Ken Robinson talks about the notion that schools and parents often do a very poor job of finding people's inborn talents. His thrust is that schools were designed at the onset of the industrial revolution, in order to train people in the skills that were most in need at the factories. So that means that mathematics and the sciences are considered the most important, and art is considered the least important - especially the performing arts. One allusion he uses is the idea that the way education is set up today, it "strip mines" children's minds for the things which the society wants most out of them.