She's Not Sick, She's A Dancer
A tender story about a girl who took over the world after she was correctly diagnosed with a learning disorder
At school, I had a burning desire to ask — is this really the most quintessential information you can be teaching me right now?
From algebra to historical events and Shakespeare to religious studies, why do we put pressure on children to remember things that are so quickly redundant?
Ken Robinson — an ex-arts professor — offered this insight on the subject matter:
“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.”
The resentment I experienced to conform to such rules was something I couldn’t shake off. And 20 years later, my nephew who is now 12 years old is asking the same question — what’s the point of all of this? My brother has no answer either. He can’t. The best he can manage is “You’ve just got to get through it, son, that’s what we all had to do.”
But is that really the best we can do?
The most annoying thing is that I get it
To teach hundreds, sometimes thousands of kids at a time requires a level of authority and conformity. Otherwise, it would be chaos. So, I get it. But I have to argue that why do we teach so many kids the same thing in the same way at the same time in the first place?
Where does this one-sized-fit’s-all kind of approach come from? And why do we reward the retention of facts over creativity?
Surely, this method only serves a few who are looking to work toward future education as Ken Robinson so brilliantly said.
“The whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. They’re the people who come out the top.” — Ken Robinson
This is one of the ways schools are killing creativity and it’s having a big impact down the line.
“Creativity is now as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
I was 15 years old when I heard Ken Robinson give his TED talk back in 2006 and it gave me hope.
Finally, there was someone who was articulating what I couldn’t, who honoured school children’s concerns and frustrations and gave examples of how it could be different.
Have you heard of Gillian Lynne? He asked the audience.
“She’s a choreographer who did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.”
Ken Robinson then shared that he used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet and after having a conversation with Gillian about her life, he knew it was time to prepare a talk that highlighted her path.
He first asked Gillian, “How did you get to be a dancer?”
What happened next shows how beautiful it can be when an adult allows a child to express themselves freely and then encourages and supports it wholeheartedly.
Here is Ken’s retelling of that moment:
“When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the ’30s, wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point.
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about the problems Gillian was having at school. Because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said, “I’ve listened to all these things your mother’s told me, I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We’ll be back; we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.
But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
I said, “What happened?” She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.”
People who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber.
She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
By the time children grow up to be adults, most have become frightened of being wrong because schools and later companies stigmatize it. So, now entire national education systems create environments where making mistakes is the worst thing you can do even though it’s often where the most growth (and creativity) tends to happen.
As a result, “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” (Ken Robinson)
“All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” — Picasso
As someone who used to love drawing and making art growing up, I believe in this passionately because now, 20 years later, it’s a massive block for me. I judge and doubt myself so I’d rather not do it. At best, this happened because it wasn’t nurtured but at worse it was thought less important than reciting Shakespeare so it wasn’t a priority.
Now I don’t do either and it’s such a shame.
That’s why Ken Robinson was spot on when he said: “We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or, rather, we get educated out of it.”
Closing thoughts
Changing something as big as the education system can be a daunting task. But not changing it because it’s overwhelming doesn’t serve anyone either.
There’s no silver bullet or some magic formula here. But a good place to start is to simply acknowledge and encourage creativity in all the beautiful ways it wants to be expressed, especially now with AI coming in so strongly.
Then with time, we might find that all the kids we deem sick today aren’t sick after all, but they’re just undiscovered artists, dancers, and so much more.
“I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.
Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.” — Ken Robinson
Here is Ken Robinson’s TED talk in full: