blog post 10

Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

I think we can learn from Sir Ken Robinson two primary issues with our education system and a fundamentally innovative way to combat those issues. He discusses a new climate crisis-misuse of human resources/talents. He states that there are two types of people in this world: those that endure instead of enjoy and those who love what they do and identify themselves by their profession. Education should foster that love for what they do, but often times it doesn't. We have to go looking for human resources like natural resources. To do this, we don't need to reform a broken system, we need to revolutionize a transformed system. The first challenge is linearity. We need to challenge what is obvious and what we take for granted. He read a quote from Abraham Lincoln stating we must, "...rise with the occassion...and disenthrall from linearity." We set our children up for following a straight line to "get to college". Life is organic, according to Sir Ken Robinson, and we need to use our talents in circumstances to function. He gave an anecdote of a boy who wanted to be a firefighter. He had a teacher tell him he was wasting his life with that career choice. The student later saved the teacher and the teacher's wife's life. He made the statement, "Human communities depend on a diversity of talents." We place this sense of urgency to get to college, but it isn't urgent. He also commented on the need to reconstitute ability--college does not start in kindergarten, kindergarten starts in kindergarten. Conformity is the next pressing issue. He states that we have built the education system like a fast food chain. It is standardized and depleting the students' spirit and innovation. We need to foster passion, what excites us, and what feeds our spirit. Sir Ken Robinson made the analgoy of needing to move our education system from an industrialized/manufactured model based on conformity and linearity to an agricultural based model where like a farmer, we need to create conditions for human flourishing. We need to customize and personalize our system/teachings to the people we are actually teaching. He ended the talk with a poem encouraging us to tread softly on children's dreams.