Creating a New Normal: Sir Ken Robinson

'Ken Robinson in London in 2005. In California the following year he said: ‘Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip-mined the earth for a particular commodity.’ Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian'

The educationist Sir Ken Robinson inspired me greatly. Sir Ken was a great proponent of the encouragement of creativity amongst children. His TED talk ‘Do schools kill creativity’ is the most viewed TED talk ever, with 70 million views. Sir Ken was an excellent speaker—and I loved his wit—and he possessed a great vision.

A few weeks ago, I saw this YouTube video of Sir Ken talking about the future after the pandemic. I loved what he had to say, as I always did. I didn’t realise until the next day that Sir Ken had passed away shortly after making this film clip. I was devastated. He was one of those people I had always classed as ‘bigger than life’. He was too young to pass on. And  he had so much to do. You can see Sir Ken’s obituary in The Guardian.

Sir Ken’s legacy must live on. I, for one, will be pushing out his ideas and trying to help create the ‘new normal’ that Sir Ken talks about in this video. Here are a couple of quotes from that last public speech that Sir Ken made and the YouTube video.

RIP Sir Ken. Thank you for your inspiration and for all you have done for children.

‘We need to see that real social social change come from the ground up through people cultivating the grassroots… it is a mistake to believe that we just need to wait until some enlightened politician comes along and shows us the way…

The real power is with the people. And connecting people as we are doing today through UNITE is the key to this. Getting people to share ideas, to collaborate, to work together, to see future possibilities and to bring them about through joint projects and through the joint support that comes from compassionate collaboration.’

‘And as we get back to normal, we need to re-imagine what that could look like, and to learn the lessons of this lockdown, to learn the lessons of the pandemic, to see beyond them and create a new sort of world and a new kind of normal. There is an opportunity. It takes bravery and imagination and we have plenty of that in store.’

In his final public speech, Sir Ken Robinson joined The Call to Unite to invite us all to imagine a new normal, and to understand how we can create a world that values the diversity of each individual’s unique gifts and talents.

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