Sir Ken Robinson speaks, from his presentation at TedTalks in Monterey, California, about creativity and the challenge of changing education to value creativity as much as literacy. He identifies the importance of preparing ourselves to be wrong, if we want to be creative, in the context of an educational system that punishes mistakes. He argues that we are all born artists, and that the challenge is to remain artists as we grow up. He points out the scale of prestige and questions why mathematicians are more appreciated than those who excel in art or drama, as well as why mathematics and dance are not taught in schools. In fact, he believes that current education leads his students to become university professors. He defines intelligence in three dimensions and creativity as the process of creating original ideas that have value, as well as the fact that this creativity comes more and more from the interaction between multiple disciplines, which is why we cannot and should not underestimate the contribution of the artistic to the numerical.

In his presentation, summarized here in just over 8 minutes, he reminds us that if we were to disappear the insects from the planet, possibly in 50 years the human being would end up destroying everything. However, if we were to remove humans from the Earth, all the rest of creation would surely flourish. For the future, which may not be seen by those of us who exist today, we have an undeniable challenge and that is to maximize the creative potential.
If you would like to see the full presentation, it is available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY . Tedtalks is an impressive source of ideas for transforming the world. Be sure to explore his contributions, now massively available on iTunes, to download to your iPod, as well as on YouTube.