One of my professional heroes, Sir Ken Robinson:

“What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this — he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.”

Can you imagine being educated out of creativity? Hard to believe, right? Well, no, not really. We do it all the time. It begins about the time we start preparing kids for high stakes standardized tests. I’m convinced that is when many students start wondering what school is for. What the point of school really is. They perhaps don’t articulate it in those terms…it probably sounds more like “I hate school.” The older kids get, the worse this problem gets for some students (some, not all). We  are guilty of squeezing the creative juices from our kids in the name of teaching to tests that have little or no value to them.