Author, speaker and international advisor
Sir Ken Robinson is one of the premier experts on the science and art of education. In this humorous but thought-provoking video, he presents his vision on the need for a change in paradigm in our current education system.
WATCH it once and then see if you can answer the questions below:
- What are the two reasons for reforming public education?
- What story was Ken Robinson told when he went to school?
- How does the speaker define creativity?
- When was the current educational system conceived?
- According to the speaker, what two types of people does traditional education believe there are?
- What does the speaker say about ADHD?
- What is divergent thinking?
Of course, as an English User, we really recommend that you take full advantage of the rich language found in Ken Robinson's speech. So below, we provide for you the complete
TRANSCRIPT for the session.
ACTIVITY: If you are in an English class or group, this makes of a great
DISCUSSION topic. Enjoy!
Transcript:
Every
country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. There are two
reasons for it.
The first
one is economic. People are trying to work out "How do we educate our
children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century. How do we do
that?"
Even though
we can't anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week as
the recent turmoil is demonstrating. How do you do that?
The second
though is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out how do we
educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we
can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the
process globalization. How do we square that circle?
The problem
is they are trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And
on the way they are alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in
going to school.
When we went
to school we were kept there with the story, which is if you worked hard and
did well and got a college degree you'd have a job. Our kids don't believe that
and they are right not to by the way.
You are
better having a degree than not, but it's not a guarantee anymore. And
particularly not if the route to it marginalises most of the things that you
think are important about yourself.
And people
say we have to raise standards as if this is a breakthrough. You know. Really?
Yes. We should. Why would you lower them, you know? I haven't come across the
odd one that persuaded me of lowering them. But raising them, of course we
should raise them.
The problem
is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and
structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of
the Enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial
Revolution. Before the middle of the 19th Century, there were no systems of
public education.
Not really,
I mean, you could get educated at [inaudible] Jesuit's if you had the money. But
public education, paid for from taxation, compulsory to everybody, and free at
the point of delivery - that was a revolutionary idea.
And many
people objected to it. They said it's not possible for many street kids,
working class children to benefit from public education. They're incapable of
learning to read and write, why are we spending time on this?
So there's
also built into [there] the whole series of assumptions about social
structuring capacity. And it was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but
running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was
essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence - that real intelligence
consists in the capacity for certain type of deductive reasoning and the
knowledge of the classics [originate] - what we'd come to think of as academic
ability.
And this is
deep in the gene pool of public education that there are already two types of
people: academic and non-academic. Smart
people and non-smart people.
And the
consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not because
they're being judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin
pillars: economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused
chaos in many people's lives.
It's been
great for some. - There have been people benefiting wonderfully from it. But
most people have not. Instead they suffered this.
This is the
modern epidemic, and it's as misplaced as fictitious. This is the plague of
ADHD. Now this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America. Or prescriptions
for ADHD.
Don't
mistake me I don't mean to say there is no such thing as attention deficit
disorder. I'm not qualified to say if there isn't such a thing. I know that a
great majority of psychologists and pediatricians think there's such a thing. -
but it's still a matter of debate.
What I do
know for a fact is it's not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as
routinely as we have our tonsils taken out and on the same whimsical basis and
for the same reason medical fashion.
Our
children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of
the earth. They are being besieged with information and parse their attention from
every platform, computers, from iPhones, from advertising holdings from
hundreds of television channels.
And we are
penalizing them for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff. At school for
the most part it seems to me not a conscience totally that the instance of ADHD
has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.
And these
kids are being given Ritalin and Adderall and all manner of things. Often quite
dangerous drugs to get them focused and calm them down. But according to this
attention deficit disorder increases as you travel east across the country.
People
start losing interest in Oklahoma. They can hardly think straight in Arkansas. And
by the time they get to Washington they've lost it completely. And there are
separate reasons for that, I believe.
It's a
fictitious epidemic. If you think of it, the Arts - and I don't say this is
exclusively the Arts, I think it's also true of Science and of Maths. I say
about the Arts particularly because they are the victims of this mentality
currently. Particularly.
The Arts
especially address the idea of Aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is
one in which your senses are operating at their peak. When you're present in the current moment. When
you are resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing. When
you are fully alive.
And
anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself what's
happening and a lot of these drugs are that. We're getting our children through
education by anaesthetising them. And I think we should be doing the exact
opposite. We shouldn't be putting them asleep; we should be waking them up, to
what they have inside of themselves.
But the
model we have is this. It's I believe we have a system of education which is
modelled on the interest of industrialism. and in the image of it. I'll give
you a couple examples.
Schools are
still pretty much organised on factory lines. On ringing bells, separate
facilities, specialised into separate subjects. We still educate children by
batches. You know, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do
that?
You know,
why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common
is how old they are. You know, it's like the most important thing about them is
their date of manufacture.
Well I know
kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different
disciplines. You know, or at different times of the day, or better in smaller
groups than in large groups or sometimes they want to be on their own.
If you are
interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line
mentality. This is essentially about conformity. Increasingly it's about that as
you look at the growth of standardised testing and standardised curricula and
it's about standardisation.
I believe
we've got go in the exact opposite direction. That's what I mean about changing
the paradigm. There is a great study done recently on divergent thinking -
Published a couple years ago. Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as
creativity.
I define
creativity as the process of having original ideas which have value. Divergent
thinking isn't a synonym, but it's an essential capacity for creativity. It's
the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question. Lots of possible
ways of interpreting a question.
To think,
what Edward de Bono publicly called laterally. To think not just in linear or
convergent ways. To see multiple answers and not one. So I made up a test for this. I mean one
called the cod example would be people might be asked to say:
How many
uses can you think of for a paper clip? Follows routine questions. Most people
might come with 10 or 15. People who are good at this might come with 200. And
they do that by saying. Well, could the paper clip be 200 foot tall and be made
of foam rubber? You know... like does it have to be a paper clip as we know it,
Jim?
The test is
this. They gave them to 1500 people in a book called Breakpoint and Beyond. And
on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level, you'd be
considered to be a genius of divergent thinking.
So my
question to you is: what percentage of the people tested of the 1500 scored
genius level for divergent thinking? I need to know one more thing about them. These
were kindergarten children.... So what do you think?
What
percentage of genius level? -80 OK? 98% Now the thing about this was a
longitudinal study. So they retested the same children five years later, ages
of 8-10. What do you think? -50? They retested them again 5 years later, ages
13-15. You can see a trend here coming.
Now, this
tells a interesting story. Because you could've imagined they're going the
other way. Could you? You start off not being very good but you get better as
you get older. But this shows 2 things: One is we all have this capacity and
Two: It mostly deteriorates.
Now a lot
have happened to these kids as they grown up, a lot. But one of the most
important things happened that I'm convinced is that by now they've become
educated. They spend 10 years in school being told there is one answer, it's at
the back, and don't look. And don't copy because that's cheating.
I mean
outside school that's called collaboration but, inside schools. This isn't
because teachers wanted this way it's just because it happens that way. It's
because it's in the gene pool of education. We have to think different about
human capacity.
We have to
get over this old conception of academic, non academic. Abstract, theoretical,
vocational and see it for what it is: a Myth. Second, we have to recognize most
great learning happens in groups.
That
collaboration is the stuff of growth. If we atomize people and separate them a
judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their
natural learning environment.
And
thirdly, it's crucially about the culture of our institutions. The habits of
institutions and the habitats that they occupy.
