If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not going to be creative. But when do we give kids the chance to be wrong. Ken Robinson’s argument in this TED talk, is that schools are designed to produce workers good at automatic tasks and bad at creative, heuristic ones. This may have worked well during the industrial revolution, but is painfully deficient in the modern world. It’s the same argument made by Daniel Pink in Drive.
Robinson is a most entertaining speaker, so the presentation is a joy to watch. It’s a great reminder that we need to foster some risk-taking, and students need to know that sometimes the ultimate consequence of failure is learning.