It also means there is less incentive for schools to make learning more child-centred. The testing culture has many beneficiaries.
One is the exam boards. Another is politicians. As Robinson says: "Political cycles are very short. Elected politicians like to see quick results and they like to have data they can use at the next round of electioneering. But it is not effective. Indeed, the creative industries are seeing the ninth culture secretary in nine years.
Education is on its third minister in six years. The law of unintended consequences is a lesson that companies should learn too. If you want a creative culture, you need to actively look at what barriers you are putting up — consciously or otherwise — and remove them, alongside proactively encouraging the creative process. We teach people to do that. He believes organisations should tackle misconceptions that ideas appear serendipitously, that some people are naturally creative and others are not, and that creative aptitude cannot be boosted.
He is not suggesting everyone can have equal ability in all fields, but that everyone can improve. Robinson defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value".
You can be imaginative all day long and never do anything. To be creative, you have to do something," he says. If organisations want to boost their creative output, they need to understand the creative process and give people access to it. Robinson says: "There are plenty of people who are not literate because they have never been taught.
Heineken demonstrated this approach two years ago when it introduced a formal programme that enabled staff to have a shared language around creativity, a way to measure it and a clear picture of what "good" looks like. Robinson also believes creativity should be democratised. I prefer to just say what it is that people do. If they are the campaign designers, call them that.
It implies that other areas are not creative. People get locked into their job descriptions. Organisations need to be flexible about where ideas come from. Businesses can be transformed by ideas coming out of other departments, Robinson says. Creativity should be treated with the same status as literacy in education.
He was a vocal critic of contemporary educational systems, believing that they educated students to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. He believed that children are born creative and have an extraordinary capacity for innovation. And more importantly, children have no fear of making mistakes.
And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. We stigmatize mistakes. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Robinson was a champion of a personal approach to learning. Kids should be treated as individuals with a diversity of talents. On educational technology, Robinson said during an interview in Tools have always done two things. They have extended our reach. But also it extends our minds. It makes us think of things differently.
It involves understanding the real dynamics of creative work. Creativity is not a linear process, in which you have to learn all the necessary skills before you get started. It is true that creative work in any field involves a growing mastery of skills and concepts. It is not true that they have to be mastered before the creative work can begin.
Focusing on skills in isolation can kill interest in any discipline. Many people have been put off by mathematics for life by endless rote tasks that did nothing to inspire them with the beauty of numbers. The real driver of creativity is an appetite for discovery and a passion for the work itself. When students are motivated to learn, they naturally acquire the skills they need to get the work done.
Their mastery of them grows as their creative ambitions expand. Subscribe to receive weekly updates of MindShift stories every Sunday.
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