Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Education Paradigms
November 27, 2010
I'm still plowing through dozens of posts that were written for the Day of National Blogging for Real Education Reform this past Monday. The brainchild of Michigan State University researcher Ira Socol, the blogfest was a rousing success and even generated a post in response by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.
I hope to post my own thoughts about the day and its themes in the next week or two. But in the meantime I thought I'd share this animated version of a recent talk given by educator and creativity expert Ken Robinson at the London-based Royal Society of Arts.
Sir Ken, whom PhilanTopic readers got to know in this TED Talk, is nothing if not passionate about education reform, and he is as dismayed by most countries' continued insistence on "trying to meet the challenges of the future by doing what they've done in the past" as he is by the "misplaced, fictitious epidemic of ADHD." Whether you agree with him or not, it's hard to argue with a man who can draw as fast as he speaks. (That's a joke.)
What do you think? Are developed countries in general, and the United States in particular, still wedded to a production-line model of education? Are we penalizing our children, who are living "in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth," for being distracted? And what, in the twenty-first century, is the purpose of education?
-- Mitch Nauffts
Posted by LOU PERRY | February 04, 2012 at 04:33 PM
A fascinating flaw in the opening of this talk highlights why we're seeing the wrong question or challenge. It goes :every country is reforming their public education systems to deal with the economies of the 21st century. The trip is in "economies." Simply, we need to think societies and economies in a more globalized world. it is not all about the economy. It is about Life, of which economics is one (major) consideration. But it is people not dollars or yen or euros that should be our penultimate focus.