Sir Ken Robinson, international education leader: "creativity is the great driver of human achievement.".

• Position: ON RECORD - Interview

Sir Ken Robinson is an author, speaker and international education leader whose ideas on creativity, education, the arts and the economy challenge conventional wisdom and inspire a whole new approach to our educational system. He was knighted in 2003 for his services to the arts. He spoke with Julie Bell, NCSL's director of education, at the 2014 Legislative Summit.

State Legislatures: You say we need to rethink the fundamental principles on which we base education. What do you mean by that?

Sir Ken Robinson: Current systems of education are based on the principles of industrial manufacturing. Most national education systems weren't invented until the mid- to late-19th century, and they grew up to meet the needs of the industrial revolution.

Schools typically operate in a very linear way with kids moving by age through the different grades. There's also a big emphasis on standardization, with the assumption that schools should concentrate only on activities or subjects that are directly relevant to work.

So it feels like an industrial system. It's like you're manufacturing products. And all that's fine except kids aren't products and life isn't like that. So what I'm arguing for is a style of education which is based on the principles that really govern the way human life flourishes, not the way factories work.

How does creativity relate to the fundamental principles of education?

It's really fundamental to the way we think about education that we should understand what creativity is, why it matters and how it works. If you ask adults if they are creative, they often say they're not, and if you ask children, they'll say that they are, up to a certain age. People mistakenly associate creativity with the arts, so when they say they're not creative, they really mean they're not very artsy.

I'm a major advocate of the arts in schools. But this is a bigger argument because you can be creative in science, in technology, in mathematics and almost anything at all that involves your intelligence. Creativity is really the great driver of human achievement because human life is characterized by great flights of the imagination and by the development of technologies, ideas, arts, practices and theories that are the fruit of human intelligence and creative thinking.

Why do you believe we educate creativity out of students?

It happens in part because of this industrial culture of education. If you look at how creativity works in any field--whether it's...