Sir Ken Robinson died on 21 August 2020, at 70, after a short battle with cancer. He never saw ChatGPT. He never encountered an autonomous AI agent capable of logging into a learning management system, watching a recorded lecture, completing an assignment and submitting it without a single human keystroke. He never witnessed a world in which the most watched TED talk of all time — his own, viewed more than 75 million times — would become not merely prescient but urgent in ways even he might not have predicted.

Robinson spent his life making a single, devastating argument: that modern education systems, forged in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution, were systematically educating children out of their creativity. The hierarchy was fixed and nearly universal. Mathematics and languages sat at the top. Humanities occupied the middle. At the bottom, always, the arts. Within the arts, music and visual art enjoyed a grudging respectability. Dance and drama were barely tolerated. A child who needed to move to think was not recognised as a different kind of intelligent. She was diagnosed as defective.

That child was Gillian Lynne. Robinson told her story in his 2006 TED talk with the timing of a born raconteur — a man who, having contracted polio at four and spent eight months in hospital, understood better than most what it meant to be denied the body’s natural expression. In the 1930s, young Gillian’s school wrote to her parents to say they believed she had a learning disorder. She could not concentrate. She fidgeted. She was, in the school’s words, “wriggle bottom.” Her mother took her to a specialist, who spoke to........

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