Mission 14
Training session 3 • Writing
4 Do you think creativity is an important skill for employees to have in general? Explain your answer.
b
Work with a classmate. Discuss your answers from the previous exercise and decide on a common response. Indicate whether you initially had different opinions and what these were. Explain how you arrived at your final common answers.
Preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Educationalist and inspirational speaker Sir Ken Robinson is of the opinion that creativity is as important in education as literacy. He has defined creativity as the application of imagination. Using our imagination, we step outside our current place and time, in short, think outside the box. The creative process allows us to test and build up ideas, thus developing imagination into reality. Risk-taking and critical thinking should also be associated with creativity, and this can apply to many areas of study and work. A report from a multinational computer technology company suggests that 65% of future jobs have not been invented yet. With the rise of robotics and digitalisation in the workplace, creativity will have a growing value in our lives. This may seem obvious, but it took some time to be acknowledged. Back in 2006, Sir Ken's first Ted talk, titled 'Do schools kill creativity?', was made to a small audience in California. In the 1990s he had written a huge government report on the same subject. In his report, he contested the hierarchy of subjects in education, with maths and languages at the top and the arts at the bottom. He pointed out that public education is based on academic ability, with the result that many brilliant people think they are not because they are judged against this view of the mind. For the most part, this report had been ignored, certainly shelved by a UK government whose focus was on testing in schools. However, his short, jokefilled Ted talk some years later went viral and was soon the most-watched Ted talk of all time. With the current focus on 'core subjects', teaching is missing out on the opportunity to use the interdisciplinary methodologies that are most effective for positive learning outcomes. Moreover, he proposed that if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. Yet we now run a national education system where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. His description was light-hearted but relevant. Generally speaking, he said, students are told that there is one answer, it is at the back of the book, but you must not look because that is cheating. Not only that, but you must not copy from or confer with fellow students. His belief is that tomorrow's world will need individuals who can think for themselves, and far from not copying, they should welcome collaboration and the sharing of ideas. In fact, his argument for change has become more relevant in the years since that famous Ted talk. Schools are producing exam robots, not creative thinkers. In the final analysis, awareness of the imagination and creativity needed to approach any problem – technological or scientific – leads to flexible thinking. And that is what our future will need.
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