Recently I’ve been getting into the Podcasts on my iPod when I make my way to work in the morning and when I need to chill out a bit at home. Usually they’re informative and entertaining, but yesterday I watched this talk by Ken Robinson entitled “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity”.
The title is immediately caught my attention, as such a striking statement against the education that has (or seems to, at least) done me well so far.
Here’s the video to check out before I go into what I think of what he says.
The first thing the podcast starts with is Robinson’s brilliant sense of humour – a trait that kept me genuinely laughing out loud while I was watching it (I bet that made my housemates happy late at night).
First of all, I think he makes an excellent point how education is expected to prepare people for the future that we cannot ever predict – 2065 (as he says) is a long way away, and innovations even in the narrow field that I am studying are coming so fast that we could have swarms of walking robots walking around in an “I, Robot”-esque world, or made little or no progress (relatively) in the field.
“[My son] was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it’s big, it’s a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.” – genius.
His argument is essentially that education trains people not to try, just because they may be wrong. His point that companies, and now national education systems across the world, stigmatise being wrong, and therefore “educate” children out of it. He uses a quote from Picasso to illustrate this:
All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.
“[Shakespeare's Dad to Shakespeare]: Go to bed, now! And put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing everybody!” – also, genius.
Robinson goes on to list the hierarchy of subjects he found in just about every education system in the world:
- Mathematics and Languages
- Humaties
- The Arts
Then, The Arts are further broken down into:
- Music
- Drama and Dance
His point that no education system in the world teaches children dance every day just as they are taught Maths every day, and it is a valid one. His excellent story about <> to demonstrate this is excellent too. Now I’m not one for drama or dance (but I am for music), but people should be given the chance to succeed at what they enjoy and what they are good at. Fortunately I was able to do that in my education, but I know not everyone gets that opportunity, which is unfortunate.
I’ll leave it to you in the comments do discuss his proposition that university professors’ bodies are simply transport mechanisms for their brains – “They look at [their bodies] as a way of getting their heads to meetings”. The disco joke made me laugh though 
I think his statement that it used to be (university degree === job) , and that it is no longer the case, is entirely true. Having a degree no longer gives you a right to a job, and employers are looking for so much more than just a degree. Experience, who you are, what you did in addition to your education and so much more now plays a part in getting a job.
Fundamentally, he suggests a completely re-think how we define intelligence, which is long overdue.
Even if you’re not interested in this topic in the slightest, I recommend you watch this presentation for the fantastic delivery, or just for the laughs.
September 2, 2009 at 9:24 am
I have to admit, this is one of the TED talks I occasionally go back and listen to again – not just because of the great presentation style, but because of the message.
I was particularly taken by the bit about some people thinking better when they move, and wonder whether the education system could be modified to take account of their needs as well as those of people who prefer to sit still. Personally, I find it very distracting when people fidget all the time, but I defend their right to do it!
I guess one of the problems is finding the time in a school timetable to fit everything in – the privileged can afford to send their children to dance classes, or other after school activities, but for the majority the cost is prohibitive.
His call for re-thinking intelligence reminds me of Kevin Warwick’s take on the subject. Warwick suggests that intelligence effectively equates with success, which I don’t think is a good comparison, personally. However, I certainly think we place too much emphasis on both speed and factual recall in our existing measures of intelligence.
I think we need to radically re-think the education system in light of the rate of progress in the world. Downes and Siemens’ concept of Connectivism points in the right direction, I think. This suggests that factual recall is not important, and the key is knowing how to find information (and critically analyse it) – knwo-where not know-how. Whilst some complain that factual recall is necessary for some academic subjects, I find myself asking whether this is an artifact of the assessment methods rather than an actual need.
In day to day life we can make use of augmented memory – leveraging the affordances of services such as Google or the crowd-sourced search available through services like Twitter – to deal with factual recall. What we really need to have is the intellectual capacity to recognise the information we need, assess whether it is appropriate for the task at hand, and use it to solve whatever problem it is that we are working on.
Much of that depends on being able to build and maintain a personal learning network – a circle of trusted friends that we can ask for help, and offer help to, that includes both experts in the fields we need to know about and “naive resources”. And one of the best ways of forging links with these people is to have not only knowledge of a subject area, well thought out opinions and the ability to convey them, but also a broad range of cultural experience – something educational systems seem to me to be lacking.
September 2, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Yes this is a very good talk. Education does have to be re-thought as do many other things.
Education is a about learning and in order to learning you have to have made mistakes or been wrong. I am sure that if you speak to a lot of the very successful people in the world, I am sure that they will say that have failed on more than on occassion.
Nice summary, look forward to seeing more