“Schools tend to inhibit creativity in general and individual talents in particular… If you personalize education…if you engage children’s imaginations…you get much higher results, much deeper commitment, and a far more resilient process of education…

Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status…

Creativity is probably the most fundamental set of capacities that distinguishes us as human beings…the process of having original ideas that have value…it’s absolutely at the heart of what it means to be a human being…

One of the ways you get kids to read and to write…is to fire up their imaginations, give them interesting stuff to read, give them challenging things to write. These [literacy and creativity] aren’t opposites, they are complimentary processes that help define what it is to be a human being.

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original…most kids have become frightened of being wrong…and we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make, and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

–Sir Ken Robinson, speaking at a TED conference

http://blog.ted.com/2006/06/27/sir_ken_robinso/