Weve come publicly to confuse raising standards with standardizing. You can have high standards without standardizing.

Sir Ken Robinson International expert on creativity and innovation Why We Need To Change Our Thinking About Our Schools And Some Thoughts On How Sir Ken Robinson is blessed with a wry sense of humor and comedic timing assets he puts to good use in delivering a serious message. Education as a whole industry is being thwarted, Robinson suggested. Not by attempts at reform, but by certain assumptions, such as what the basics really are. I want to talk about that, he explained, and invite you to challenge some of the things in education that we take for granted. Robinson speaks from experience. In 1998, British Prime Minister Tony Blair asked him to lead the effort to come up with a national strategy on creativity. He was also the central figure in developing a strategy for creativity and economic development as part of the peace process in Northern Ireland and served as a key advisor to the government of Singapore in designing its strategy to become the hub of Southeast Asia. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II knighted Robinson for services to the arts. He now lives in California, consulting with numerous leaders from around the world on how to make creativity a new basic skill. Highlights Robinson shared three propositions with the group: Education globally is engulfed in a revolution.

In a global economy, redoing student performance standards has become an economic imperative. The world is changing, Robinson observed, yet we are educating everyone to meet the demands of the old economy. And the current standards movement is making it worse. One of the great ironies of the school reform movement, he explained, is that the pressure to narrow the curriculum is being done in the interest of business, but this is not what business wants. Robinson added, The competition (for global markets) is becoming considerable at a time when we are standardizing ourselves. In a way, America is giving up its birthright. If educational professionals are to engage successfully in the revolution, they must challenge some basic assumptions.

According to Robinson, policymakers in many countries assume that raising standards is only about getting back to the basics, which they take as givens. The problem is that these

subjects are not so basic anymoreand some subjects not previously considered basic, have become so.1 To make his point, Robinson described the following hierarchy of subjects. At the top are English, math and science. Next come the humanities history, geography, and social studies considered interesting, but not crucial. In last place are the arts music, drama, dance, and painting regarded by most cultures as dispensable. The hierarchy, Robinson argued, is deeply ingrained in the two cornerstones of public education, where schooling has been designed to both meet the economic needs of the Industrial Age and produce an educated citizenry for a democratic society coupled with the Age of Enlightenment, which places a premium on knowledge verified empirically using the scientific method. And so weve grown up with this idea that science is all about objectivity, facts, and hard knowledge, he explained, and the arts are all about feeling, intuition, and expressions of emotion. A second set of assumptions that Robinson hoped to dispel concerns the nature of creativity itself: 1. That creativity is only about special people folks who wear jeans at work and come in late because theyve been struggling with an idea of some sort. In contrast, he asserted, creativity is the natural birthright of every individual. 2. That creativity is only about certain subjects. As a result, the arts have become ghettoized and the rest of the curriculum has become sterilized. In contrast, contended Robinson, everything is potentially creative. 3. That creativity is about letting it all go, kind of running around and kicking the furniture and hanging out. Instead of being the antithesis of achieving high standards, Robinson claimed, creativity can be taught and it is how you get to high standards. Robinson summarized his thoughts this way. Because we treat creativity and intelligence separately, we run our schools accordingly. Its as if we cant do the creative stuff until we get the standards up. Only then can we can start to be creativeon Friday afternoon. In contrast, according to Robinson, the whole heart and soul of (improving education) is about reintegrating creativity with intelligence to show that one is a function of the other. Nobody deliberately sets out to discourage creative thinking, he asserted, but it happens systematically anyway. Having challenged these basic assumptions, we now need to behave differently.

Currently, observed Robinson, if education promotes creativity, it does so accidentally. Consequently, he continued, we need to adopt an overt strategy. And this can best be accomplished by dissecting the essence of creativity and innovation as follows:
Robinson fully explores these ideas in his book, Out of Our Minds, Learning to Be Creative, Capstone Publishing Limited, 2001.
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1. Imagination is the characteristic gift of human intelligence, the capacity to have mental conceptions visualization that takes us out of existing time and space in order to conceive new ideas; 2. Creativity is applied imagination, the process of coming up with original ideas that add value; and 3. Innovation is applied creativity, the process of putting the new ideas into practice. Robinson shared his own experiences in the United Kingdom as a potential strategy of where to begin. At Prime Minister Tony Blairs request, Robinson formed a national commission on creativity, education, and the economy. He brought together distinguished leaders, including Nobel Laureates, from all walks of life. Their report, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education2 contained recommendations, which were subsequently adopted by the British government. According to Robinson, We have to recognize that the world will become increasingly diverse, dynamic, and localized as well as globalized, and we need a curriculum that meets that challenge. His solution is to redo the standards by integrating creativity into the curriculum. Rather than focus on discrete subjects, Robinson also advocates for concentrating on the disciplines because this encompasses not just information, but conceptual tools, ways of thinking, and forms of discourse. Real innovation, he concluded, happens from the intersections of the disciplines, not from the confines of them.

Captured from the meeting proceedings of the Council of Chief State School Officers fall 2006 meeting on Leading Change: Innovative Opportunities for the 21st Century. Shared with permission from CCSSO and the presenter.

An electronic copy of the report, issued in May 1999, can be downloaded from the following website: http://www.dfes.gov.uk/naccce/index1.shtml.