Does Education Kill Creativity?

I like many others believe that education is killing creativity, and from a very young age. It destroys pupil’s natural curiosity, and they do all of this in the name of learning.

The education system as it is, is very standardized. All education does is prepare students to sit examinations rather than actually encourage them to think for themselves. It is very strict. It does not allow children to think for themselves. Quite often there are any number of solutions to any number of problems. However if you choose an answer that is deemed incorrect on an examination while in actuality is correct, you will get penalized and deducted a point. This is not the way we should want children to view the education system. There needs to be some flexibility, rather than this strict, condensed way of thinking we have now.

In the video below Sir Ken Robinson says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” There were many poignant statements in the video however this one stuck with me like no other. It got me thinking about my school life, and my life in general. All those times where a teacher told me I was wrong but deep in my gut knew I was right. It also got me thinking about my everyday life out of education. I look at all the things I have in my bedroom right now and think, “Whose idea was it to make that?” and “Was there ever a time that person was told that they couldn’t do that?”

Many of the world’s greatest minds, scientists and innovators have dropped out of education at some point in their lives. Bill Gate, founder of Microsoft, who is currently the richest man on the planet with a net worth of $84.7 billion, dropped out of Harvard University, one of the United States’ most prestigious schools, to pursue his creative vision. Similarly with Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, one of the world’s most popular websites, dropped out of Harvard to continue working on a creative project that was not only not taught to him, but actively discouraged by Harvard University.

While it is true to some degree that you need to be educated in a certain field to pursue any creative dreams you may have, education does have a tendency to stifle those ambitions in order to educate people on how to answer 10 questions on an exam paper.