Dr. Sanjay Arora: Unleashing Creativity in Education
Education is expected to prepare young people for the future. Yet in his TEDxISH talk, Dr. Sanjay Arora argues that many schools cultivate precisely the habits an unpredictable future may reward least: conformity, passivity, fear of mistakes, and dependence on a single approved answer.
Drawing on personal experience, childhood anecdotes, and familiar stories of discovery, Arora makes the case for a broader model of learning. His central concern is not simply whether schools teach art. It is whether they preserve the imagination, curiosity, physical freedom, and intellectual courage that children already possess.
When a Score Becomes a Judgment
Arora begins with an uncomfortable memory: he received nine marks out of 100 in mathematics in his final year of school. He attributes that result to arithmophobia—a fear of numbers that, he says, has never entirely disappeared.
The anecdote establishes an important distinction. A poor score in one subject can identify a difficulty, but it can also become a verdict on the learner. When institutions treat a narrow measure of performance as a measure of intelligence or potential, students may absorb the idea that their weaknesses define them.
For Arora, this is one symptom of a deeper problem. Young children readily invent dozens of possible responses to an open question. As they move through school, however, they learn to search for the answer the adult expects. Efficiency improves, but possibility contracts.
Creativity, in this account, is not a rare gift introduced by a specialist teacher. It is a natural capacity that education can either develop or gradually suppress.
Education Needs Both Wings
Arora uses the familiar contrast between logical and imaginative modes of thought. He associates one side with analysis and the other with music, sensory experience, and creativity, while acknowledging that the distinction is not absolute.
The metaphor matters more than a rigid division of brain functions. Early education often involves movement, touch, play, and making. Later, learning becomes increasingly sedentary and abstract. The body is expected to remain still while the mind processes information.
Arora compares the result to a bird whose creative wing has been restrained throughout childhood. Once students enter adult life, employers suddenly ask them to innovate, take risks, and generate original ideas. Organizations then spend heavily on creativity workshops in an attempt to restore abilities that conventional schooling may have weakened.
The contradiction is striking: children are trained to comply and later evaluated on their capacity to depart from convention.
Children See More Than Adults Expect
To illustrate spontaneous imagination, Arora recalls watching a sunset in Goa with his young son. Where an adult might have offered a conventional description of the scene, the child compared the setting sun to a half-fried egg.
The value of that observation is not its sophistication. It is the freedom of the association. The child has not yet learned that some comparisons sound serious and others do not. He simply connects shape, color, and memory.
Arora also describes an exercise in which students at different grade levels are asked whether they are artists. Many young children eagerly identify themselves that way; the proportion declines among older students. Growing older does not necessarily remove artistic ability. Instead, students may become more conscious of judgment and increasingly reluctant to claim a creative identity.
This helps explain the “closet artist”: someone who draws, writes, dances, or makes music privately but does not regard that work as legitimate. Academic culture can reinforce the split when it treats artistic practice as a diversion rather than a mode of thinking.
A School System Built for a Previous Economy
Arora connects contemporary schooling to the Industrial Revolution. In that model, institutions were organized to produce graduates with standardized qualifications for recognizable roles. Timetables, age-based groups, uniform expectations, and subject hierarchies all served a world that valued predictable outputs.
The structure remains familiar, but the world beyond school has changed. Arora invokes futurist Alvin Toffler’s criticism of factory-style education and asks how schools can prepare children whose working lives may extend toward 2080.
Artificial intelligence makes that question even more urgent. No curriculum can reliably anticipate every occupation or technical skill that students will need decades from now. An education built primarily around transferring current information risks becoming obsolete before its recipients finish using it.
Arora therefore emphasizes capacities with longer lives: imagination, adaptability, synthesis, and the ability to frame new questions. Knowledge remains essential, but students also need to recombine it when circumstances change.
The Hidden Hierarchy of Subjects
Not all forms of achievement receive equal respect in school. Arora describes a hierarchy in which mathematics and science often occupy the highest positions, humanities sit below them, and disciplines such as dance, drama, and visual art receive the least institutional weight.
That ranking can distort how students understand their own abilities. A child who excels through movement may be labeled restless. A gifted performer may be treated as academically marginal. Meanwhile, success in a highly valued subject may be confused with intelligence in general.
Arora recounts the widely told story of dancer and choreographer Gillian Lynne, whose difficulty remaining still was initially treated as a behavioral problem. According to the story, a perceptive specialist recognized that she responded naturally to music and encouraged dance training. She later built a distinguished career in ballet and musical theatre.
Arora uses the story to illustrate kinetic learning: some people understand and express themselves through movement. The educational lesson is not that every restless student is a future dancer. It is that behavior can carry information about how a person learns—and that a poor fit between learner and environment should not automatically be treated as a defect in the learner.
Why Unstructured Time Matters
One of Arora’s strongest recommendations is also one of the simplest: give children time that has not been fully programmed.
A school day can move from lesson to lesson, followed by extracurricular activities that are nearly as controlled as academic classes. Even art may come with a prescribed outcome, leaving little room to experiment, abandon an idea, or make something that cannot be graded against a model.
Arora notes that students may experience unusual freedom during unsupervised periods such as a bus journey. Those intervals allow conversation, daydreaming, observation, and self-directed play. They may appear unproductive, yet they create space for mental connections that scheduled activity can crowd out.
His examples of insight arriving during dreams, bathing, or rest—from August Kekulé’s account of imagining benzene’s structure to the story of Archimedes in the bath—support a broader point. Concentrated effort is only one phase of problem-solving. The mind also needs periods in which ideas can combine outside deliberate attention.
For schools and families, this need not mean eliminating structure. It means preserving genuine openings within it:
time for play without a predetermined product;
creative spaces where experimentation is not immediately assessed;
opportunities to move, wander, observe, and make;
permission to become bored long enough for self-directed activity to begin.
Unstructured time is not the absence of learning. It is an environment in which learners can initiate it themselves.
Questioning Is a Form of Engagement
Creativity also depends on a student’s relationship with authority. Arora argues that teachers and parents can unintentionally discourage inquiry when they treat questioning as disrespectful.
This is especially damaging because knowledge advances through challenge. Einstein did not extend physics by accepting every existing assumption. Inventors did not transform transportation by deferring to people who dismissed powered flight or automobiles as impossible or impractical.
Authority can provide expertise, discipline, and guidance. But when it becomes immune to examination, it creates an intellectual bottleneck. Students learn to repeat conclusions rather than test them.
A healthy classroom makes room for questions such as:
Why is this explanation accepted?
What evidence could disprove it?
Is there another way to frame the problem?
Which assumption are we making without noticing?
These questions do more than stimulate creativity. They teach students how knowledge is built, corrected, and refined.
Creativity Grows Through Connection
Arora describes the mind as a synthesis machine. New ideas frequently emerge when knowledge from separate domains is brought together: science and music, design and psychology, movement and language, technology and social experience.
That is why broad interests matter. Specialization can produce depth, but exposure to unrelated subjects supplies the raw material for unexpected connections. Walking, showering, resting, and daydreaming can then give the subconscious room to reorganize that material.
Curiosity is one engine of this process. Frustration is another. A person who is dissatisfied with an existing tool, rule, or explanation has a reason to imagine an alternative. In that sense, creativity is not limited to artistic expression. It also appears in scientific hypotheses, social reforms, business models, and everyday solutions.
Schools that want more original thinking should therefore do more than add a creativity session. They should allow disciplines to meet, reward thoughtful questions, and let students pursue problems that genuinely bother or fascinate them.
Preparing Students for an Uncertain Future
Arora’s argument ultimately asks education to reconsider its definition of preparation. The goal cannot be limited to producing compliant graduates with credentials in traditionally prestigious subjects. Future readiness also requires confidence in one’s perceptions, the ability to cross disciplinary boundaries, and the courage to propose an answer that has not already been approved.
This does not require abandoning knowledge, rigor, or standards. It requires recognizing that rigor and imagination are partners. Logic helps test an idea; creativity makes the idea possible. Structure supports sustained effort; freedom creates room for discovery. Expertise deserves respect; questioning prevents expertise from becoming dogma.
Children arrive with both wings. The task of education is not to manufacture creativity after years of suppressing it, but to help learners retain and strengthen the capacities they already bring.
