Creativity: The Human Skill Machines Can’t Replace | Fatma Naz Toksöz | TEDxYaamTasarmSchools
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBknYnfVHDA Video ID: mBknYnfVHDA ============================================================ Transcriber: Shay Kang Reviewer: Sarah Abdelrahman Are you? Yes. My name is Nancy. I'm pleased to be here to share my thoughts with you today. I'm going to talk about why schools should teach creativity. What if I told you that the most powerful skill your child could have is 11 on the school curriculum? It's not math. Not coding? Not even science. It's something far more human creativity. Our world is changing faster than ever before. Artificial intelligence is designing art. Robots are writing news articles. Machines are even passing medical exams. But they still can't imagine a better world that takes human creativity. So how do we prepare kids for a future we can't even predict? The answer is creativity. Yet our schools are still stuck in the past. Many students spent over 60% of their school time memorizing facts rather than creating or questioning. They are told not to fail, not to question, and just copy. That's not education, that's programming. Let me give you an example from Pakistan. A young girl named Malala Yousufzai grew up in a society that denied girls rights to education. But Malala refused to accept it. At 11, she began writing a blog advocating for girls education. She used her voice even when told to be Miss Thailand in 2012. She was shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school, but she survived and became the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala drew strength not from Tesco but from imagination, vision and courage. She continues to fight worldwide for education rights. This is the power of creativity. Or take Elon Musk. While others were improving gas engines, he imagined cars that didn't need fuel. When the world stopped at the moon, he asked why. Not much. That's not just intelligence. That's creativity with vision and courage. I would like to talk about Kevin Dao from Sierra Leone. Imagine a place where electricity was was unreliable. 13 year old Kevin scavenge scraps to build his own generator and later a radio transmitter. He launched a community radio station, became known as DJ focus, and started broadcasting news and music to his village. He learned everything on his own. Driven by curiosity and purpose. MIT, the world's number one university for engineering and technology, discovered his story and invited him to the US, where he became one of the youngest ever participants in their visiting practitioner program. This wasn't about textbooks. This was creativity sparked by necessity. And when 15 year old Anna Markuszewski learned that her friend in the Philippines couldn't study at night due to lack of electricity, she invented a flashlight that works without batteries or sunlight, powered only by the heat of your hand. Can you imagine that? And this is what ended when she was just 15. That's incredible. After that, she went international science fairs and proved that empathy can fuel invention and didn't wait for the future. She built it herself. These examples show us creativity isn't just about big conventions. It's about thinking differently, applying knowledge in new ways, and imagining solutions where others see obstacles. If we want better engineers, teach them to imagine impossible worlds. If you want better doctors, help them design better patient experiences, not just memorize phones. If we want better citizens, let them reflect, write, and reimagine what justice looks like and hear the truth in numbers. 85% of the jobs that today's students will do in the future don't even exist yet. Only about 30% of schools worldwide prioritize creativity as a core skill. Countries investing in creative, project based learning see up to 20% higher student engagement and problem solving ability. We should stop asking students to stay inside the lines. We should hand them to brush and say, paint your own future. Thank you very much for listening.