Dr. Michael Hynes is the Superintendent of the Port Washington School District in New York and a friend of Sir Ken Robinson.
The Legacy and Impact of Sir Ken Robinson
The world lost an inspiring and incredible human-being on August 21, 2020. Sir Ken Robinson, the gifted author and educator, and one of the world’s leading thinkers made an incredible impact on everyone he met. You may know him from his famous TED Talk entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity”. It happened to be the most viewed TED Talk of all-time. To think people cared to watch an 18-minute discussion about school and creativity more than 66 million times shows us what an amazing orator he was. More important, it highlights his ability to connect with people who cared about what he had to say.
Most people know him from his multiple TED Talks. Not many knew that he led an incredibly multifaceted career before he hit TED stardom. Sir Ken was Director of the Arts in Schools Project, an initiative to develop arts education throughout England and Wales. He also chaired Artswork, the UK’s national youth arts development agency. Sir Ken was also professor emeritus of education at the University of Warwick. In 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his services to the arts. I’m just scratching the surface of his esteemed career but this gentleman was also Senior Advisor for Education & Creativity at the Getty Museum. His contributions to the field of education and the world are vast.
I could go on and on about his legacy and his ideas concerning creativity. He deeply cared about the education system our children and teachers are “trapped” in because he felt it needed to be transformed. His quotes are legendary. Here are a few of my favorites:
1. “The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”
2. “Creativity is as important as literacy”
3. “Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.”
I was blessed and fortunate to work with Sir Ken a few years ago and stay connected ever since. This past April I had the pleasure and honor of spending time with him for his new podcast series related to teaching from home. Sir Ken is like that old friend you don’t see for a while; and then when you do meet up again, it’s like you saw them yesterday. He made you feel like your work and ideas mattered. Sir Ken had the uncanny ability to use his humor to draw people in and then use his superpower of connecting with you to seal the deal.
I saw that someone penned, “Sir Ken’s loss offers everyone in the field of education an opportunity to honor him by reflecting and acting on his wisdom.” As Pasi Shalberg, another icon in the field of education wrote me earlier today, “His words would have been heeded now more than ever. We must carry his message forward, Mike.” I couldn’t agree more. We all must carry his message forward every single day.
In one of his last TED Talks, Sir Ken discusses how life is your talents discovered. He concluded his talk by saying, “Nothing is more influential as a life well lived.” I can’t think of another human-being that I know of who has lived a life more well lived than my dear friend. The world lost a great man but his ideas will live on.
Favorite video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MSgCut1Ils when he speaks to the Dali Lama.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What a profound loss!
R.I.P., Ken Robinson. And thank you from all the children.
The truism that one should teach children, not subjects, is a false dichotomy, but it conveys, imperfectly, a truth. Our prime directive as teachers must be to appeal to and nurture intrinsic motivation in our students because learning isn’t something done at the beginning of a life and then finished. It’s a lifelong process, and we need kids to come out of our schools engaged, intrinsically motivated, life-long learners. And what is intrinsically motivating? Well, as Ken Robinson understood, people are motivated by using their talents toward significant, personally meaningful, creative ends. This insight about intrinsic motivation and its connection to creativity is explored in the recent book Slaying Goliath by another great thinker about education, Diane Ravitch. How I would have loved to hear the two of them in conversation! But short of that, we can hold the conversations that wed her ideas and his. What a foundation to build upon!
My problem with Sir Ken (and the whole Romantic school of education of which he is a par)t is that he snubs the pedestrian hard work and rote learning that is the necessary foundation for the lofty flights of creativity. His fairy castles will never materialize without a solid foundation of carefully laid bricks. The Romantics, from Rousseau and Tolstoy down to the latest 19 year old neo-hippie pipe dreamer about education, don’t realize that inputting knowledge is the font of creativity, not its antithesis.
I’ll take another Brit, poet Matthew Arnold, over Sir Ken. In the General Report for the Year 1880, Arnold praised the British schools’ custom of having kids memorize and recite 100 lines of carefully-chosen poetry. “The acquisition of good poetry is a discipline which works deeper than any other discipline in the range of work of our schools…The poetry exercise is invaluable by causing words to be dwelt upon and canvassed, by leading the children to grasp the meaning of new words, and by thus extending the range of their ideas.” Discipline, dwelling upon memorized lines, canvassing them, extending the range of their ideas –these unsexy goals are the nuts and bolts of real education. Sir Ken, like so many, prefers to breeze past all these steps to his glorious land of Creativity, Imagination and Critical Thinking. But the kids who follow him never arrive.
“But the kids who follow him never arrive.”
This, as the rest of this comment, is stated without evidence. Usually, those people who claim that the best way to educate kids is for them to sit quietly, absorb information and then regurgitate it, assert that educators who want to nurture creativity from a young age want to make kids discover everything by themselves.
Good educators make room for both creative activities and background information.
I was long ago on the board of the ED Hirsch Core Knowledge Foundation, which advocated for his strong belief in facts and knowledge. When I did research on implementation of CK, I learned that almost all the successful projects were using constructivist hands-on projects to teach “core knowledge.” That was an eye-opener.
I guess because at CK they listened Leonardo’s declaration “Experience is a truer guide than the words of others.”
I really do not understand why would anybody insist on promoting extreme methods in education. Teachers are supposed to be the most flexible people in the world since they have to understand and relate to the whole population: the smart, the shy, the loud, the happy, the blunt, the introvert, the extrovert, the active, the lazy, the patient, the hyperactive, the obedient, the opinionated, the quick, the thoughtful.
Teachers are like conductors: they want to achieve harmony, but that won’t happen if she forces all orchestra members to play the violin or if she lets everybody play their own tunes.
I just reread Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed” and am struck by how flaky he sounds. I recently read a biography of Edward Carpenter, the British gay rights pioneer, who lived around the same time –it reveals an era full of utopian flaky thinking (mixed with some good ideas). Carpenter, Dewey and many others were concocting beautiful, half-baked prognostications of how the future was going to be so different and so wonderful. Readers lapped up what these prophets of modernity poured forth. Unfortunately most of it was cant. Dewey says education must be upended, but gives no evidence that his vision will actually work. Everything must grow organically out of the child’s nature, immediate realm of experience, and their “social life”. Sounds lovely and organic. But it’s just not true. A five year old is happy to learn about dinosaurs and anacondas and rice growing in China. These have nothing to do with their immediate experience, much less their social life. Kids are configured to learn all sorts of stuff. A unit on “the home” or replicating home life in school is exactly what the kid does NOT need. He already knows that stuff. Teach him about the world beyond his immediate experience. Dewey’s turn-of-the-century half-baked musings are poison to real education.
Here we go, yet again: let’s assert that Ken Robinson and others who promote nurturing creativity in schools are extremists they mean that 100% of teaching is about letting kids loose, don’t inform them about the Greeks, dinosaurs, percentages and then claim, the whole idea of exploring kids’ creativity in classrooms doesn’t work.
Why are you afraid of sometimes asking kids questions that start with “What do you think about ….” or “How do you feel about …” or “What is your opinion about…” ? What are the dangers of having occasional conversations with kids in the classroom?
I agree with Emerson:
“The whole theory of school is on the nurse’s or mother’s knee. The child is as hot to learn as the mother is too impart. There is mutual delight. The joy of our childhood in hearing beautiful stories from some skillful aunt who loves to tell them, must be repeated in youth…Not less delightful is the mutual pleasure of teaching and learning the secret of algebra, or of chemistry…or of chosen facts in history or in biography.”
Dewey, tragically, inaugurated our pernicious national prejudice against listening to teachers. He derided it as “passive” and not truly “educative”. Educators now speak of lecturing as borderline child abuse –that’s how deep the prejudice runs. Teachers are exhorted to do anything but lecture. But Emerson is right –the whole theory of school is on the mother’s knee –and Dewey is simply wrong. Pace the progressives, listening is often joyful and group work/activities are often joyless. And the former almost always yields more real learning.
I wish more people studied the history of education (e.g. by reading Diane’s Left Back –have you read it, Mate?) One finds so much lost wisdom. All we’re left with is this sterile and false modern orthodoxy.
Here’s another area in which Dewey is dead wrong: he thinks “real” education must stem from a child’s pre-existing interests. Ha! If that were the case, I couldn’t teach anything to my 7th graders that didn’t stem from violent video games like Fortnite. No, there does not need to be a connection, however intuitive this may seem. A totally stand-alone lesson on say, Tuvan throat singing, can interest kids if it’s taught well. The teacher has thus implanted a new interest in kids. He has changed who they are. Dewey sanctifies the child’s original nature or essence; this is bunk. A young child has little essence to start with –the whole point of school is to augment that essence with the fruits of civilization.
Dewey glorifies students’ social life. School must center around that social life, he says. Ha! There is far too much social life in school; it is the bane of education. For a child to learn about Africa, algebra or atoms, they must turn off the social thoughts for a while. Again Dewey’s dreamy, ivory-tower theorizing misses the mark.
“Again Dewey’s dreamy, ivory-tower theorizing misses the mark.”
And to prove your claim above, you will show us a paper or two where the superiority of the “sit quietly, listen and never ever take your eyes off me” method is shown by comparing test scores because that’s the purpose of education and that’s how you judge its success: by test scores.
Why do you insist on repeatedly presenting your rigid personal conviction as evidence and promote it to be used for the whole population?
You think kids’ only job is to listen but you do not appear to be able to listen, despite repeated requests.
Let’s listen to Ken Robinson.
“Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” (does he really say, only creativity matters and literacy is unimportant?)
Does Einstein really say, munching on bratwurst in his ivory tower, only creativity should be taught?
“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”
Is Plutarch a promoter of 21st century flaky educational principles?
“For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting – no more – then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.”
In which ivory tower was MLK residing when he said
“Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction. The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. ”
Let’s stop misrepresenting what people think and say in the ivory tower or elsewhere, and let’s stop presenting personal believes as evidence.
Does Dewey provide any evidence?
I question the veracity of the Plutarch quote. Can you tell me which of Plutarch’s writings contains it?
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/28/mind-fire/
I was wrong! Thanks for digging this up.
One reason I was skeptical is that Plutarch’s voluminous Lives, much of which I read with great pleasure in college, is exactly the sort of “pail filler” that I would like to add to the standard curriculum. I suppose his bios of great men (and women? I don’t remember) could “light fires” as well as “fill pails” with concrete details about the individuals, their actions and their qualities. The power of Plutarch lies in the concrete particulars. My school has suffered from several dreadful character education /social emotional learning curricula. All of them purport to teach courage –without giving any powerful examples of courageous people. It’s lots of inane activities (draw a picture of what courage looks like to you; create a 2 minute skit in which a character shows courage –this always devolves into a farce; etc.), except insofar as they encourage students to mine their memories for examples of courage in their own lives (very Dewey-esque). As we slog through these awful mandated lessons, I often think reading Plutarch together would be a far more effective and enjoyable way to learn about courage (and other admirable qualities). The story of Socrates’ trial, or of Alexei Navalny, –teaching the concrete facts of their lives –seems a far better way to approach the subject.
The quote comes from *On Listening” –sounds like an interesting read.
“The quote comes from *On Listening””
It’s intriguing, isn’t it, that such a quote comes from that essay? 😉
Are you talking about the Salvador Dali Lama?
https://images.app.goo.gl/7sNPrUKjZ2S9RPyJA
🙂
My condolences to his family. He continues to be an inspiration to me in my educational practice!
My condolences to his family as well. His talks and writings have inspired a great deal of what I do in the classroom.
HIs TED talked allowed me to move my staff and school into IB. I wish more would champion his vision.