Sir Ken Robinson on Arts in Education
School Administrator, December 2015

What does it mean to promote creativity in schools and how does it mesh with arts instruction?

Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized voice in education, has been a longtime leader on issues of creativity and human potential. In his latest book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education (Viking, 2015), Robinson asks educators to revamp the outdated industrial K-12 education system. He wants to see a personalized approach that engages students’ individual abilities and creativity in math, science and the arts — to build their skills for the unique challenges of this century.

In his newest book, Sir Ken Robinson sees personalized instruction as the best way to stimulate students’ creativity. (Photo by Todd Bigelow Photography)

In a recent interview with Kristin Hubing, School Administrator magazine’s editorial associate, Robinson discussed the importance of promoting creativity in schools, models for excellence in creative education and how school leaders can rectify common misconceptions about arts education.

His responses have been edited for clarity and conciseness. A full version of the interview with Robinson can be found at www.aasa.org/kenrobinson.aspx.



With all of the academic demands on elementary and secondary schools today, why should educators be promoting creativity?

Robinson: Human life is shot through with evidence of our imagination, our creativity and our productivity. In science and the arts, in technology, everywhere. In the languages we speak, in the way we design our environment, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat. Human life is creative. So I’ve been arguing for a long time that we should recognize the nature and diversity and importance of creativity in education as a whole.

But there’s a real sense if we don’t help young people develop their imaginative powers and their abilities to be creative across the whole curriculum, then we’re doing a huge disservice. We’re not really helping them cultivate some of the most important qualities and capabilities they have.


In Creative Schools, you cite the Boston Arts Academy, a public high school for the visual and performing arts with about 450 students, as a model for integrating arts into the academic curriculum. What impresses you about their approach?

Robinson: One of Boston Arts Academy’s principles is that the way to engage young people is to seek out their talents and their interests. The core of this is that education is not a mechanical or an impersonal process of mass production. It’s a personal process. You’re dealing with human beings, with lives and biographies and feelings and aspirations and anxieties and people living real lives in real communities.

Some problems don’t originate in schools, they just show up in schools because of the lives kids are leading outside in their communities, in the streets and with their families. Some areas have very high poverty and some don’t. Some have high unemployment and difficult street cultures. So kids show up with complicated lives — and to then give them a diet of testing and sitting at desks all day doing something they’re not interested in exacerbates the problem. So the system itself can cause the problems as well.

At Boston Arts Academy, they are offering a much richer diet of opportunities. They are seeking out and cultivating the talents and interests and passions of the students themselves. It’s through the arts — dance, music, theater and visual arts — but they also offer a full program of more conventional academic work. And of course they’re not looking for established prowess in the arts before they accept young people into the academy. They say, “We’re not looking for children who can dance. … We’re looking for kids who can’t dance.” They’re looking for potential. And they cultivate that potential.


Are the school’s efforts to personalize kids’ education through the arts making a difference in outcomes?

Robinson: What they find at the academy is they have very high graduation rates. Something near 90 percent of the graduates of the school go to college every year. They serve a diverse range of Boston’s neighborhoods, and they offer collaborative work, and they work cross-culturally in a cross-disciplinary way.

But what they also find, and this happens all the time in schools with big arts programs, is that student achievement doesn’t just go up in the art discipline; achievement goes up across the board. They find students are more engaged in other parts of the curriculum as well. So it’s a real win-win.

To me it’s common sense that we should be adopting these sorts of approaches because the results are so spectacular. It’s not mysterious that they should be because we’re tapping into the real creative energy and passions of the kids themselves, rather than depressing them.


In your writing, you suggest that creativity is often conflated with the arts. What do you mean by this and how does it affect our schools?

Robinson: Creativity is a much bigger idea. It takes in science and technology and math — the whole curriculum. But if you think of the arts in particular, there are several aspects to a balanced arts education. The first is it should cover a range of disciplines. It should cover the visual arts, performing arts and literary arts.

Secondly, the arts are not just forms of recreation or leisure. I always want to oppose the idea that they’re somehow categorically different from the sciences. The sciences are ways of organizing our understanding of the world around us. They’re rigorous and they’re objective at their best and highly creative, too.

But the arts are rigorous and highly disciplined and creative as well, and they have more to do with understanding the world within us and how we can relate to the world around us. That’s what music and poetry and dance and theater are all about. Understanding our experiences in the world, our personal experience, our relationships with other people, our own perceptions of the world around us.

If you look at dancers or orchestra musicians in rehearsal and the techniques in lighting, these are very rigorous and demanding technical processes. We wouldn’t expect young children to be experts in any of these areas any more than we expect them to excel in calculus when they’re 5 years old. It’s a process, it’s developmental. As soon as we’re clear that there are techniques involved, that there are issues of value and judgment involved, it becomes feasible to put together a supportive and proper schedule of assessment criteria. Art schools have been doing it for years. It’s perfectly feasible and actually necessary that we should do it.


What can education leaders do to promote creativity in schools?

Robinson: I think if you don’t have a balance in schools between the arts, the sciences, the humanities, physical education, mathematics and languages, then you’re not doing education. You’re doing something else, but you’re not giving people a proper full and balanced education.

I’m not saying the arts are more important than the sciences, but they’re just as important. Actually, there are a lot of interactions between them. There are some wonderful cross-disciplinary projects between the arts and sciences as well, which I’ve seen in schools.

Creativity is not only about the arts, it’s about the whole curriculum. It’s important and necessary to develop creative capacities in the sciences, in mathematics, in technology and so on. We’re surrounded by the fruits of that form of creative thinking. There’s also a misconception that only special people are creative and that it’s a rather rare commodity, but it’s not. Human beings are born with immense creative capacity. But we have to cultivate it. So a creative curriculum, a creative school, involves everybody as well as the whole curriculum.

A common misconception is that creativity is just doing what you like. Just kind of brainstorming and coming up with random ideas without having checks and balances and that somehow it’s the opposite of factual learning and discipline. That’s a complete misconception. You can’t be creative in writing or in music or in science or in dance without having progressively better control over the discipline of it. It’s a developmental process, but discipline isn’t a hindrance to creative work; it facilitates it when properly conceived. It’s about encouraging techniques in the service of producing interesting work. And that’s what great art teachers know.

There is an assumption that creativity can’t be taught. It absolutely can. It means having a clear definition of creativity and understanding that teaching is more than direct instruction. That teaching is mentoring and coaching and encouraging and critiquing and much more. It includes, but it takes in much more than factual instruction.


So how do you define creativity?

Robinson: I define creativity as a process of generating original ideas that have value. It’s about coming up with fresh thinking. It doesn’t have to be new to the entire planet, but it certainly has to be new to you.

And it’s about critical judgment. Critical judgment isn’t the opposite of creative work, it’s an integral part of it. You look at people designing scientific experiments or writing a piece of music and there’s a constant process of checks and balances. Does this work? Does this feel right? And then when the work’s produced, of course people form their own views of it. So I’ve never wanted to divorce critical judgment and values from creativity. The challenge for educators is to understand how these things connect.