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TED（Technology、Entertainment、Design的缩写）大会的宗旨是“用思想的力量来改变世界”，它于1984年由理查德·温曼和哈里·马克思共同创办。每年来自全球不同学科的顶尖学者与实践者们会云集该大会，将自己的研究成果凝聚在一个18分钟的演讲里。演讲内容涵盖科学、艺术、政治、建筑、音乐等。
Ken Robinson，全球知名创新与创造力专家，在开发创造性和创新能力方面是国际公认的领袖人物。本文节选自他在TED大会论坛上就创建一个呵护而非摧残创造力的教育体系而发表的演讲，语言深入浅出、发人深思。
We’ve all agreed on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. And my 1)contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we 2)squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a six-year-old girl who was in a drawing lesson. The teacher said usually this little girl hardly paid attention, but in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and said, “What are you drawing?” and the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”
Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is remaining an artist as we grow up. I believe passionately that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects—every one; it doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics
and languages, then the 3)humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them
progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what’s it for, public education, I think you’d have to conclude (if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the 4)brownie points, who are the winners) the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out on top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the 5)high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there’s something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re 6)disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they?
In the next 30 years, according to 7)UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about—technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an 8)MA where the previous job required a 9)BA, and now you need a 10)PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to 11)radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think 12)kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, 13)more often than not comes about through the interaction of different 14)disciplinary ways of seeing things.
And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really 15)prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. She’s a 16)choreographer. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she’s wonderful. Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer?” And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a 17)learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was 18)fidgeting.
Anyway, she went to see a 19)specialist in an oak-paneled room with her mother and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having
at school. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately. Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we 20)strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future—by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.
我们一致认同，孩子拥有超凡的才能，或者说创新能力。我认为：每个孩子身上都蕴含着巨大的才能，却被成人无情地磨灭了。因此，我想谈谈教育和创造力。我相信在当今这个时代，创造力在教育中的地位同读写能力一样重要，理应得到同等程度的重视。
前些日子我听到了一个很棒的故事，我喜欢逢人就讲。有个6岁的小姑娘在上绘画课。她的老师说，这个小姑娘上课一向不怎么专心，而这次却不同。老师很好奇，于是走过去问小姑娘：“你在画什么？”“我在画上帝”，小姑娘答道。老师不解：“可是从来没有人知道上帝长什么样啊！”小姑娘答道：“等我画好他们就知道了。”
毕加索曾经说过：每一个孩子都是天生的艺术家。问题在于我们长大之后能否继续保持着艺术家的个性。我坚信，随着年龄的增长，我们的创造力并非与日俱增，反而是与日俱减。甚至可以说，我们的创造力被教育扼杀了。怎么会这样呢？
世界上所有的教育系统都有着相同的学科体系，无一例外。你会想肯定有某个地方会例外的吧，可是无论你走到哪都是这样。位于顶端的是数学和语言，接着是人文学科，处在最底端的是艺术。全球普遍如此。在这颗星球上没有一个教育系统会像上数学课一样天天给孩子们上舞蹈课。为什么？为什么不这样？我觉得这非常重要。我知道数学很重要，但是舞蹈也同样重要啊。如果获得允许，孩子们可以整天跳舞，我们也是。我们都有身体可以舞动起来，不是吗？现实中的真相是：随着孩子们在长大，大人们开始逐步地训练他们，首先是腰部以上的部位，然后是集中训练他们的大脑，并且渐渐地有点偏向大脑一侧。
假设你是一位外星来客，来考察地球上的教育，想知道公共教育究竟有何作用。在得出结论之前，我建议你先看看公共教育的产物，看看究竟是谁通过教育获得成功？是谁中规中矩地完成了使命？是谁得到了所有的赞许？又是谁成了最后的赢家？我想你会由此得出结论：全球公共教育的目的完全在于培养大学教授，不是吗？他们是教育体制最高端的产物。我过去也曾是其中一员，嗯，我喜欢大学教授们。不过，你知道，我们不应该将他们推崇为全人类最大的成就。他们所代表的仅仅是一种生活方式，另一种不同的生活方式。不过大学教授们还是蛮古怪的，我是出于对他们的喜爱才这么说的，虽然不是所有大学教授都这样，但他们的确有些奇特，典型表现为：他们生活在自己的思维里，住在自己的大脑中，而且还略偏向于大脑一侧。他们崇尚精神世界，躯体在他们看来不过是思维的承载工具，不是吗？
根据联合国教科文组织的统计预测，未来三十年内全球的教育系统毕业生人数将达到历史之最。高科技及其对工作性质的改变影响，人口以及人口大爆炸，这些我们提及过的因素加在一起将导致毕业生越来越多。学历突然缩水了。难道不是吗？我上学那会儿，只要你有一纸文凭，你就有饭碗。如果你没有工作，那是因为你不想要。坦白说，我当时就不想要（作者的自嘲）。可现在有学历的毕业生们却常常待业在家打游戏，因为工作岗位的学历要求都升级了，过去需要学士的岗位现在开始要硕士了，过去要硕士的岗位现在要博士了。这是个“学历膨胀”的过程。这一过程说明了整个教育体系正在我们眼下经历着重大转变。我们需要从根本上重新审视自己的智能观。
我们知道智能有三大特点：第一，智能具有多元性。我们运用各种体验方式来认知世界，比如视觉、听觉、触觉、抽象化、动态化等等。第二，智能具有交互性。大脑并不是由相互隔绝的单元组成的。事实上，创造活动往往就诞生于各学科看待事物的不同方式所产生的交互作用，在我看来，创造就是“有价值的原创思想的产生过程”。
第三，智能具有独特性。目前我正在写一本新书，叫做《悟》，是根据一系列人物访谈写成的，主题围绕“你是如何发现自己才能的？”。我对人们的自我发现很感兴趣。事实上，写这本书的念头源自我和一位出色的女士之间的对话，也许这里大部分人没有听说过她，她叫吉莉安·林恩，是一名舞蹈指导，曾经给歌舞剧《猫》、《歌剧魅影》编排舞蹈，非常棒的一位女士！有一天我和吉莉安一起吃午餐，我问她：“吉莉安，你当初是怎么走上跳舞这条路的？”她告诉我，其中的故事还蛮有趣的。当年她在学校时，大家都说她没得救了。那还是在上世纪三十年代，学校写信给她父母说“我们认为吉莉安有学习障碍”。那时候的她无法集中注意力，总是坐立不安。
后来她妈妈就带着她去看专科。那是一间铺着橡木地板的诊室。吉莉安把双手压在屁股下，耐住性子坐了20分钟，这段时间里医生和她妈妈谈论了她在学校里出现的种种问题。最后，医生走过来坐在吉莉安身边对她说：“吉莉安，你妈妈和我讲了你的所有事情，现在我要和她私下谈谈。在这儿等着，我们很快就回来。”于是他们就留下她出去了。
就在他们离开房间的时候，医生拧开了他桌上的收音机。走出房间后，医生对吉莉安的妈妈说道：“就在这儿观察一下她”。吉莉安说，他们刚离开房间她就站了起来，随着音乐移动步子。在外面观察了几分钟后，那位医生转向她妈妈说道：“林恩夫人，吉莉安并没有生病，她是个天生的舞蹈家。送她去舞蹈学校吧。”（感谢当年那位医生，）换了别人或许会对吉莉安进行药物治疗，并告诉她要平静下来。
我认为我们未来唯一的希望在于创设一种新的人文生态构想，唯有在此构想上才可重新认识到人类能力之丰富。如同获得商品的欲望驱使人类掠采矿物资源，现行的教育体制也正以此道压榨着我们的智力，而这种压榨并不能造福人类社会。
我们必须重新思考我们教育孩子的基本原则。我们的任务是教育所有的孩子，以便他们能够面对未来——顺便提一下，这个未来或许我们是看不见了，但是他们可以，我们的工作就是帮助他们战胜未来的挑战。
Ken Robinson，全球知名创新与创造力专家，在开发创造性和创新能力方面是国际公认的领袖人物。本文节选自他在TED大会论坛上就创建一个呵护而非摧残创造力的教育体系而发表的演讲，语言深入浅出、发人深思。
We’ve all agreed on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation. And my 1)contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we 2)squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a six-year-old girl who was in a drawing lesson. The teacher said usually this little girl hardly paid attention, but in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and said, “What are you drawing?” and the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”
Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is remaining an artist as we grow up. I believe passionately that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects—every one; it doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics
and languages, then the 3)humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them
progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what’s it for, public education, I think you’d have to conclude (if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the 4)brownie points, who are the winners) the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out on top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the 5)high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there’s something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re 6)disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they?
In the next 30 years, according to 7)UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about—technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an 8)MA where the previous job required a 9)BA, and now you need a 10)PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to 11)radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think 12)kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, 13)more often than not comes about through the interaction of different 14)disciplinary ways of seeing things.
And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really 15)prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. She’s a 16)choreographer. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she’s wonderful. Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer?” And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a 17)learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was 18)fidgeting.
Anyway, she went to see a 19)specialist in an oak-paneled room with her mother and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having
at school. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately. Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we 20)strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future—by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.
我们一致认同，孩子拥有超凡的才能，或者说创新能力。我认为：每个孩子身上都蕴含着巨大的才能，却被成人无情地磨灭了。因此，我想谈谈教育和创造力。我相信在当今这个时代，创造力在教育中的地位同读写能力一样重要，理应得到同等程度的重视。
前些日子我听到了一个很棒的故事，我喜欢逢人就讲。有个6岁的小姑娘在上绘画课。她的老师说，这个小姑娘上课一向不怎么专心，而这次却不同。老师很好奇，于是走过去问小姑娘：“你在画什么？”“我在画上帝”，小姑娘答道。老师不解：“可是从来没有人知道上帝长什么样啊！”小姑娘答道：“等我画好他们就知道了。”
毕加索曾经说过：每一个孩子都是天生的艺术家。问题在于我们长大之后能否继续保持着艺术家的个性。我坚信，随着年龄的增长，我们的创造力并非与日俱增，反而是与日俱减。甚至可以说，我们的创造力被教育扼杀了。怎么会这样呢？
世界上所有的教育系统都有着相同的学科体系，无一例外。你会想肯定有某个地方会例外的吧，可是无论你走到哪都是这样。位于顶端的是数学和语言，接着是人文学科，处在最底端的是艺术。全球普遍如此。在这颗星球上没有一个教育系统会像上数学课一样天天给孩子们上舞蹈课。为什么？为什么不这样？我觉得这非常重要。我知道数学很重要，但是舞蹈也同样重要啊。如果获得允许，孩子们可以整天跳舞，我们也是。我们都有身体可以舞动起来，不是吗？现实中的真相是：随着孩子们在长大，大人们开始逐步地训练他们，首先是腰部以上的部位，然后是集中训练他们的大脑，并且渐渐地有点偏向大脑一侧。
假设你是一位外星来客，来考察地球上的教育，想知道公共教育究竟有何作用。在得出结论之前，我建议你先看看公共教育的产物，看看究竟是谁通过教育获得成功？是谁中规中矩地完成了使命？是谁得到了所有的赞许？又是谁成了最后的赢家？我想你会由此得出结论：全球公共教育的目的完全在于培养大学教授，不是吗？他们是教育体制最高端的产物。我过去也曾是其中一员，嗯，我喜欢大学教授们。不过，你知道，我们不应该将他们推崇为全人类最大的成就。他们所代表的仅仅是一种生活方式，另一种不同的生活方式。不过大学教授们还是蛮古怪的，我是出于对他们的喜爱才这么说的，虽然不是所有大学教授都这样，但他们的确有些奇特，典型表现为：他们生活在自己的思维里，住在自己的大脑中，而且还略偏向于大脑一侧。他们崇尚精神世界，躯体在他们看来不过是思维的承载工具，不是吗？
根据联合国教科文组织的统计预测，未来三十年内全球的教育系统毕业生人数将达到历史之最。高科技及其对工作性质的改变影响，人口以及人口大爆炸，这些我们提及过的因素加在一起将导致毕业生越来越多。学历突然缩水了。难道不是吗？我上学那会儿，只要你有一纸文凭，你就有饭碗。如果你没有工作，那是因为你不想要。坦白说，我当时就不想要（作者的自嘲）。可现在有学历的毕业生们却常常待业在家打游戏，因为工作岗位的学历要求都升级了，过去需要学士的岗位现在开始要硕士了，过去要硕士的岗位现在要博士了。这是个“学历膨胀”的过程。这一过程说明了整个教育体系正在我们眼下经历着重大转变。我们需要从根本上重新审视自己的智能观。
我们知道智能有三大特点：第一，智能具有多元性。我们运用各种体验方式来认知世界，比如视觉、听觉、触觉、抽象化、动态化等等。第二，智能具有交互性。大脑并不是由相互隔绝的单元组成的。事实上，创造活动往往就诞生于各学科看待事物的不同方式所产生的交互作用，在我看来，创造就是“有价值的原创思想的产生过程”。
第三，智能具有独特性。目前我正在写一本新书，叫做《悟》，是根据一系列人物访谈写成的，主题围绕“你是如何发现自己才能的？”。我对人们的自我发现很感兴趣。事实上，写这本书的念头源自我和一位出色的女士之间的对话，也许这里大部分人没有听说过她，她叫吉莉安·林恩，是一名舞蹈指导，曾经给歌舞剧《猫》、《歌剧魅影》编排舞蹈，非常棒的一位女士！有一天我和吉莉安一起吃午餐，我问她：“吉莉安，你当初是怎么走上跳舞这条路的？”她告诉我，其中的故事还蛮有趣的。当年她在学校时，大家都说她没得救了。那还是在上世纪三十年代，学校写信给她父母说“我们认为吉莉安有学习障碍”。那时候的她无法集中注意力，总是坐立不安。
后来她妈妈就带着她去看专科。那是一间铺着橡木地板的诊室。吉莉安把双手压在屁股下，耐住性子坐了20分钟，这段时间里医生和她妈妈谈论了她在学校里出现的种种问题。最后，医生走过来坐在吉莉安身边对她说：“吉莉安，你妈妈和我讲了你的所有事情，现在我要和她私下谈谈。在这儿等着，我们很快就回来。”于是他们就留下她出去了。
就在他们离开房间的时候，医生拧开了他桌上的收音机。走出房间后，医生对吉莉安的妈妈说道：“就在这儿观察一下她”。吉莉安说，他们刚离开房间她就站了起来，随着音乐移动步子。在外面观察了几分钟后，那位医生转向她妈妈说道：“林恩夫人，吉莉安并没有生病，她是个天生的舞蹈家。送她去舞蹈学校吧。”（感谢当年那位医生，）换了别人或许会对吉莉安进行药物治疗，并告诉她要平静下来。
我认为我们未来唯一的希望在于创设一种新的人文生态构想，唯有在此构想上才可重新认识到人类能力之丰富。如同获得商品的欲望驱使人类掠采矿物资源，现行的教育体制也正以此道压榨着我们的智力，而这种压榨并不能造福人类社会。
我们必须重新思考我们教育孩子的基本原则。我们的任务是教育所有的孩子，以便他们能够面对未来——顺便提一下，这个未来或许我们是看不见了，但是他们可以，我们的工作就是帮助他们战胜未来的挑战。