Do you know what the most viewed TED conference on the web is? That of Sir Ken Robinson, an emeritus professor of arts education in England, who headed a commission on education and creativity for the British government. Number of views: +49 million on the simple TED platform and around 350 million on all platforms combined if you believe Robinson.
That is a lot. Certainly not as much as Despacito (+4 billion), but that's already not bad! Proof that the subject school X creativity is debated and crystallizes quite a few tensions.
But is school really the creative steamroller that is so easy to denounce? According to another TEDx speaker, Dr. George Land (” The failure of success ”), the answer is yes: NASA would have asked Land and another scientist (Dr. Beth Jarman) a few years ago to design a test to assess the creative abilities of their scientists. The test would have worked so well for NASA that he and Jarman decided to take their research further by using the test on a group of 1,600 children between the ages of 4 and 5. Result: 98% of children found “innovative” solutions (including new ones) when they were subjected to a problem. But when the 2 scientists decided to follow the evolution of this capacity over time, the results shocked them: 30% at 10 years, 12% at 15 years and... 2% once adults. Easy conclusion: school kills creativity. Speech that we hear as we want and that seems to be more of a settling of scores than an argumentative position.
Because if we believe the work of other scientists (in particular that of Mathieu Cassotti already mentioned here, lecturer in developmental psychology at the Institute of Psychology of Paris Descartes University), children are indeed capable of providing more creative solutions than “seniors” or adult experts... except that these solutions are rarely operational.
So the debate remains unresolved: does school really kill our creativity (or is it age, experience?) or on the contrary does it make it possible to channel it and focus on the most “relevant” solutions? What do you think?
