Do Schools Kill Creativity?

This week we viewed a video of Ken Robinson discussing how schools don't seem to encourage creativity enough. Here is a link to the video : http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

His discussion of the dancer at the end reminded me of my little brother. He is now going to school as a music education major. There is a famous family video in my family where he got a Mickey Mouse plastic guitar for Christmas one year and wouldn't stop "playing" it. Our whole family knew that music was going to be his thing, and sure enough he kept with it and enjoys it. He was a very accomplished saxophone player in high school, winning several state honors. However, he was never encouraged by his band director to pursue anything in music, it was more my parents. In fact, when he told the band director he wanted to go into music (he hadn't decided at that point in performing or teaching) the band director was surprised. I think this shows the lack of encouragement that students receive to take those sort of career paths, that even someone that talented (I'm not intentionally trying to talk my brother up I'm sorry) wasn't pushed to pursue that by educators.

Anyway, enough of my unnecessary rambling, here are some other reactions to this video (that I have responded to) :

http://johnatillinois.blogspot.com/2008/09/schools-kill-creativity-kenrobinson.html
http://jkrone2.blogspot.com/2008/09/blog-week-2-ken-robinson-and-creativity.html
http://2-o-hearts.blogspot.com/2008/09/ken-robinson-schools-vs-creativity.html