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Do Schools Kill Creativity?
Robinson's 2006 TED talk—the most-watched TED talk in history, with over seventy million views—which compressed thirty years of argument into nineteen minutes and made Robinson the most effective public advocate for educational transformation of his generation.
Robinson delivered "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" at the TED conference in Monterey, California, in February 2006. The talk ran nineteen minutes. It combined three anecdotes—the girl drawing God, Gillian Lynne's diagnosis as a dancer, and the Torrance data on divergent thinking decay—into a compressed argument that the educational systems of every developed nation were systematically suppressing the creative capacities they claimed to develop. The talk became the most-watched TED talk of all time, viewed more than seventy million times across TED's platforms and vastly more on unofficial channels. It transformed Robinson from respected educational researcher to global public figure and established the vocabulary of creative education in popular discourse.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The talk's structure was deceptively simple. Robinson opened with humor, established his credentials through self-deprecation rather than assertion, and moved through three linked anecdotes that together constituted his argument. The girl drawing God established