Our Guest: Sir Ken Robinson, Expert on Creativity, Education & Human Potential
Listen to our interview with Sir Ken ~ HERE (or visit the link on the bottom of this post to listen and download the interview)
We live in a country with a broken educational system.
Now, factions on all sides of the issue will point at each other and say the blame for the system’s failure rests with :
- The teachers
- The unions
- The politicians
- The parents
- Too much technology
- (it shortens your attention, ruins your spelling and rots your brain …. you know that right?)
- Too little technology
- (how can school “A” compete with school “B” when school “A” has all those computers, smart boards, internet connectivity, etc.)
- Too little money
- (funny that while we spend more money on education than in the past nobody ever argues there’s too much money)
- Too much testing
- (never time to teach ’cause we’re always having to teach for the test)
- Too little testing
- (how can we know what works unless we have more outcome based testing)
But rarely does anyone come along and point out that maybe part of the problem isn’t all the pieces of the system as much as it is the system itself.
That’s part of the theme we explored with Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally recognized expert on education, creativity and human potential.
Now, normally that’s the kind of introduction you give someone who might be bright but is also magnificently boring. That’s not the case
with Sir Ken Robinson (the boring part…not the intelligent part). When I first heard his TED presentation (highlighted below) I was blown away.
Time after time throughout his presentation he made points that seemed to be specifically targeted at many of the frustrations and struggles that I’d been having with my own son and his education. But beyond my son it was also the frustrations that I witnessed first hand with children we were working with who showed remarkable brilliance, talents and gifts yet somehow were being put in boxes by their schools for a lack of “educational ability”, “attention” and “control”.
While Sir Ken’s speaking style is a casual, conversational style wrapped in frequent colorful anecdotes and self-deprecating humor it all is done to create a framework for his many critical, insightful and at times biting points, including:
From his TED Talk
“We are educating people out of their creativity.”
“It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.”
From an excellent piece he wrote in the Huffington Post:
The future for the American Dream is not the materialist coma that Edward Albee parodied in the 1960s, for which we’re now receiving the check. It has to be the wide awake dream of people like Martin Luther King — a passionate vision of social equality and personal possibility, of economic responsibility and cultural respect. Realizing this dream means thinking in radically different ways about ourselves and our children, about our relationships with the earth itself and about the billions of other people who are clinging to it with us.
All of this is the work of education. Not the sort of education we have now. The present system was designed for 19th century industrialism and it’s overheating in a dangerous way. Reforming education isn’t enough. The real task is transformation. America urgently needs systems of education that live and breathe in the 21st century. This is a large task and it can’t be put off.
I remember being told that Americans don’t get irony. I never believed that, but I had the proof it wasn’t true when I came across the education bill, No Child Left Behind. Whoever thought of that title clearly gets irony. The fact is this legislation is actually leaving millions of children behind. I can see that’s not a very attractive name for an education bill — “Millions of Children Left Behind” — but it’s closer to the truth and less ironic.
His problems with NCLB …
…the problems with NCLB are much deeper than money. The whole premise of the act is deeply flawed. It’s based on the fatal idea that to face the future schools just have to do better what they did in the past: they simply have to get back to basics and raise standards. Schools, and policy makers, should get back to basics. They should aim to raise standards too. Why would you lower them? But what are the basics now, and which standards should apply?
I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Actually there are three flawed premises. First, NCLB promotes a catastrophically narrow idea of intelligence and ability. The result is a terrible waste of talent and motivation in countless students. Second, it confuses standards with standardizing. The result is that schools across the country are becoming dreary and homogenized. And third, it assumes that education can be improved without the professional creativity and personal passion of teachers. The result is that too many good teachers are streaming out of the very schools that urgently need them to stay. All of this is holding America back in a world that’s moving faster than ever.
More From Sir Ken Robinson
Two Great Presentations By Sir Ken (longer than his TED Presentation)
The Huffington Post Piece Referenced Above
Great books by Sir Ken (click the book for more information or to order the books)
Our interview with Sir Ken Robinson on “The My Great Kid Radio Program” :
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
.jpg){kind=logo}
