Ken Robinson Out Of Our Minds Chapter 3 Summary

Ken Robinson’s, Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, brings up many interesting points about creativity in our everyday lives. One of the most important ideas that I think he brought up was creativity in education. In fact, he states that, “But creativity is also about working in a highly focused way on ideas and projects, crafting them into their best forms and making critical judgments along the way about which work best and why” (Chapter 1). He is juxtaposing this statement with the fact that creativity allows children to bend rules and do what they want in a sense. With this statement, he emphasizes the importance of creativity in school and how it leads to better work. In chapter 1, another important idea he brought up was the

Going off the problem with education, Robinson believes that, “we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it" (Chapter 3). In other words, people are born with an innate creative ability, however, as we go through life, we lose that. An example being that younger children are significantly more creative than older kids, especially after high school. Another important idea touched upon in this chapter is the idea of organizational culture and how that leads to a lack of creativity. If children are brought up with basically the same schooling as their peers, it is like a factory system in a sense. The smartest kids end up doing well. However, those who do not do well, tend to struggle through life. In the correctional system, a lot of prisoners are there due to a lack of good education. An argument made was that it costs around $9000 for a year of high school education but around $30000 for a year in a prison. We need to spend more money and time on schooling and preventing incarceration rather than just dealing with it. A third important idea in this chapter is that, “At the top are mathematics, languages and sciences; some way down are the humanities – history, geography and social studies – and physical education; at the bottom are the arts. There is another hierarchy within the arts: art and music usually have higher status than theatre and dance”. This is emphasizing the lack of importance that arts

It involves many different mental functions, combinations of skills and personal attributes (Chapter 6). What this means is that everyone has the ability to be creative, however, the extent of which, varies from person to person. It also emphasizes what goes into creativity. It is not a black and white concept, and everyone’s definitions of it is different. In chapter seven, Robinson describes the purpose of artists as, "Artists are involved in describing and evoking the qualities of experience. The poet writing of love or melancholy is trying to articulate a state of personal being: a mood or sensibility". This is vastly different than the purpose of science and math, a comparison that we have been making in previous