Art a Day: The Kids’ Version of Stayin’ Alive

One of the first TED Talks I ever watched was Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do School Kill Creativity”. It’s a blessing when your first experience with something new leaves a profound impression.

Before we take a deep dive into the talk, let’s touch upon the main idea that Sir Robinson is communicating - “All children are born artists. The challenge is to remain artists while growing up.”

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I like to condense any learning into six words to truly grasp the key takeaway from my perspective.

Read the post below to to explore your 6 Cents.

Art a day, keeps child alive.

What Sir Robinson brings to our attention is highly important, and yet regularly ignored. The education system undermines creativity’s importance in an individual’s life. For centuries, as technological marvels piled up, subjects like mathematics, physics, and chemistry seized the steering wheel. It was expected of every individual to dwell in these careers to be called “successful”.

Now, as AI begins to automate even our cleverest routines, the urgency of nurturing the untamed, imaginative mind becomes impossible to ignore.

He observed a hierarchy in every education system: mathematics and science at the top, the humanities in the middle, and—at the very bottom—the arts. Even within the arts, another ranking emerges: art and music are favoured over drama and dance. The top‑tier subjects appear on timetables daily; the single weekly art class feels almost apologetic.

Considering how at the end of the day, any human interacts with some form of Art to truly feel connected to themselves, to nature and to the things beyond our understanding, they interact with Art. It is time we give the same treatment to creativity as literacy in education.

My personal takeaway was - if you are not prepared to be wrong, you won’t come up with something original.

Experience one art form daily. Whether its music, dance, painting, quilling, reading poetry.

I am walking away after watching this talk with a decision of interacting with some art daily, because in the end, to be truly human, I would want the child in me to be with until the end.

A song that comes to mind after this talk is Stayin’ Alive by Bee Gees.

Because to stay alive in every sense that matters, we have to keep the child alive—one small act of creativity at a time.

What if we all tried one small act of creativity a day? A sketch, a song, a scribble, a silly dance. Just something to keep the child in us alive.