Sir Ken Robinson’s latest talk on Changing Education

Check out Ken Robinson’s RSA lecture: Changing Paradigms of Education here.

Or, you can get a Podcast of this lecture in iTunes for your mobile device by going here.

These are my notes from this 11 minute version of this lecture:

Every country on earth is reforming public education right now for two reasons.

1. For economic reasons. How do we educate our children to take place in the economic landscape of our country given that we can’t anticipate what the economy will look like next week?

2. For cultural reasons. How do we educate our children so they have a cultural identity and be a part of globalization?

The problem is we are trying to reform education the way it was done in the past.

We were told when we were young if we worked hard, did well in school, we’d get a job. Not true anymore. Particularly not true if the route to doing this marginalizes the things you feel are important about yourself.

Is raising standards the answer?

Of course you should raise standards. No one is arguing against raising standards.

But the problem is, the current education system was designed and conceived for a different age -- during the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and economic culture of the Industrial Revolution.

Public, compulsory education was a revolutionary idea back then. Many said it’s not possible to educate all children, because some street children aren’t smart enough for school. An intellectual model of the mind developed that said real intelligence = academic ability. Or, there are smart and non-smart people.

Sadly, many brilliant people think they are not smart because of this notion.

This model of education (intellectual and economic) has benefited some, but most have not benefited from it.

The current plague of ADHD – the diagnosis is still a matter of debate.

It’s not an epidemic, yet many kids are being routinely medicated.

Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth, they are being besieged with information and calls for their attention from so many sources – computers, iPhones, tv, etc. & we are penalizing them from getting distracted from what? From mostly the boring stuff at school.

It doesn’t seem to be too much of a coincidence then that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.

The arts, in particular, are victims of this mentality – the arts address an aesthetic experience, when you are present in the current moment, and your senses operate at their peak, when you are fully alive.

An anesthetic is when you shut yourself off and deaden your senses, a lot of these drugs for ADHD do this to children. We are getting our children through education by anesthetizing them and I think we should be waking them up to what is inside of themselves, not putting them to sleep.

Education is modeled on the interests & image of industrialization – ringing bells, factory mentality, separate subjects, separate ages groups, still educate them by batches, by age groups, etc.

You don’t start from a production line mentality if you are interested in a good model of learning. I believe we have to go in the opposite direction of standardization. That’s changing the paradigm.

Divergent thinking example. Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for creativity. There are tests for divergent thinking.

One longitudinal study of 1500 kindergarteners asked how many uses are there for a paperclip? 200 uses means they have high levels of divergent thinking.

What % of these 1500 kindergarteners tested scored at genius level for divergent thinking? 98%.

The same kids were retested 5 years later.

What % now scored at genius level for divergent thinking? 50%.

Retested again 5 years later…

The idea is we all have this divergent thinking capacity when we are young, yet it mostly deteriorates over time. What happens to us? One thing is we’ve been educated. We’ve been told for 10 years in school there is one answer, and it’s in the back of the book, and don’t copy, that’s cheating. Outside of school, “cheating” is called collaborating.

And all of this isn’t because teachers want it this way, it’s because it happens this way.

What do we have to do?

We have to realize these ideas are in the education gene pool. We have to think differently about human capacity, we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups, in collaboration. If we judge people separately, we form a disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.

It’s about the habits of our institutions and the habitats they occupy.

Waiting for Superman and Race to Nowhere

There’s a lot of hype right now about the new educational documentary Waiting for Superman. I saw it last spring and took some notes on it. These are my notes:

Ideas from Waiting for Superman that I thought were true:

- We all were promised the ideal that public schools could work
- We are placing our children in the hands of luck in public schools
- We all have a different definition of a great school
- A good teacher is the answer
- NEA is the largest campaign contributor to democrats
- NY rubber rooms waste $65 million/year
- The kids who get hurt are the ones in the middle
- Tenure was originally meant for university professors only
- Teacher’s unions were originally set up to protect women’s rights, yet 100 years later the union is still a major force
- Teacher’s unions say we shouldn’t make distinctions among teachers [then how do we reward good teachers or fire bad ones?]
- Cal State remediates 50% of freshman
- It is a lie that disadvantaged kids can’t learn

Ideas from Waiting for Superman that I question:

- Charters like KIPP http://www.kipp.org/schools are the answer
- A college education automatically means a career
- 1 in 5 charters produce good results (define good results)
- Up until 1970s US schools were best in the world (how was that measured?)
- Bill Gates’ emphasis on math, science and engineering only as the answer to saving schools

I’m thrilled educational documentaries are getting a lot of exposure right now because I’m on the Advisory board for the film Race to Nowhere. If you get a chance to see any educational documentaries, please do so, but if you have to choose between Race to Nowhere and Waiting for Superman, I’d recommend Race to Nowhere. And, here’s why…

Those in the media who are promoting Waiting for Superman claim the film can fix education. Be wary of anyone who claims to be able to fix education. Race to Nowhere offers a grassroots change, especially when it is screened in local theatres and schools that have discussions after the film. The film’s website also offers a facilitation guide to aid in post film discussions. RTN admits that education’s problems are vast and complex, and change needs to come from many places, including from within.

Another reason I’d recommend Race to Nowhere is that most readers of this blog will be able to relate to it. It highlights several schools in suburban communities and one urban school. I’m guessing that most readers of this blog live above the poverty line and in the suburbs, so the schools mentioned in RTN will look and feel familiar. Waiting for Superman is mainly about poor, urban schools and mentions only one suburban school, in Redwood City.

Waiting For Superman praises charter schools like KIPP. KIPP is a very regimented approach that claims to transform disadvantaged inner city kids with poor test scores into college bound students with high test scores. While this may be true of some KIPP students, KIPP schools seem to disregard a developmental, individual approach and turns kids into products that must produce at a certain level.

Even though not every charter is a good school, I like the idea of charter schools because they give parents more choice about where to send their kids to school. If there are several charters to choose from, parents can decide for themselves what is a good fit for their children.

In Race to Nowhere an innovative school is shown as an example of a school that works. This is the Blue School in New York. There are many wonderful charter and independent schools across the country. Please take a look at my sidebar on this blog under “My Recommendations – Noteworthy Schools/Programs” to see some that I’ve found to be worth checking out. One approach that I’m particularly impressed with is Big Picture Schools.

And lastly, while Waiting for Superman tends to blame the teacher’s union for many of education’s problems, Race to Nowhere doesn’t blame any one group but rather blames all involved parties. RTN asks us to question our own lives and try to make changes starting at home.

Here is a good review and comparison of Race to Nowhere and Waiting For Superman:

In my opinion, I prefer RTN because I identify with it more, but both documentaries are worth watching and if Waiting for Superman and Race to Nowhere help begin a national conversation about myriad issues gone wrong in American public education, that is a very good thing.

If you feel that RTN should get as much media attention as WFS, why not Face Book about it or write an editorial for your local paper or mention Race to Nowhere each time someone talks about Waiting for Superman?

Your thoughts?