TED Talk Review

My previous exposure to TED talks has been limited, before being assigned to review a TED talk I was only familiar with the basic concept of TED;  a conference where speakers give short creative presentations on a variety of subjects.  I wanted to view a popular TED talk to get a good representation of the format.  Thankfully TED has created a list of the most popular talks of all time on their site.  I chose the first link of this list, a talk by Ken Robinson titled Do schools kill creativity?

To begin I really think this talk is titled well, the question itself is very provocative and immediately pulls the viewer in curious to hear the evidence for this.  Unfortunately while the argument is certainly intriguing I found the author’s argument to be flawed.  In my opinion currently the system sufficiently promotes creativity.  However,  we don’t and shouldn’t expect the education system to nurture and promote each child’s unique artistic ability.  This is the reason children take lessons outside of the school.  I feel creativity is mainly the responsibility of the parents to promote and nurture.  The role of education is to take creativity and apply it to the core subjects taught.  So while I am not arguing for removing art from school, I believe that art in the school is alive and well.   

Robinson argues that creativity is as important as literacy, which seems a bit overstated.  Again the crux of Robinson’s argument revolves around the idea that our education system is squandering the natural creativity of our children.  While I do agree that our education system is vastly outdated, in my view Robinson is missing the mark by focusing on creativity exclusively as the major problem in our education system.  Sure creativity is important, but so is critical thinking, focus, drive, passion, practical knowledge.  There are so many qualities and abilities we as a society hope our education system is instilling. 

Robinson feels that their exists an unjust hierarchy of subjects, that math and science preside over the humanities.  My question would be what is wrong with this.  We live in a capitalistic, technologically advanced society which of course values math and science above other skills.  Robinson states that education has been flawed from the beginning as it arose to meet the needs of industrialism.  Again I don’t see the problem with this as our education system is geared toward providing society with the skills which are valued at a premium.  These skill just happen to tend to be more science and math based currently because of the times we live in.

In conclusion I found Robinson’s talk to be very entertaining.  The presentation had a great flow.  Robinson used humor very effectively he possessed a very dry, British sense of humor.  The jokes and anecdotes he told fit well within his talk and provided support by illustrating his points.  While I really enjoyed the humor it almost became too much especially considering he was relying almost exclusively on humorous stories to support his argument. After a while this reliance on humorous anecdotes felt to me like an appeal to emotion rather than reason.  There were no facts or figures to support the claims.  To conclude I found this particular TED talk to be a case of style over substance, but I did enjoy the medium and will be watching other talks.