创造力，我们再也伤不起

by Sir Ken Robinson 译/ 陈继龙

Creativity is a key part of the educated mind.

教书育人的关键在于发展创造力。

Iheard a great story recently about a six-year-old girl in a drawing lesson. The teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention in class, but during this lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated.

She asked the girl, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “Im drawing a picture of God.” The teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl said, “They will in a minute.”

What all children have in common is that they will take a chance1). Theyre not frightened of being wrong. I dont mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But if youre not prepared to be wrong, youll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

We run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize2) mistakes. Now, were running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso3) once said that all children are born artists. The trick is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: We dont grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Or, rather, we get educated out of it. Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Something strikes you when you travel around the world: Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy4) of subjects. It doesnt matter where you go. Youd think it would be otherwise, but it isnt. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts—everywhere on Earth.

And in pretty much every system, too, there is a hierarchy within the arts. Music and art are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isnt an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.

Why not? I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if theyre allowed to. What happens is that as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. Then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.

If you were an alien from another planet visiting Earth and you asked yourself what public education here is for, youd have to conclude, if you look at the output—who really succeeds, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points5), who are the winners—that its whole purpose, throughout the world, is to produce university professors.

I like university professors, but we shouldnt hold them up as the exemplars of all human achievement. Theyre just a form of life. But theyre rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them.

Typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. Theyre disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look on their body as a form of transport for their heads. Its a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a conference of senior academics and pop into the nightclub on the final night. And there youll see it: grown men and women writhing6) uncontrollably, off the beat7), waiting for it to end so they can go home and write a paper about it.

So our education system is predicated on8) the idea of academic ability. And theres a reason for that. The whole system came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So you were probably steered benignly9) away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that10) you would never get a job doing that: Dont do music; youre not going to be a musician. Dont do art; you wont be an artist. Then: benign advice. Now: profoundly mistaken.

Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of intelligence. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted11) process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly talented, creative people think theyre not, because the thing they were good at was not valued in school, or was actually stigmatized.

We cant afford to go on that way. In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO12), more people worldwide will graduate from school than did so from the beginning of history to the present. This is because of the transformative effects of technology on the nature of work, and the huge explosion in population.

Suddenly, degrees arent worth anything like what they used to be worth. When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job, and if you didnt have a job, it was because you didnt want one.

But now, kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need a masters degree where the previous job required a bachelors degree, and now you need a PhD for the job that once required an MA. Its a process of academic inflation, and it indicates that the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet and that we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

We know three things about intelligence: First, its diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically13), we think in abstract terms, we think in movement and in many other ways, too.

Second, intelligence is dynamic. Look at the working processes of the human brain: Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isnt divided into unrelated compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not14) comes about15) through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

And the third thing about intelligence is that its distinct. Im doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany16), which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. It was prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman named Gillian Lynne. Shes a choreographer17), and everybody knows her work. She did Cats18) and The Phantom of the Opera19).

Gillian and I had lunch one day, and I said, “How did you get to be a dancer?” She told me that when she was at school, she was really hopeless. She couldnt concentrate; she was always fidgeting20). The school wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” So Gillians mother took her to see this specialist. She sat on her hands for 20 minutes while her mother talked to this man about all the problems Gillian was having at school: She was disturbing people, and her homework was always late, and so on. In the end, the doctor sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian, Ive listened to all these things that your mothers told me. I need now to speak to her privately. Wait here—well be back. We wont be very long.”

As they went out of the room, he turned on the radio sitting on his desk. When they got out of the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” The minute they left, she was on her feet, moving to the music. They watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, “You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isnt sick. Shes a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”

I asked, “What happened?” and Gillian said, “She did. I cant tell you how wonderful it was. We walked into this room, and it was full of people like me, people who had to move to think.”

She eventually auditioned21) for the Royal Ballet School and had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet and became a soloist. She later moved on, founded her own company, and met Andrew Lloyd Webber22). Shes been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, shes given pleasure to millions, and shes probably a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

I dont mean to say we are all dancers. But in a way, we are all Gillians. There are millions of Gillians. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine23) the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it wont serve us.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which were educating our children. And the only way well do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness24) they are, and seeing our children for the hope they are. Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future. We may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

我最近听到一个很有意思的故事，讲的是一个六岁的女孩上绘画课的事情。老师说这个小女孩以前上课几乎从来都不专心，但这节课却专心起来。这引起了这位老师的注意。

她问女孩：“你在画什么呀？”女孩说：“我在画上帝。”老师说：“可是没有人知道上帝长什么样啊。”女孩说：“一会儿他们就知道了。”

所有的孩子都有一个共同的特点，那就是他们愿意冒险。他们不怕犯错。我不是说犯错等同于有创造力，但是如果你没有犯错的心理准备，你就永远不会有任何创新。大多数孩子长大成人以后就失去这种敢于冒险的能力了，他们变得畏缩不前，生怕犯错。

顺便提一下，我们在经营公司时也存在这样的问题。我们总是对错误一味指责。如今，国家教育体系的运行方式也如出一辙，在这个体系中，犯错是最令人难以容忍的情形。

这样导致的结果是我们教出来一个个毫无创造力的人。毕加索曾说过，所有的孩子都是天生的艺术家。问题的关键在于，如何在我们成长的过程中始终做一名艺术家。我深信，创造力不会随着我们的成长与日俱增，而是会越来越少。或者，更确切地说，我们所受的教育让我们渐渐丧失了创造力。如今，在教育领域，创造力与读写能力一样重要，我们不应厚此薄彼。

当你在世界各地旅行时，有件事会令你印象深刻：世界上每个国家的教育体系都有着同样的学科等级系统。不管你去哪里，全都一样。你或许以为会有例外的情况，但事实上没有差别。排在最上面的学科是数学和语言，接下来是人文学科，而艺术则位于底端——寰球皆如此。

在几乎每一个教育系统内，艺术课程本身也有等级之分。在学校里，音乐和美术通常都要比戏剧和舞蹈更受重视。在我们的星球上，没有哪个教育体系会像我们教孩子学习数学那样每日教他们学习舞蹈。

为什么不呢？我认为数学非常重要，但舞蹈也同等重要。如果允许孩子们跳舞，他们会一直跳个不停。然而事实是，当孩子们渐渐长大时，我们的教育重心开始逐渐转移到他们的腰部以上，之后把关注点放在他们的头部，并且有点偏重一侧大脑。

假如你是一名造访地球的外星人，你自问：在这里，公共教育的目的何在？如果你看到教育的结果——谁真正取得了成功，谁尽了该尽的本分，谁赢得了赞誉，谁又成了赢家——那么，你就必定会得出这样的结论：世界上所有公共教育的全部目的就是培养大学教授。

我喜欢大学教授，但我们不应当将他们树立为全人类成就的典范。他们只是生命呈现的一种形式而已。不过，他们都相当好学，我这么说，完全是出于对他们的倾慕之心。

一般来讲，他们都依靠大脑生存。他们的生活就在他们的脑中，而且稍稍偏向一侧。毫不夸张地说，他们是生活在身体的躯壳之外的。他们仅把身体视为大脑的交通工具，可以载着大脑去开会。

对了，要是你想真正见证一下这种头脑脱离躯体的经历，你可以去参加一次由资深学者参加的研讨会，然后在研讨会的最后一个晚上跑去夜总会。在那儿，你就眼见为实了：成年男女扭动着身体，动作失控，不合节拍，只等着舞曲赶紧结束，这样就能回家写篇论文来报告此行了。

所以，我们的教育体系所基于的正是这种注重学术能力的观点。这是有原因的。整个教育体系是为了满足工业化的需求应运而生的。因此，在你的孩提时代，学校可能就善意地引导你远离你喜欢的事情了，他们的理由是就算你学了，你也永远不可能靠它找份工作：别玩音乐了，你又成不了音乐家；别画画了，你又不会成为画家。往昔之良言，今日之大谬！

学术能力确实已经开始主导我们对才智的看法。细想一下，你就会发现，世界各地公共教育的整套体系就是一场旷日持久的大学入学考试。其结果是，许多天赋异禀、颇具创造力的人对自己的能力产生了怀疑，因为他们的特长在学校没有得到重视，甚至还遭到污蔑。

我们不能再这样下去了。据联合国教科文组织称，在未来30年间，从学校毕业的人比从古至今毕业的人加在一起还多。这既源于科技对劳动本身所产生的变革影响，也归咎于人口大爆炸。

突然间，文凭变得不像以前那么值钱了。我上学那会儿，只要你有一纸文凭，你就会有一份工作；如果你没有工作，那只是因为你不想要而已。

但现在就不一样了，拿着文凭的孩子们常常只能回家玩电脑游戏，因为以前本科毕业就可以做的工作现在得要硕士文凭才行；原来需要硕士文凭的岗位现在得要博士文凭。这是一个学历膨胀的过程，它表明整个教育结构正在我们眼前发生改变，我们需要好好地重新思考一下对才智的看法。

我们知道才智有三个特点。首先，它是多样的。我们用自身形形色色的体验去理解这个世界。我们用视觉、听觉、触觉去理解，我们抽象地思维，我们在运动中思考，如此种种，不一而足。

其二，才智是充满活力的。来看一下人脑的运行过程就知道了：才智有着奇妙的交互性。大脑的各个组成部分之间并不是毫无关联的。实际上，创造力——我个人把其定义为产生有价值的独创性观点的过程——通常是在从不同学科的角度认识事物的交互作用下产生的。

才智的第三个特征是与众不同性。眼下我正在写一本书，名叫《顿悟》，书的内容是基于一系列关于如何发现自己天分的人物访谈。这本书的灵感来自于我和一位优秀女士的对话。这位女士名叫吉莲·琳内，是一位舞蹈编导。说起她的作品，可以说是无人不晓：《猫》和《歌剧魅影》都是她的代表作。

有一天吉莲与我共进午餐，我问：“你是怎么成为舞者的？”她告诉我，她上学那会儿真是无可救药。她不能集中注意力，总是动来动去。学校给她父母写信说：“我们认为吉莲患有学习障碍。”于是，吉莲的母亲带她去看专科医生。母亲跟医生谈论起吉莲在学校出现的所有问题：她总是打扰别人，老是迟交家庭作业等等。在此期间，吉莲把双手放在屁股下坐了20分钟。最后，那位医生坐到吉莲身边说：“吉莲，我听你妈妈讲了关于你的所有事情，现在我需要和她私下里谈谈。你在这等会儿，我们一会儿就回来，不会太久。”

离开房间的时候，医生打开了桌上的收音机。迈出房门，他对她的母亲说：“我们就站在这儿，观察她会做什么。”他们一离开，吉莲就站起身，跟着音乐动起来。他们观察了几分钟后，医生转身对她母亲说：“您看，琳内夫人，吉莲没有得病。她是一个天生的舞者，带她去上舞蹈学校吧。”

我问：“后来呢？”吉莲说：“母亲带我去舞蹈学校了。别提有多棒了。我们走进那个房间，满屋子都是像我这样的人，都是需要动起来才能思考的人。”

她最终参加了皇家芭蕾舞学校的试演，在皇家芭蕾舞团经历了一段精彩的职业生涯，并成为一名独舞演员。后来她继续发展，成立了自己的公司，遇到了安德鲁·劳埃德·韦伯。她担任了史上好几部最成功的音乐剧作品的舞蹈编导，为数百万人带去了欢乐，而她自己大概也成了千万富婆。要是换成别的医生，当初可能就会给她吃药，叫她安静下来了。

我的意思不是说我们所有人都能成为舞者，但从某种意义上讲，我们都是吉莲，我们周围有数百万的吉莲。我相信，我们未来的唯一希望在于，对于人类生态学，我们要抱有新的观念，基于这个新观念，我们要开始重新构建我们对人类所拥有的丰富潜能的看法。我们的教育制度开启我们心智的方式就像人类露天开采地球矿藏一样：针对的都是某种有特殊价值的东西。但这在未来并不能为我们造福。

我们必须重新思考我们教育孩子时所依据的那些基本原则。为此，我们唯一的办法就是要看到我们有着丰富的创造力，认识到我们的孩子是我们的希望所在。我们的任务就是为孩子们提供全方位的教育，使他们能够面对未来。我们不一定看得到这个未来，但他们一定会。我们的工作就是帮助他们在未来有所作为。

1. take a chance：冒险

2. stigmatize [?st?ɡm?ta?z] vt. 指责；非难

3. Picasso：毕加索(1881～1973)，西班牙画家、雕塑家，现代艺术的创始人，西方现代派绘画的主要代表

4. hierarchy：请参见41页注释2。

5. brownie point：品行良好而获得的称赞；讨好上级所得的信任

6. writhe [ra??] vi. 扭动身体

7. off the beat：不合拍

8. be predicated on：基于，依据

9. benignly [b??na?nli] adv. 和善地

10. on the grounds that：根据，以??为由

11. protracted [pr??tr?kt?d] adj. 拖延的

12. UNESCO：联合国教科文组织(United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization)，该组织成立于1946年，总部设在法国巴黎。其宗旨是促进教育、科学及文化方面的国际合作，以利于各国人民之间的相互了解，维护世界和平。

13. kinesthetically [?k?ni?s?θet?k(?)li] adv. 动觉地；(肌肉等)运动感觉地

14. more often than not：大半；大概

15. come about：发生；产生

16. epiphany [??p?f?ni] n. 对事物真谛的顿悟

17. choreographer [?k?ri??ɡr?f?(r)] n. 舞蹈编导

18. Cats：《猫》，由作曲家安德鲁·劳埃德·韦伯根据英国诗人T. S. 艾略特的诗集《老负鼠的猫经》及其他诗歌所编写的一部音乐剧，是历史上最成功的音乐剧之一。

19. The Phantom of the Opera：《歌剧魅影》，由安德鲁·劳埃德·韦伯作曲的一部知名音乐剧，剧本根据法国侦探小说家卡斯顿·勒胡所著的同名爱情惊悚小说改编。

20. fidget [?f?d??t] vi. 动来动去

21. audition [???d??(?)n] vi. 试演

22. Andrew Lloyd Webber：安德鲁·劳埃德·韦伯(1948～)，生于英国伦敦，是一位非常成功的音乐剧作曲家，代表作品有《猫》、《歌剧魅影》、《万世巨星》、《日落大道》等。

23. strip-mine：露天开采

24. see sb./sth. for sth.：认识到某人或某事的真实情况