I have listened to the talk by Sir Ken Robinson at TED (19 mins) more than a dozen times. I listed it at the top of my favorite TED talks. I strongly recommend it both from the delivery and from the content point of view.

The clarity of the flow combined with the lack of any written support make the talk rather special. We can feel that he commands the subject and that he is passionate about it. The talk is entitled "Do schools kill creativity?" and the main message is clearly stated at the beginning:

Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

Much can be learnt from his delivery. No slides. Not even movement. Just voice and pause. Still he captures the entire audience.

The pace is just excellent and the talk is filled with stories that are interleaved with the main content. They both complement the content and they entertain the audience. I still laugh at the "Shakespeare ... stop speaking like that" joke. The tone is relaxed most of the time, and in particular when he tells stories. He laughs slightly almost every other sentence, which is a bit strange in the beginning, but it does the job.

He uses these stories to build his case. He gets the audience relaxed, and then he radically changes the tone, increases the rhythm and slams a succinct lesson he draws from the story. He follows with a pause, and makes the transition to another story that introduces the next point. For example, he describes how one of the children playing one of the messengers in the Nativity Play improvises his line. He then points out that children will take a chance when they do not know something, while adults would not.

A couple of times he uses repetition to enforce an important point. For example, after the Nativity Play story, he states that:

If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come with anything original.

He then repeats ... if you are not prepare to be wrong. This is an important point, because it introduces his view on the problem of creativity:

We do not grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we are educated out of it.

He spends the rest of the talk providing anecdotal evidences for how this is the case. He concludes by reinforcing the main message:

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity... We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.

We have to be careful now that we use [human imagination] wisely ... and the only way will do it is to see our creative capacity for the richness they are, and see our children for the hope that they are... We may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

It’s just brilliant.