Ian Leslie

Sir Ken Robinson__ 2008 talk on educational reform__ntitled __o Schools Kill Creativity?___as now been viewed more than 4 million times. In it Robinson cites the fact that children__ scores on standard tests of creativity decline as they grow older and advance through the educational system. He concludes that children start out as curious, creative individuals but are made duller by factory-style schools that spend too much time teaching children academic facts and not enough helping them express themselves. Sir Ken clearly cares greatly about the well-being of children, and he is a superb storyteller, but his arguments about creativity, though beguilingly made, are almost entirely baseless.

Only fiction has the power to cross the mental barricades, to make strangers intelligible to each other, because it moves people's hearts as well as engaging their minds.

Ignorance as a deliberate choice, can be used to reinforce prejudice and discrimination.

... knowing what not to know was itself indispensable knowledge.

[Rumsfield's] reply included a complex formulation that would become inextricably associated with him: 'There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know.

It's only people, as far as we know, who look up at the stars and wonder what they are.