Sir Ken Robinson
Education guru and brilliant lecturer who emphasised the need for risk-taking and creativity
SIR KEN ROBINSON, who has died aged 70, was a British academic who spent much of his life campaigning for the reform of education systems that he felt stifled creativity. He was a captivating lecturer, and his sense of mission about children – and how their “extraordinary capacities for innovation” needed to be nurtured, not “educated out” made him enormously popular with parents. “Creativity now,” he argued, “is as important as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
Robinson was also the target of criticism from some who saw him as a man of wit and insight who, nevertheless, had little to offer in the way of practical solutions – an analysis that Robinson rejected in blunt terms: “The idea that I am sitting in the Bodleian Library just venting at people is b------,” he said, pointing to a wealth of experience working with schools, universities and teacher-training programmes.
Under Tony Blair’s administration, Robinson chaired a committee charged with reviewing cultural and creative education. The resulting report, All Our Futures (1999), called for a shift in the way governing bodies and schools approached education, with a much heavier emphasis on finding and nurturing pupils’ “creative strengths”.
Robinson recognised that the world in which young people lived was changing fast, thanks to the growth of information-sharing technologies. Children who became adults in such a world would need to be risk-takers and adept at moving from one hitherto discrete “realm” to another, as the traditional divide between the arts and the sciences ceased to exist.
In Robinson’s view, teaching these skills should not come at the expense of high educational standards, and creative education could never become a curriculum subject in itself.
“There is a balance in all good teaching between formal instruction of content and of skills”, the report explained, “and giving young people the freedom to inquire, question, experiment and to express their own thoughts and ideas.”
It was that freedom which Robinson sought to advance through his work on another Blair-era report, Unlocking
Creativity (2000). Looking towards a time of peace and political stability in Northern Ireland, this set out a strategy for creative and economic development in the province that would equip subsequent generations with the skills necessary to compete on a global stage.
Robinson went on to write several books. Among these were Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative (2001) and You, Your Child, and School (2018) – the latter cowritten with the American editor and publisher Lou Aronica. Robinson and Aronica’s 2009 book The Element (subtitled How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything) was translated into more than 20 languages and sold more than a million copies.
That was as nothing, however, compared to the phenomenal success of a 20-minute talk which Robinson delivered to an audience of 1,000 in Berkeley, California, in 2006. Packed with jokes and anecdotes, “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” was one in a series of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks uploaded to Youtube, and at time of Robinson’s death the video had been viewed more than 66 million times – making it the most popular TED talk ever.
One of seven children, Kenneth Robinson was born in Liverpool on March 4 1950. At the age of four he contracted polio and was confined to hospital for eight months. The disease permanently affected his gait and led to his being sent to the Margaret Beavan School for the Physically Handicapped.
Kenneth’s fellow pupils had a range of disabilities, and he later compared the look of the place – with characteristic dry humour – to “the bar-room scene from Star Wars”.
His teachers recognised his academic potential and encouraged him to sit the 11-plus. He was the first member of his family – and the only pupil in his school that year – to pass. After Liverpool Collegiate School he went on to Wade Deacon Grammar School, before studying English and Drama at Bretton Hall College of Education.
In 1981 he took a PHD from the University of London on the function of drama teaching in secondary education. Four years later he became a director of the Arts in Schools Project. On leaving that role in 1989, Robinson became Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick.
A call from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, offering him the post of adviser, prompted an abrupt change of scene, and for the rest of his career he divided his time between LA and London.
Ken Robinson was knighted for services to the arts in 2003.
He was supported throughout by his wife Marie-thérèse (Terry), a novelist and teacher whom he met when she was one of a – dispiritingly small – number attending a lecture that he had been due to give. “It was 9.30am,” he recalled of that first encounter, “and I thought, ‘If I talk long enough, maybe coffee?’” The couple had a son and a daughter.
Sir Ken Robinson, born March 4 1950, died August 21 2020