complicated. You don’t sit them down to learn to talk. They just
learn. Education is supposed to help them to learn, the idea of education is
that there are some things that kids need to learn which are too complicated
for them to do without expert help. You can learn to speak, but learning to
write is a different thing. You can’t go around inventing your own writing
system. We have writing systems and people need to be introduced to them. You
don’t just pick them up. Like calculus. It wouldn’t be reasonable to allow
children just to go off and invent their own system of calculus when we spent
hundreds of years generating these things. It’s a huge cultural acquisition. So
education is organized learning.
The problem is, and this is part of what I’m
pointing to in the book, is the structures of education themselves often
frustrate learning inadvertently. Like breaking the day up into bits all the
time or keeping kids rigidly in age groups, like dividing the day into certain
subjects, when actually subjects and disciplines often feed into each other. If
you change the structures of education, you get remarkably different results.
For example, in America we’re told about 7,000 kids a day leave high school
without graduating. Over a million kids a year do that. But I see kids being
re-engaged all the time in alternative education programs that are more
personalized. You see huge levels of disengagement. You have kids being
diagnosed in elementary schools, they’re being asked to sit for hour after hour
at desks doing tests or getting ready for tests when they need to be up and
around moving. You see them being diagnosed with ADD, they’re being medicated,
but if you get them out of their desks and you get them moving, a lot of these
problems start to disappear. In other words, it’s the system that creates the
problems that we think we’re solving so when people say to me “how do we solve
these problems – disengagement and non-graduation and so on,” Part of my answer
is, well, stop causing them. Do something different. Try a different method and
the book is just full of examples of schools and teachers who are doing that
and getting much better results.
Q: In Creative Schools, you suggested one
positive step for schools to take is to become tied more closely to the fabric
of their communities. What do you mean by that and what are some of the
benefits?
A: Schools are,
when properly conceived, not testing centers. They’re centers of learning. And
the best schools always have closeness. The kids spend more time out of school
than they do in it. And they come from real backgrounds, they live in real
neighborhoods, they have relationships and they have, in most cases, I say most
because of course the world is changing very quickly, but they have families
and connections and lives outside the school and people whose children are in
schools have hopes and aspirations for them as well. So schools shouldn’t be
isolated ghettos in their communities. They are ideally enmeshed in the fabric
of the community. A great school has those connections with the community, can
be a hub of community life, a center for performances, for adult learning, for
teacher workshops, places where the facilities are made available to others,
certainly to students but to others as well. Great schools have theaters, they
have gymnasiums, they have sports facilities, so they can be a real hub and a
great school raises the hopes and aspirations of the community as well.
That’s
what we’re arguing for – that if you have a broad curriculum and an expansive
conception of the schools’ role in the community, they can bring life to
neighborhoods. And if they are closed and restricted, they can also drain life
and expectations in the community. Schools have always been a gateway to
opportunity for kids and can be for their families as well. So what I’m trying
to encourage in the book is a broader conception of what a school is. Schools
to me are any communities of learners and the learners don’t have to be just
the students. The great schools I know recognize that teachers are learners too
and teachers can also be students and students can be teachers. We can have
adults other than teachers teaching in schools and also people older than young
people actually in schools taking classes alongside them. And there are lots of
examples of schools being reinvented like that. And also these aren’t fresh
ideas, they’ve been around for a long time.
I do have reservations and
anxieties about this multibillion dollar testing industry and it’s worth
remembering that it is a business and most of these tests are designed by
companies for profit. Whatever their other intentions may be, this multibillion
dollar industry is not regulated in any way and every time there’s a new twist
in the curriculum, every time there’s a new set of standards, it’s another
bonanza for the testing companies. One estimate is that the education testing industry
generates revenues of about $16 billion per year in the U.S. And all that’s
coming out of the budgets of state and districts, out of the education budgets.
You can imagine what we could do to improve the nation’s schools with an extra
$16 billion a year to spend on facilities and training and cultural programs
and instead it’s going into testing. So now I’m encouraging people to rethink
what schools can be like and a lot of things that go on in schools aren’t
mandated and aren’t required by law, but are just other things we’ve done for
years and we keep doing them because we always did them. So there are lots of
ways that schools can reinvent themselves internally and also can recreate
their relationships with the communities around them and I say all the evidence
is that when that’s done imaginatively, creatively and with passion and with
commitment then we get extraordinary levels of achievement and a very different
outcome.