In the video above, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the current education system and its negative effects on creativity. He goes onto argues that kids are born naturally creative and when they don't know any better they are far more willing to take a chance and make mistakes. In other words they aren't afraid of being wrong. In the same sense, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. However, the problem is by the time children reach adulthood, most kids have lost the capacity and are afraid of being wrong. Robinson argues that this is a product of our educational system that essentially teaches kids at a young age that being wrong is the worst mistake they can make. Robinson suggests that we are in fact educating people out of their creative capacities through current educational practices.
I found this particular infobit extremely interesting and encouraging because as an entrepreneur we often learn the most by making mistakes. I think from a management perspective when running my own business it is important to remember that creativity is a process and that it is okay to make mistakes and let employees make mistakes so long as there is a lesson learned or an attempt at doing something different.
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The fear of making mistakes is probably the greatest obstacle for creativity. People have ideas all the time something to make life easier or work faster, but they don't say anything because they don't want to stand out. If one person says your idea is stupid that's only one person there are still billions of other people that could like it. No one likes to be criticized or have their idea shot down so they just don't speak out to avoid the whole situation all together.
I agree that in most school creativity is being trained out of students, students are trained to memorize formulas, theories, statistics and text books, and because of this students have, what they believe to be perfected methods to do things. There aren't as many people now as there used to be looking for other techniques or methods. While at the same time any classes that require students to be creative are left empty because students believe that those courses won't help them for their future goals. The fact is that most people that have careers where they have to be creative like; artists, glass blowers, musicians, etc, don't make as much so its a field where students tend to stay away from.