Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson @ The Creative Company Conference by Sebastiaan ter Burg

“Creativity is essential to the success and fulfilment of young people, to the vitality of our communities and to the long-term health of the economy.”

Sir Ken Robinson

This weekend we learnt of the sad passing of the hugely influential educator and author, Sir Ken Robinson. Artis Foundation would like to send our deepest sympathies to Sir Ken Robinson’s family and friends, and offer our immense gratitude for all he did for creativity in education.

Sir Ken spoke widely and passionately about the value of the arts within schools. His 2006 TED Talk ‘Do Schools Kill Creativity?’ has now gained over 65 million views and has inspired so many artists and educators in their careers to push for the arts in schools to support all aspects of a child’s learning.

Artis was established in 2004 and has always felt a synergy with Sir Ken Robinson’s work. Through our mission, to transform lives through the arts, we were able to reflect on his words and draw on his studies as evidence for the necessity of creativity in education.

“Creative and cultural education are not subjects in the curriculum, they are general functions of education.”
All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (The Robinson Report, 1999)

His pivotal words have been a call to arms, to provide schools with professional performing arts educators who use music, drama and movement to support learning across the curriculum, bringing the arts into every aspect of learning within a school.

His legacy will be more important now than ever. We need more voices like Sir Ken Robinson’s to fight for creativity in education as it continues to be sidelined and squeezed out of the curriculum.

“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education, but to personalise it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”

Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (2009)