Education and creativity

When my niece was 2 years old, she was absolutely in love with the Disney short film “Peter and the Wolf”, based on Tchaikowsky’s classical piece. She knew all the parts by heart and could match the instruments to the characters, and got really angry when we switched them when we sang with her.

One day she asked me to draw the characters. My drawing skills are practically inexisten, but I managed to draw a very simple Ivan (the cat) and Sonja (the duck), and could even sketch a skinny Peter. She then asked me to draw the wolf. Oops, I can’t draw a wolf, I told her – it was far too advanced for me! She just got the pen from my hand and doodled something on the page. ‘There’, she said, ‘there’s the wolf. It’s easy’.

What happened was that I was trying to be logical and rational and really draw something that would actually LOOK like a wolf. But Clara didn’t need that. She already had the wolf in her mind, and with my ‘adult mind’ I didn’t see that.

Why am I telling you this little anecdote? I remembered the story after watching this informal presentation given by Sir Ken Robinson during the TED talks in Monterrey, California. Here he talks about creativity and how schools systems in general work against it. A very interesting talk I would like to invite you to watch and reflect on.