rePost::TED Blog: TED and Reddit asked Sir Ken Robinson anything — and he answered

submitted by guru
As a kid, I spent all of my free time at a computer, soaking up as much as I could about how it worked on every level. All that exploration really made my career possible.
But I didn’t have great grades in school, because I had a hard time developing a curiosity about much beyond the computer. My dad always said, “You need to be more well-rounded,” and he encouraged me to take on a sport or a musical instrument. But like many of the subjects in school, those things never really stuck for me when I was growing up.
As an adult, my interests have expanded far beyond the computer screen. In college I minored in photography, and at first it was a technical interest in the gear and the magic of the darkroom, but that quickly gave way a deeper interest in visual aesthetics, design, and the whole world of art and art history. I’ve found over time that similar links exist between all of my interests, and learning a new subject is only a matter of finding the right bridge from my current interests.
I imagine this is how most people learn. So why do we make these distinctions between “math”, “biology”, “history”, and “art”, when they are all linked, and when the interconnections so often make them meaningful? Is it OK if children are not “well-rounded,” as long as they are following their curiosities, or does a lack of “well-roundedness” mean we are not exposing them to enough bridges to new interests?
Sir Ken: I think he’s completely right about this. One of the points I make in the TEDTalk, and that I make generally, is that the human mind is essentially created. We live in worlds that we have forged and composed. It’s much more true than any of the species that you see. I mean, it seems to me that one of the most distinctive features of human intelligence is the capacity to imagine, to project out of our own immediate circumstances and to bring to mind things that aren’t present here and now. You know, to conceive of the past, to anticipate the future, and not just a future but multiple possible futures and many different sorts of pasts.
So this capacity for imagination, to me, is absolutely at the heart of this whole argument.Creativity to me is a step on. Creativity is putting your imagination to work and it’s produced the most extraordinary results in human culture. I mean, it is really the foundation of human culture, I believe. And it’s generated multiple ways of looking at the world, multiple ways of seeing it, multiple ways of thinking about it.
What happened over the course of the development of our public institutions is that these different ways of thinking tend to become formalized into subjects. Schools and universities are built upon different forms of knowledge, and the way we most commonly think about them is as subjects.
via TED Blog: TED and Reddit asked Sir Ken Robinson anything — and he answered.