On March 27, Sir Ken Robinson spoke at Grand Valley State University as a part of their community reading project, where students and faculty were encouraged to read his book, The Element.
Robinson started by talking about his own experience with education, saying that he went to college at a time when college led straight to a job. When he graduated, he didn’t want a job, so he was going to go to India, to “find himself”. However, he ended up teaching English in Sweden instead, and then earning his PhD in England.
The problem that he sees is that people don’t feel that they’re talented. He thinks that if people could gain a better understanding of their talents and aptitudes, they would be far better at choosing careers. People are very different at seventeen or eighteen, when they’re choosing what paths they’re going to take, than they are at thirty or forty, when they’ve arrived at where that path led.
“We live in revolutionary, unprecedented times.” Said Robinson, talking about rapidly changing technology. Ten years ago, there was no Twitter, and the rest of the internet was a very different place. Humans have had to adapt quickly, and in this new and changing economy, everyone has to be creative to be relevant. Our current education system fails to foster creativity because it is based on training workers for an economy that no longer exists – one of manual, mechanical, labor. In an industrial system, it makes sense to divide students by age, which Robinson says is detrimental – there is a wide range of ability levels within the same grade, and it’s difficult to teach at all of those levels. Instead, the system teaches to a medium level, and students who excel are bored, and students who are behind are lost.
Robinson links passion with education, and connects that to happiness and well-being. This connectivity got me thinking about design, and really? Education is a design problem.
What education needs is a system that nurtures students and their interests, teaches necessary skills, and prepares them for the workforce. This is a big system, and it has limits. There’s data on what is currently working and what isn’t, and what systems are working in other places. If change was allowed, maybe some big-idea designers could make a difference in the way education works.
Comments
I continue to believe that what he said it simply repetition from education specialists. Certainly there are people that haven't thought about these issues, but for those already aware-this is nothing groundbreaking.
I think his public speaking ability and ability to frame the issues is a part of what makes his work interesting. Do you think that there would be any benefit to inviting people from outside of the education world to take a look at the current situation? Do you think that enough educators are working to make things better?