Here’s a must-see video of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech at the TED conference. (Not sure if it’s from this year or last.) Sir Ken is a tremendously entertaining speaker and passionate advocate for re-thinking how our schools work. He argues, convincingly to my mind, that the traditional educational system, designed for another time and place, was designed to educate us out of creativity. In our industrial past it was decided (with some merit) that schools had to concentrate on things that would help graduates find jobs in the ’professions’ - medicine, accounting, law. That was the route to a successful career in the past and education reflected that.
This approach is now irrelevant. There’s such a diversified global economy out there now there are endless endless opportunities for people with talents other than the traditional, ‘left brain’ disciplines. As an Irishman sitting in downtown Shanghai working at ChinesePod, I can say that I have discovered opportunities to do things that I could not have imagined 20 years ago. I also agree wholehearetedly with Sir Ken that every child is born with talent, if only we can allow it to bloom.
It’s great stuff. Go see it.
Ken Carroll
Ken is interesting but he is wrong when he says schools kill creativity. Teachers kill creativity because they rarely take the trouble to think about how they are teaching and what resources they are using to do it with. Ironically it is precisely in the subjects like music that the most devastatingly poor teaching takes place. It is hardly possible to be in the company of a group of adults long,before somebody will tell you that their teacher told them they could not sing , or they were hopeless at the piano etc. It stays with them all their life.
The great aim for most classical music students is to be able to study Beethoven with somebody who studied with somebody…. who had lessons with Beethoven.etc And this from the best of our music conservatories.
Further more if you look at the sports sciences that have grown up to help athletes build better performances and then try and find similar research in music , you will look in vain. Where is the research to support the use of Alexander Technique ( widely used amongst professional players) where is the research to help the many professional musicians who suffer from nerves before a performance on a regular basis.
There is a saying in England “Those who can play- those who can’t teach”. I rest my case.
Thanks Ken, that was a great presentation. I agree that children need to be able to explore different avenues. I find more and more young people coming out of the educational system who did everything right according to the curriculum but are basically helpless and need to be retrained on how to work. I am reminded of what Mao Zedong once said. He said that the most important person in the aftermath of a major catastrophe will be the guy who knows how to make the plumbing work. I think we need to match young people to their talents and train them to be a success in their chosen field no matter if they wear a tie to work or not. I remember when I was in basic training in the Air Force and at the end of the training course we were given our assignments and further orders. One quiet, plain young man who didn’t seem overly bright received orders to go to generator rewinding school and we all laughed. It turns out that he was suitably adapted to that field, learned his skills well, became enthused, and today he owns a company that rebuilds electric motors and he is a very wealthy man. We need to find out what people are best at and then help them achieve success and not just “educate” the heck out of them according to some general formula and then put them in a corporate pigeonhole. I spend part of each week giving industrial training classes and I find that the first thing I need to do is make the subject interesting and then help provide the people with the skills to understand and make use of the training. Many times I find that I first need to take a step back and teach them skills that they should have learned in school but never did. It is terribly gratifying to watch them progress and see the lights go on one by one as they really get into it. I think now that I might like to be a high school industrial arts teacher but alas…I am not “qualified”.
I’m still laughing about the “Frank sent this” line! I just love how creative our students can be (when I get out of the way and give them some space). Just yesterday I was teaching a Portuguese class, having the students do some work in pairs. Two students decided to create some dialogs between a priest and a confessor. My dull suggestions of spy vs spy, father vs child, police vs crook, etc. weren’t near as cool as their creative dialogs which had the whole class laughing out loud.
So, three cheers to Sir Ken, and a good post for our other Ken.
What an excellent speaker. I particularly agree with his comment about the academic world shifting beneath our feet. We need a new system that better suits this new world we’re in. If I had watched this video first I wouldn’t have felt like I was preaching to the unconverted in my post on Ken’s blog entry on the ‘A vision of students today’ video.
I’d like to add that schools are one thing, but also, it seems to me that regulations hinder creativity. Arts funding promotes certain types of creativity in favour of others and so acts as a kind of censorship.
I agree that the usual academic way of teaching languages is not efficient. I was wondering if chinesepod had a plan to put out a ‘chinesepod’ system to teach english (or french) to Chinese students in China. It would mean having ipods in the classroom, one for each, that could be left there and used by other classes in turn. Have you thought of that?
Just saw ‘A Beautiful Mind’ a couple days ago and thought this was appropriate…
“Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.”