Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

I couldn't agree with Sir Ken Robinson more. I have always been a creative creature. I excel in theater arts. I'm good at visual arts and love to sing and dance. I love to think and create entire systems and infrastructures.

It is my desire to create that attracted me to computer science. It allowed me to be creative. I taught myself HTML when I was introduced to the internet at age 14. I taught myself the (horrific) table-based page formatting models. I learned to use Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks. I learned to use the Java applets that were popular in those days (1996). The result was my school's website. Nido de Aguilas finally got a professional to make a new one, but only after using modified versions of my original website for nearly 10 years!

Saddelback College introduced me OOP, C++ and UI programming using Java, AWT, and Swing, but I 'learned' C++ from The C++ Programming Language. I learned STL from Accelerated C++ and Generic Programming and the STL. I learned about C and make from A Book on C. I taught myself to install, configure and use Linux and FreeBSD. Ruby. Rails. CSS. XML. JavaScript. SQL. C#. XNA. wxWidgets. Excel VBA. Python. PHP. bash. I can go on and on ad nauseam.

The point is I learn by books, not schools. I learn on my own, on my own time, at my own speed. I learn by my creative digestion of the literature. I learn by actually doing something that applies to the real world, not two classes from now or a job from now, but RIGHT NOW. It's need-based learning and I've acquired a nice little library of books and URLs because of it.

I'm sure Sir Ken Robinson would agree that there is a lack of freedom in our schools today. I'm not a grade. I'm an artist. Give me some room. Give me some time. I will create beautiful systems that help people through my art, but because I've been so hampered by competing with your metrics, I have no art to show.

I'm afraid due to metrics that I will spend the next few years at an employer where I feel just as restricted. Artists usually starve, but I can practice my art on my own time...