Education kills Creativity

  I watched a TED lecture video “Education kills creativity.” As the name which depicted the first letters of Technology, Entertainment, Design, the video we saw was quite educational and also fun. Sir Ken Robinson, who talks in this video, shows us a really humorous and also educational speech. In the video, Ken Robinson keeps talking about how and why education is lethal to creativity. According to his words, we are educated out of creativity in order to be like others, assuming we should follow the major.

 Ken Robinson’s point is this. Creativity could achieve fantastic works. It could show people how god looks like for example. Actually, the speaker spoke this in order to entertain the audiences but it kind of makes sense. A girl was drawing a picture and when her teacher asked what she is drawing, she responded that she was drawing the picture of god. When the teacher said “Nobody knows how god looks like”, the girl responded “They would in a minute.” This is just a story for humor but isn’t creativity the thing which enables these things to exist? That humor was quite funny and what enabled it to exist? Creativeness did. Of course in reality, we would need a certain degree of education in order to let a person reach a certain level of intelligence. Without the knowledge which exists in the present, it would be a hard thing to create new ones. We build up things using our creativity and knowledge as the ingredients. The most impressive part about his speech was when he expressed how we lose creativeness by the term “We are educated out of creativeness.”

 Some people might say education is necessary in order to make any kind of human resources including creative people. They say that people should be educated and thus, become useful to the society. I have a rather different opinion.

 I agree with Ken Robinson’s idea. Education might pass off the ideas from old generation and would certainly keep the human race comfortable, but most or actually nearly every student doesn’t want the current education system. It forces information into students’ brains which is called cramming education. Forcing young students to learn information is an apt way to produce thinking computers for information storage. However, it is not that efficient in growing creative and wise people who would lead and make the world a better place. According to Ken Robinson, creativity could make fantastic things happen. We could not risk losing these possibilities in order to produce human dictionaries.

  Even though I agree with the professor’s idea, I cannot ignore the flaws in the statement “Education kills creativity.” There are many kinds of education and some of them are even designed only in order to develop one’s creativity. Simple memorizing of information would certainly keep the students from being creative and forcing them think in a certain way would do the same as well. However, nowadays, there are education systems which actually helps one develop creativeness and the trend is to increase one’s creativity. I believe that the creativity-killing-education would soon disappear and would finally focus on what students want and truly needs. 

First assignment!

 I don’t have a lot of experiences with writing but still, I have my unique style. My style of writing is writing only the essential points. That is, my writing is usually very easy to understand. My strength is that my writing is as clear as science or math. It is not hard to find out what I’m talking about. However, this style of writing sometimes lacks deepness. It is easy to read and understand, but that’s all. No more meanings or emotions are contained in it. It could be compared to a body. My essay just has bones. It makes the essay very clear, but without the flesh, it feels somewhat empty and is usually very short. Therefore, I need to improve the skill of writing long and still not losing clarity. I would very much like to write a long essay and still maintain my strength of clearness. My goal is to kick redundancy out of my essay and by that, benefit in both length and clarity.

 My best work until now was an essay I wrote when I was preparing for the Toefl exam. I revised it several times and wrote it over and over. Finally, I got my best work. I submitted it to my writing teacher and she gave me full points. Before that essay, my writing score hovered over the early twenties. I was paid back for my hard work and the time spent for the work by my enhanced writing ability. Since then, I got higher scores in my writing assignments and when I actually took the Toefl, I got 30, the top score I could get. This essay was an event that showed myself that I too, was capable of working hard, just like the people on the TV for successful life. However, it was deleted when I had to fix my laptop and is not available for now.

 Since my goal is to get rid of redundancy, I would like to learn some skills to get rid of it. Also, I lack ideas for my essay, which makes it even more redundant. Learning more skills to develop and support my ideas would be a way to solve my problems and strengthen my essay. Things I do not want is overloaded vocabulary. Actually, I do not use a wide variety of words in my essay and there is insufficient time to memorize all the vocabularies. In last semester, reality forced me to choose either to memorize the wordsmart book or do other homework and get grades from them. I actually do not want to make that kind of decision again. As for class, the primary thing should be how much we get. However, I believe that how exciting the class is actually effects on the student’s efficiency of learning. Therefore, I hope the class to be fun and exciting rather than difficult and heavy. I am really looking forward to this semester, and hope that I could learn a lot more about writing.