"Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity"

After listening to Ken Robinson's very persuasive argument in 2006, the audience feels persuaded to his very well developed point. Ken believes that today's education system is reducing childrencs creativity. Ken believes that there is a kind of "educational inflation" occuring today that is leading to several students and children to limit their creativeness. With his humorous and personable tone, Robinson develops this point with the use of many ancedotes, a few statistics, and many logical conclusions that the audience can agree upon.

Beggining Ken's TED Talk, it can be noted that he is building his ethos through his peronsable character. Ken casually talks to his audience as if they are having a conversation at a coffee table. Allowing the audience to feel more comfortable, Ken also introduces a few jokes here and there; his jokes tend to make fun of his opposing view point. By declaring "And I used to be one (refferring to proffesors), so there", Ken shows that he used to be an average proffessor (showing us his ethos) that he mentions. Those average professors " live up in their heads."

Continuing thorugh the video, the audience is given several ancedotes that are comical and at the same time aid Ken to develop his point. One of his better ancedotes is rather near the ending (saving -the -best- for -last kind of persuasvive element). He discusses how a young girl basically couldn't stop fidgeting. Her parents were informed from the school ; the school was basically telling the parents that she has ADD. In concern, her parents took her to a specialist; the specailist realized that "the girl is not sick but rather she is a dancer." Listening to the doctors advice, the parents took her to a dance school. Today she is a famous multimilionare dance choreographer; she could have been a regular person if the girls creativity was supressed by medicine. This example hits the audience very hard as it perfectly supports and coincides with Robinsons argument.  His use of ancedotes help with his personable character ( building up his ethos) while also building up the audiences pathos as most of his stories have a humorous twist to them with his comical remarks.

Disperesed throughout his argument, logical facts from statistics and other research are found in Ken's argument. Ken find a statistic from UNESCO that says in the next 30 years there will be more graduates world wide than in the beginning of history. This point is used to back up his argument about educational inflation destroying creativity among students who now have to compete to get PHD's just to get a job ( unlike in the past where they only needed a regular degree). He also brings up other logos near the end by quoting Jonas Salk. His logos allows the audience to see that his point does have some truth.


Overall, Ken's argument in his 20 minute video is very persuasive. He mentions several arguments that seem to be true about todays education system and then ties it back into how the education system is destroying students' creativity. His use of logos, ethos and pathos all help him to be very effective in his argument.

Take a look at the video at :

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html?qtwh=true&utm_expid=166907-14&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ted.com%2Ftalks%3Flang%3Den%26event%3D%26duration%3D%26sort%3Dpersuasive%26tag%3D