"We are educating people out of their creativity"

"우리는 창의성 없는 교육을 하고 있다"

1. 6살 여자 아이의 일화 소개 - 한,일,중,영 스크립트 및 Podcasting

오늘의 단락 - 한국어)

저는 6살 여자 아이의 놀라운 이야기를 들었습니다. 한 선생님이 6살 아이들의 그룹에서 그림 수업을 하고 있었습니다. 그 수업의 뒤쪽에는 수업에 거의 참여하지 않고, 학업에 그다지 열정적이지 않은 한 여자 아이가 있었습니다. 그러나 그 아이가 이 그림 수업에 임할 때 아이는 그 일에 완전히 열중했습니다. 선생님은 아이에게 다가가 무엇을 그리고 있는지 물어보았습니다. 그리고 아이는 신의 모습을 그리고 있다고 대답했습니다. 그러자 선생님은 '누구도 신이 어떻게 생겼는지 모른다'고 말했습니다.

그러자 소녀가 말했습니다: 그들은 잠시 후에 알게 될거예요.

오늘의 단락 - 일본어)

私は、6才の女の子の素晴らしい物語を聞きました。先生は、6才子供達のグループとともに、スケッチレッスンをしていました。そのクラスの裏側には授業にほとんど参加しないで,学業にあまり熱情的ではない一女の子がいました。しかし、その女の子がこの絵クラスに臨む時子供はそれに完全に夢中になりまいた。先生は子供に歩み寄って何を描いているのか尋ねました。そして、女の子は神の絵を描いていると答えました。すると先生は '誰も神さまが何のように見えるかわかりません’と言いました。

そして、女の子は言いました：彼らは、もうすぐ現れます。

오늘의 단락 - 중국어)

我听了6岁的女孩的出色的故事。先生正在跟6岁小孩们的集团一起学习画画儿。在那个班的背面，几乎不参加上课，学业有不热情地太1个女孩子了。但是完全热中于那个,并且拧了那个女孩出席这个绘画班的时子助手。问是否先生接近小孩,正画什么了。以及回答女孩正画神的绘画的事了。据说当做的时候和是否象什么那样至于先生看得见'任何人神不被懂的'了。

以及女孩说了：他们马上出现。

오늘의 단락 - 영어)

“I heard this wonderful story of a 6-year-old girl. A teacher was doing a drawing lesson with a group of 6 yr olds. And there was a girl at the back of the class who rarely participated, was not very enthusiastic about school. But while she was in this drawing lesson she was completely absorbed with what she was doing. The teacher went up to her and asked what are you drawing and the girl said I’m drawing a picture of God. And the teacher said but ‘nobody knows what God looks like."

And the girl said: they will in a minute.

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 “Well one of the major ways that people think they can do this is through education and they are right, education is the biggest investment we can make in our own future. The problem as I see it as I go around is that most countries are making a mistake. The mistake is that they tend to believe that we can face the future simply by doing better what we did in the past, we just have to do more of it.

Do you know in the next 30 years more people will pass through formal education worldwide than since the beginning of history. If you add them all up until now there will be more of them in the next 30 years. One spectacular consequence already is a tumbling decline in the value of qualifications.

On the whole we are educating peopleasif we are still facing the industrial revolution- which by the way required a largely manual work force and a minority of people doing intellectual work which is why we had the system structured the way it was"

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BusinessWeek, an interview with Sir Ken Robinson

                                                                     Creativity By Jessie Scanlon

Reading, Writing, and Creativity

Education guru Sir Ken Robinson talks about the importance of nurturing innovative solutions in the classroom -- indeed, in every aspect of modern life

Sir Ken Robinson, now a senior advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, was knighted in 2003 for his commitment to creativity and education. for four years from 1985 the British citizen was director of The Arts in Schools Project, a major initiative to improve teaching of the arts in his native land, and in 1998 he was appointed by the government to chair the National Advisory Committee on Creative & Cultural Education, the largest-ever inquiry into the importance of creativity in education and the economy. Advertisement

Since then, nearly $1 billion has been put into initiatives based on the so-called Robinson Report. In the meantime, Robinson has become a frequent speaker on creativity as a broader concept, arguing that the ability to think creatively is essential for students as they seek jobs, companies as they go up against competitors, and nations competing in the global economy.

Prior to his presentation at the TED conference in Monterey, Calif., this week, Robinson spoke with BusinessWeek Online editor Jessie Scanlon.

Creativity is the latest buzzword in the corporate world. What's your explanation?

The world is changing so quickly that promoting the ability for creative thinking and promoting cultural adaptability is essential. Remember that kids starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. We don't have a clue about what the world will be like then.

The trouble is that the educational system isn't designed to promote this sort of innovative thinking that we need. It is designed to promote uniformity and a certain type of narrow skill set. Creativity is as important as literacy and numeracy, and I actually think people understand that creativity is important -- they just don't understand what it is.

How do you define creativity?

Ultimately it's the process of having original ideas, but there are several steps.The first step is imagination, the capacity that we all have to see something in the mind's eye. Creativity is then using that imagination to solve problems -- call it applied imagination. Then innovation is putting that creativity into practice as applied creativity.

That seems pretty straightforward. What do people not understand?

There are several common misconceptions. The first is that people think that only some are creative. It's in the nature of human beings that we are creative. The second misconception is that creativity is about design and marketing. What the TED conference shows is that creativity is central to the practice of science and business and more. Creative initiatives should help you find what you are passionate about. The third is that you can't do anything about it.You can cultivate creativity.

How?

There are several elements, but I think the first is curriculum. Things like the recent Innovation Initiative in the U.S. are a big mistake, because they focus too much on math and science. Yes, the U.S. needs more people doing math and more doing science, but it needs creative people in all fields.

The Renaissance was a flowering on all fronts. It concerns me that this U.S. initiative is focused on a piece of the problem but not the whole thing. A second element is teaching. You can't just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them.

Companies that are clued into the innovation imperative have set up labs intended to foster creativity. But it can't be as easy as setting up a cool room with creative toys and a whiteboard.

No.On the corporate level, Pixar is a good example. The company has something called Pixar University, that runs classes, events, workshops and stuff throughout the day. Every employee is entitled to spend four hours a week at Pixar University, and they are encouraged to not take anything job-related. That keeps peoples' minds alive.

You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly. I think that will be the big challenge for John Lassetter as he moves to Disney.

At the same time, anything companies do in the short term is only half the battle. Companies can and should do better at cultivating creativity. But the educational system needs to do a better job of building the talent pool.

What's an example of a school district doing that well?

I'm working with a nonprofit in Arizona and Oklahoma called A+ Schools that is working to rewrite the curriculum with the input of the community, and trying to develop teaching methods to match individual learning styles. For instance my daughter is 16 and was practically failing chemistry. One day her teacher called and said she'd like to work with her one-on-one. The upshot is that she went from a borderline F to an A- in three weeks.

One-on-one teaching sounds great, but how does it scale?

First of all this is achievable. When the U.S. first introduced state education, people thought it was impossible. Now we take public, tax-financed education for granted.While some of the challenge that education faces has been caused by information technology, IT also must be part of the solution. Especially today when most kids are digital natives -- not like us digital immigrants.

Schools also need to be broken into smaller units and individual schools or principals need more autonomy, along with certain incentives.School reforms always emphasize standards and standardized testing, as if it's akin to a McDonald's (MCD) franchise. But standardized testing demoralizes teachers, demoralizes students, and incents people to teach to the test. Standardized testing is based on the idea that we have to make education teacher-proof and I think we have to do the reverse.

What does that mean for business?

A lot of the secret of the creative corporation is looking hard at employees and realizing their strengths. When companies first start thinking about becoming creative, they tend to start thinking about hiring people from outside. They don't think about the people they already have. And a lot of creativity is in helping people, whether students or employees, to find their talent -- the way they are creative. Because most everyone is.

Scanlon is Innovation & Design editor for BusinessWeek Online

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According to McKinsey, organizations everywhere are now fighting a 'war for talent'(i). Companies are competing in a world of economic and technological change that is moving faster than ever. The ability to adapt, to make decisions quickly in situations of high uncertainty and to steer through change is critical. To succeed they urgently need people who are creative, innovative and flexible. Too often, they can't find them. McKinsey concludes that companies are engaged in a war for senior talent that will remain a defining characteristic of the competitive landscape for decades to come. Yet most are ill-prepared and even the best are vulnerable. This problem is part of a global, creative crisis. In my new book, "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative,"(ii) I offer answers to three questions that are now vitally important for all companies:

• Why is it essential to promote creativity? - Why should companies be so concerned with creativity and innovation? What's the price of failure?
• Why is it necessary to develop creativity? - Why do so many people think that they're not creative? Most children are buzzing with ideas, what happens as they grow up?
• What is involved in promoting creativity? - Is everyone creative or just a select few? Can creativity be developed and what can companies do to make the most of their creative resources?

Most companies keep their creatives in separate departments: they're the people who wear jeans and don't wear ties and come in late because they've been struggling with an

• Everyone has creative capacities
• These capacities are the most important resource that any company has.
• Exploiting them calls for a culture of innovation across the whole organization - not only in the creative departments.

Companies face big challenges in making the most of their creative resources. These challenges can be overcome but occasional courses in creative thinking are not the answer. Like rain dancing, they underestimate the nature of the problems they are trying to solve.

The Intelligence of Creativity

Creativity is the process of generating ideas that are original and of value. If we're serious about developing creativity the first step is to recognize how diverse and individual creativity is. People underestimate their creativity because they underestimate their intelligence.

One of the most fundamental problems is that companies are trying to fix a problem that originates in our schools and universities. A powerful illustration is the crisis in graduate recruitment. It's not that there aren't enough graduates to go around - there are more and more.In fact, in the next thirty years, more people will be getting formal qualifications through education and training than since the beginning of history.But many graduates don't have what business urgently needs: they can't communicate well, they can't work in teams and they don't think creatively. But why should they? University degrees aren't designed to make people creative. They're designed to do other things, and they often do them well. But complaining that graduates aren't creative is like saying, 'I bought a bus, and it sank.'

The main reason for these limitations is that education is obsessed with academic ability. It's very important. But there's much more to intelligence than academic ability. If not, most of human culture with its complex fabric of scientific, technological, artistic, economic and social enterprises would never have happened. The preoccupation with academic ability has led to an incalculable waste of human talent and resources. People with strong academic abilities often fail to discover their other strengths. Those of less academic ability may have other powerful intellectual abilities that lie dormant.

The plain fact is that human intelligence is complex and multifaceted. We can think about the world in all the ways we experience is: visually, in touch, sound, in movement and in many other ways too. Human culture is as rich and diverse as it is because human intelligence is so complex and dynamic. We all have great natural capacities and we all have them differently - our own profiles of intellectual strengths in visual intelligences, in sound, in movement in mathematical thinking and so on.

Conventional education looks only for certain sorts of ability. Those who have it often have other abilities that are ignored: those who don't are likely to be seen as not intelligent at all. Some of the most successful people I know failed in education. No matter how successful they have become, they carry within them a secret worry that they're not really as clever as they're making out. Many only succeeded once they'd recovered from their education. So what should organizations do to promote creativity and innovation? There are three priorities.

Identifying creative talent

Creativity is possible wherever human intelligence is actively engaged. People are not creative in general but in doing something specific: in mathematics, in science, in technology, in business or whatever. Real creativity comes from finding your medium, from being in your element. When people find their medium they can discover their real creative strengths and come into their own.

People join companies from many different backgrounds. Two major influences on how they are judged are their educational qualifications and their existing job descriptions.But many people have abilities that have not yet been brought out because they haven't been required or valued.Highly able, creative people can be turned away from companies or lost in them because their qualifications tell the wrong story.Many people work with their minds in neutral because their real abilities aren't engaged by the work they do or by the roles they're given.

Identifying creative abilities is not simply a matter of conducting a formal test. There are no general tests that provide a reliable picture of person's creative capacities. The range and subtlety of individual creative ability combined with the many factors that motivate or suppress it mean inevitably that any formal test can give only the roughest guide. There is no substitute for putting people in situations where their abilities can be used differently or where different aspects of their potential are called on and revealed.Their creative abilities then need to be trained and developed in a systematic way.

Facilitating

Training individuals is not enough. Many people have been sent on two or three day courses to develop their creativity in various ways. Like white water rafting, these experiences can be very worthwhile and enjoyable. They may even find themselves bonding with people in unexpected ways for the weekend. But they often come back to the same job on Monday morning and find the company unchanged. Developing a culture of creativity involves more than enthusing a small number of individuals. It means energizing the whole organization. There are several related processes in facilitating a culture of creativity.

Blurring Boundaries

Creative insights often occur by making connections between ideas that were previously unconnected. This is why the best creative teams are often made up from specialists in different fields, and why the most creative period in the life of an organization is often in its early days when there's a rush of excitement about new possibilities - before it has settled into fixed structures and routines.Stimulating the creative impulse in companies often involves blurring the boundaries between specialists and departments so that ideas can flow more freely between specialists who are too often kept apart from each other.This can be done by bringing specialists together into focused project teams, simply to encourage experimentation and the exchange of ideas.

Loosening Expectations

Creativity relies on the flow of ideas. This happens best in an atmosphere where risk is encouraged and where failure is seen as part of the process of success. Creativity can be stifled by pressure to deliver the wrong sorts of resorts over the wrong timescale - by the wrong sort of accountability. There's a tendency throughout the corporate world to 'short-termism.' As organizations compete in increasingly aggressive markets, budgets for experimental research, blue-skies thinking and long-range development are being cut back in the interest of immediate returns and instant results. The effect can be to stifle the wellsprings of creativity on which long-term success ultimately depends.

Harnessing Creativity

Organizations must also establish systems in which creative abilities from all areas and levels of the company are harnessed to the organizational objectives. Those who run companies must make it clear in very practical ways that new ideas will be evaluated, developed and actively rewarded, professionally and financially.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the War for Talent can only be won by raiding the resources of our competitors. A better strategy is to recognize the abundance of untapped potential in our midst. Human talent is not in short supply.The limitations are in how we recognize and develop it. In the future as in the past, companies that make the most of their people will find people who'll make the most of them.

_________

(i) 'The War for Talent', McKinsey Quarterly, 1998, No 3

(ii) Ken Robinson, 'Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative' Capstone Publishing Company, 2001.

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Our Obsession with Academic Ability

Adapted from an article published in The Express on Wednesday 15 September 1999

Why do so many people think they're not clever? I come across people in every walk of life who think this - people in business, in ordinary jobs, writers, musicians and academics. Why? It usually dates back to their time at school. Instead of finding out what they could do, they find out what they couldn't.Education has made too many bright people feel they are dull. It's vital that we stop doing this.

Young people now face challenges we haven't known before. To meet them they'll need all their wits about them and education is the key.

We need to organise a radical review of the whole curriculum beyond 2000. The truth is that standards have not only been too low in some schools: they have been far too narrow almost everywhere.

So what's the problem and should be done about it? I think it's to do with the whole idea of academic ability.Our education system puts a huge emphasis in academic ability and the rewards go to those who show it. Such ability is very important but it shouldn't be confused with intelligence.This is dangerous because it encourages us to downgrade other intellectual abilities that all children have and which are equally important. This is often why so many bright people leave school thinking they're not.

Academic ability involves particular types of verbal and mathematical reasoning. These are essential, but there is much more to human intelligence, reasoning which enables us to design, compose music, paint, write poetry, compete in sport and to love each other. Human intelligence is creative and diverse. Education should develop the potential in our different ways of thinking.

Our present education system was planned in the Forties to produce an industrial workforce that was 80% manual and 20% professional workers. Grammar schools prepared young people for desk jobs and secondary schools for factories. The 11-plus made the decision. It was really an economic test. Most people didn't know this. They saw it as a kind of blood test, which told them if they were clever or not. This system may have been right for its time. It won't do now.

New technologies are revolutionising work. Suddenly, everyone has to be educated to a much higher level. And employers now want more than academic qualifications. They want people who can think creatively, adapt to change, work in teams and communicate. The ordinary academic curriculum is not designed to develop these things.

Schools have to provide a broad curriculum that allows children to discover their strengths and passions. This means giving equal weight to the arts, the sciences, humanities and to physical education. But the National Curriculum does not reward these subjects. Teachers must be allowed more freedom. Good teachers make learning exciting. They are also expert at spotting how different children think and learn. We all remember good teachers because they inspired us. If we want that for our children, teachers need the freedom to do it.

For the last year I have chaired the Government's National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education, a think tank of leading business people, scientists, educators and entertainers. The report (published in July 1999) urges the Government to rethink the balance of education to encourage a broader range of achievement by all young people.

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나의 이야기)

이제 껏 살아오면서 나에게 가장 깊은 영감을 주었던 '선생님'은 누구였던가. 그 분은 동래의 한 학원에서 언어영역 강의를 했던 '이정재 선생님'이었다. 그 분은 언어영역 수업 시간에 언어영역을 가르치지 않았다. 그분은 오히려 강단에 서서 삶을 역설하셨으며, 개별적인 삶 속에 묻어있는 진리가 언어영역 문제를 푸는데 하나의 단서가 되기를 '바랄 뿐' 이었다. 그 분의 사상을 흡수하느냐 마느냐 -어쩜 그건 할 수 있느냐 못하느냐의 문제였다- 는 온전히 학생들의 선택의 문제였다. 그리고 그 분은 내게 있어서, 뜻밖에 만난, 학원강사가 아닌 온전한 스승이었다.

나는 그 때 개별 과목과 성적에 집착하는 것보다 '큰 그림을 머리 속에 그리는 일'이 얼마나 중요한지 알게 되었다. 아니, 깨달았다. 학업이 본업인 학생은 항상 다음과 같은 의문을 품어야 한다. '내가 왜 공부를 하는지? 좋은 성적을 받고 싶은 이유는 무엇인지? 좋은 성적을 받으면 그 다음에는 무엇을 할 것인지?'

그리고 사회로의 진출을 꿈꾸는 청년이라면 마찬가지로 다음과 같은 질문에 나름의 답을 가지고 있어야 한다. '나는 왜 돈을 벌고 싶은지? 돈이 좋다면 왜 좋은지? 많은 돈을 벌면 그 다음에는 무엇을 할 것인지?'

'모든 것은 결국 하나의 진리에 수렴한다는 정신적인 믿음', '존재는 움직이는 것'과 같은 종교적이고 철학적인 내 사상은 고등학교 3학년 당시, 그렇게 형성되었다. 나아가 그 시절에 형성된 삶에 대한 나의 태도는 지금도 학점, 외국어 성적표 등에 집착하지 않는 태도로 이어지고 있다. 나는 고집스럽게 현상보다는 본질이 중요하다고 생각하는 편이다.

나는 현상에 얽메이지 말아야한다. 지식과 사람 사이의 벽을 허물고, 훨 훨 날아다녀야 한다. 나는 그렇게 할 수 있다. 나는 자신있다. 본질은 차별에 있지 않고, 차이에 있다. 발전은 편견과 질투보다는 도덕적 개방과 사랑하는 마음 속에 있다.