Colour Inside the Lines – Said No Great Innovator Ever!


If you've ever watched a child try to draw a dinosaur and end up with a scribbled rainbow dragon wielding a sword and shooting cupcakes from its nose, you'll know exactly what unfiltered, glorious creativity looks like. It’s weird. It’s wonderful. And sadly, it doesn’t stand a chance in your average school setting.

Sir Ken Robinson said it best, “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.” And he was right. Schools, for all their good intentions, have become factories. Not the cool Wonka kind. More like those grey, humming conveyor belts churning out identical boxes. Perfectly packaged. Neatly labelled. Void of any cupcakes or rainbow dragons. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?language=en

Let’s not mince words here. The traditional schooling system is absolutely phenomenal at killing creativity. Ruthless, really. Got a child who thinks sideways? Who asks why the sky isn’t purple, or what happens if ants get hiccups? Give it a few years of rigid curricula, repetitive assessment rubrics, and standardised testing, and we’ll sand those edges right off. Clean. Polished. Muted.

See, schools love order. Neat handwriting. Quiet lines. Predictable answers. And the system rewards those who play along. Colour inside the lines, tick the boxes, and memorise all the facts — even the ones you’ll never use again unless you plan on becoming a trivia champion. The ones who dare to colour outside the lines, question authority, or heaven forbid, invent their own method for solving a problem? Well, they’re often labelled “distracted”, “difficult”, or “underperforming”.

Here’s the tragedy: our world has never needed creative thinkers more than it does right now. We are facing a future filled with challenges no textbook has solved before. Yet we’re still teaching kids as if they’re preparing for jobs in 1963. Sir Ken Robinson's landmark TED Talk wasn’t a warm, fuzzy pep talk. It was a wake-up call, and it should’ve shaken the very foundations of the education system. Spoiler: it didn’t.

Instead, most schools have doubled down on old habits. Arts programs? Slashed. Drama, music, and dance? Optional. Coding, design, and divergent thinking? Maybe, but only if it fits neatly into the timetable and doesn’t interrupt Maths. Because heaven forbid we lose one lesson of long division for something like curiosity.

And yes, I know some schools are “integrating creative thinking” through special projects or themed weeks - but that’s like putting a sprinkle on top of a cardboard cupcake and calling it dessert. Creativity isn’t something you sprinkle on top. It’s something you build everything around.

Parents, it’s time to start asking the right questions. Not “What grade did you get in Natural Science?” but “What did you wonder about today?” Not “Did you behave?” but “Did you try something new?” Start valuing mistakes, risk-taking, weird ideas, and yes, even dinosaurs that shoot baked goods. Because that’s where true learning lives.

Creativity isn’t optional. It’s oxygen. And the longer we hold it back in the name of neatness and efficiency, the more we’re suffocating the very people who might one day fix what we’ve broken.

Let’s raise a generation of cupcake-shooting dragon dreamers. The world could use a few.

 

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