Every Hottentot can dance

Ken Robinson, Who Preached Creativity in Teaching, Dies at 70: Dance, he said, is just as important as math. He was knighted for his work, and his [disruptive] TED Talk on schools and the arts was the most viewed of all time.

Ken Robinson in 2018. “There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.”

...

“I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to.”

As Sir Lawrence Olivier's Mr. Darcy observed in the 1940 production of "Pride and Prejudice, "Every Hottentot can dance". [In today's obsessive bandwagon search-for-slights mania, Olivier would have been cancelled for speaking a "racist" line aloud.] "Woke" ninnies aside, I think it would be more accurate to say that children PLAY all the time, if they're allowed to. Regardless, let's look at the math: 

Pre-COVID, in a 168-hour week, children spent roughly 

• ~70 hours in bed
• 32.5 hours at school (~25 hours of instruction)

Leaving ~ 65.5 hours for play (too often screen-time) and spontaneous dance.

Was Robinson serious? How could an extra hour of dance (regimented, rather than spontaneous) make a difference? Robinson shot his own need-for-dance classes in school argument in the foot. Even worse, useful-to-society creativity does not cross over from dance to useful intellectual innovation. 

Needless to say, many who had felt bored whilst learning how to learn, how to memorize, how to achieve self-discipline, how to master the essential rudiments of 20th and 21st century cognitive skills jumped eagerly on the Entertain-Me-Or-Else! bandwagon. Has cognitive creativity increased as a result of Robinson's One Trick Pony? Not that I have noticed.