In his now legendary TED Talks, educational visionary, Sir Ken Robinson makes a rather powerful - and hilarious - case for why we need a revolution in education. Robinson, who is a specialist in creativity, argues that rather than enhance this highest of our potentials, schools actually kill creativity and diminish the love of learning we were born with. Creativity, which he defines as “the process of having original ideas that have value”, is as important as literacy, he argues, but there is little in our education that encourages, or even allows it.
“As it is, we more often kill their dreams than help them realize them. We wildly underestimate the capacities of children, and ruthlessly squander their talents, failing to realize that, given education as we know it, “we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it.” All children are born artists,” he asserts, “and the problem is to remain artists as we grow up.”
This is why it is not enough to reform the system as we know it, because it is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption that learning is a linear process and that there is a single ideal that all students should aim to master, as if one-size-fits-all. Closer to the truth, learning is a nonlinear, dialectic process that depends critically upon intrinsic motivation and individual readiness, such as only children, and perhaps their parents, if they are attentive, are likely to know.
For this reason, he makes clear in short order – we need more than school reform -- we need is an a actual revolution in education, one that moves us away from institutionalized pedagogy, and toward personalized forms of individuated learning.
He builds on the arguments of previous speakers at the critically acclaimed TED Conference, including that of Al Gore, who spoke on the climate crisis. There is a second climate crisis, Robinson argues, that is as severe and as urgent. It is a crisis of human resources.
“Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents, and human resources are like natural resources – they are often buried deep. You have to go looking for them. They’re not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often, it’s not.”
Sadly, in the world such as it is, most people endure rather than enjoy their education, their work, and their lives. It’s not true of enough of us that we get to actualize our highest potentials. There are many causes for this, Robinson says, but chief among them is education.
Following the metaphor presented by nutritionist, Jamie Oliver, he argues further, “we have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it’s impoverishing our spirits and energies as much as fast-food is depleting our physical bodies.” It is for this reason, Robinson argues, that so many people are opting out of education as we know it, which is the same reason that so many young minds tune out in the course of any given day what teachers are trying their best to teach them, “because it doesn’t feed the spirit; it doesn’t feed their energy or their passion.”
The reality is that “human talent is tremendously diverse,” but our schools emphasize standardization and conformity. And what’s more, “human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.” People have very different aptitudes and unique potentials. And it’s not only about talents, “it’s about passion. Often people are good at things they don’t really care for. It’s about passion and what excites our spirit and our energy.”
David C, Berlinger of the National Education Policy Center put it this way in his critique of No Child Left Behind policies. The lack of time for “learning for fun is perhaps the most important part of this teacher’s lament. The ability for students to learn in areas that are of interest to them seems almost unlimited.” (p.129)(David C. Berlinger, “The Incompatibility of High-Stakes Testing and the Development of Skills for the Twenty-first Century.”) “But in this era of high stakes testing, students cannot be allowed time in school to follow their interests. The standards define what students should know at different grade levels, and deviation from that plan is considered dangerous because it might result in missing some items on the state high-stakes accountability test.
Of course, schools never allowed much time for individualized work, but now even the teachers that made some use of problem-based or project-based learning, forms of instruction that could ignite students’ interests through a curriculum more personally tailored for the individual, are not allowed to do so.” (p.129)
“One size of the curriculum is supposed to fit all students, yet we are reasonably sure that the twenty first century economy will require from our work worlds a broad set of skills, not narrow ones. Thus, diversity in the outcomes of the educational system ought to be a goal of American education, not sameness.”(p.129)
“It is like evolution: if characteristics of the niche one inhabits change, only organisms that are adaptive will survive. This means that in changeable times, variation in talents, like variation in genes, is needed. Identical skills, like identical genes, may prove of no value for survival.”(p. 130) Given the increasing volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (Johansen, 2007) of our world in the twenty-first century, “more than ever before in our history requires breadth of talent so that we might possess an adaptable workforce much like it was throughout the twentieth century. High-stakes testing works against this goal.”(p.130) There is no place for critical thinking in the No Child Left Behind curriculum.(p.132)
The founding fathers – Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams -- themselves wanted a broader curriculum than we have now, meant not as an end in itself, but for the sake of learning to live a virtuous life, which meant since ancient times, actualizing one’s highest potentials.
Robinson emphasizes the psychology of time, building on an insight made clear by educational thinkers since ancient times. “If you’re doing the thing that you love to do, that you’re good at, time takes a different course entirely… If you’re doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. Whereas if you’re doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.” And this is what accounts for the almost universal appraisal that ‘school is boring.’
It is the manufacturing model, Robinson argues, in place throughout the 20th century and simply no longer suits us, if it ever did. What we need is a return to the organic, agricultural model. As farmers create the conditions under which plants will grow and flourish, we need to create such conditions for our young. We need to let education be customized to the student and circumstances under which our young can grow to their own highest potentials.
New technologies make personalized education not only possible, but prudent, for people developing their own curriculum as their interest commands is a especially efficient means of learning, if only because readiness guides it. It is the lack of this self-direction in learning that has for so long made the path of education bumpy and difficult, and might now let learning become easier, once self-direction takes the lead.
For instance, as Gatto observes in his powerful little book, Dumbing Us Down, it takes only about fifty hours to learn the entire body of mathematics -- once the student is ready and even anxious to understand. Instead, spoon-feeding it before the student has developed a taste not only engages us and them in something like 1500 hours of force-fed instruction. As it is, we compel them to study many things before they see its value and have actual interest – as Socrates would say, before they’ve asked the questions, which provokes resistance and anxiety in students about many subjects that leave a bitter taste in their mouths, rather than satisfy their pallet. But given new technologies and the support of personally responsive teachers, evidence suggests we would find that our young actually grow hungry for the math, and science, and history they once had to be compelled to learn.
Now add to this the fact that the National Education Association has publicly stated that, out of 900 hours of school per year, only during 200 or so of those hours are kids actually 'on task' -- that is, spending time engaged in teaching and learning the required subjects. The rest of the time is spent changing classes, having lunch, getting settled for the start of class, preparing to leave class, and socializing in the halls between class, where arguably, some of the most dysfunctional behavior human beings ever exhibit is learned. Every parent knows that kids need social time together, but few could argue that this is the best or only way for them to get it.
We manage, in our schools and practically everywhere else in our society today, to convince so many of our young people that they are indeed 'dumb' -- and eventually, as if by self-fulfilling prophesy, they increasingly seem to become so. Which is to say, they grow unable to even talk about all the variables that play into their underconfidence in their own intelligence.
Yet it is often the case that success or failure in schools has less to do with intrinsic intelligence, and more to do with extrinsic variables such as socio-economic status, race, gender, physical attributes, 'popularity', and all the forms of ambition these factors effect. Sometimes it is simply the result of being offered the right knowledge at the wrong time, or out of sequence and context.
Gatto, award winning teacher and educational reformer, argues in his seminal 1992 book, Dumbing Us Down, that practically everything we teach is disconnected, out of context, presented with a lack of coherence, and full of internal contradictions.
"Children have no words to define the panic and anger they feel at the constant violations of natural order and sequence fobbed off on them as quality in education."[P.2]
Gatto lists "the seven lessons of school-teaching -- confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, and surveillance -- all lessons that are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius."[p.118] Rather than educating our young, Gotto argues, such methods serve rather to "prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior."[p.10] "We've built a way of life that depends on people doing what they are told because they don't know how to tell themselves what to do."[p.10] And meanwhile, "behind the patchwork quilt of school sequences and the school obsession with facts and theories, the age-old human search for meaning lies well concealed."[p.3]
However, intelligence and talent, it turns out, do not distribute themselves economically over a bell curve, as Gatto points out, and human destiny is not mathematically and scientifically determined, as our training in education programs tends to teach. Rather, "genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us." Which is why teachers who pay attention are repeatedly surprised to find when and how often the unlikliest kids demonstrate such hallmarks of human excellence as curiosity, insight, originality and industry, justice, courage, and temperance.
Thus, in rethinking his methods of teaching, says Gatto, "I dropped the idea that I was an expert, whose job it was to fill the little heads with my expertise, and began to explore how I could remove those obstacles that prevented the inherent genius of children from gathering itself." Such obstacles include grades and labels, as well as the central assumptions behind the institutional school system, such as that it is difficult to learn, and that children resist it. Rather, what children resist, when they do resist schooling, is not the learning itself, which comes absolutely naturally to them, whether we intend for it or not, but those methods of control -- that is, the grades and labels -- which we concoct (ironically, to make their learning easier) but which confine them to learning what we teach, when we teach it, and just prior to when we test them and move them on to what we presume to be the next proper subject. The 'good kids', or so we say, are those who do the thinking that is assigned them with a minimum of resistance. 'Bad kids', on the other hand, fight this -- even though they often lack the concepts to know what they are fighting. And believing we cannot survive as schoolteachers if we allow them to win the struggle over what and when to learn, well-trained teachers use many well-tested procedures to break the will of those who resist.
In this way, and despite the best efforts of otherwise good teachers, we "teach that a kid's self-respect should depend on expert opinion. Kids are constantly evaluated and judged, while self-evaluation -- the staple of every major philosophical system that ever appeared on the planet -- is never considered a factor."[pp.10-11]
And the implication of this constant surveillance and judgment is that no one can be trusted to learn, if not compelled, and that children must be closely watched and directed, lest they "follow a private drummer", in which case, we may never be able to "get them into a uniformed marching band."[p.12] And by way of homework, this "surveillance...travels into private households, where students might otherwise use free time to learn something unauthorized from a father or a mother, by exploration, or by apprenticing to some wise person in the neighborhood...[all those] devils always ready to find work for idle hands."[p.11]
"It is more difficult, naturally, if the kids have respectable parents who come to their aid," Gatto adds, tongue in cheek, "but that happens less and less, in spite of the bad reputation of schools," which is "probably the best testimony to what happens to families when mother and father have been well-schooled themselves."[p.9]
All this has the unfortunate consequent that many a child grows up believing that they are 'bad at' math, or science, or any of many subjects offered them too soon, too late, or with too much compulsion and extrinsic direction to have sunk in. The problem, says Gatto, is timing. Despite our good intentions, we actually manage to "prevent children keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families to learn lessons in self-motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity, and love."[p.21] "It is a gross betrayal of the democratic promise that once made this nation a noble experiment."[p.33] "I don't even know why parents would, without a fight, allow it to be done to their kids."[p.5] For "the truth is that reading, writing, and arithmetic only take about one hundred hours to transmit -- as long as the audience is eager and willing to learn. The trick is to wait until someone asks and then move fast while the mood is on."[p.13]
So it is that recognizing the nonlinear nature of learning, as well as the importance of intrinsic motivation and discovery in the learning process, would move us to let students choose the path appropriate to them at any given time, and could give rise to an actual revolution in education.
As Robinson argues, we do not need educational reform, for it cannot help us to fix a fundamentally flawed system. What we need is an entirely new model of learning, because one size does not fit all. We need education that suits the ever changing and unique circumstances of student’s lives, one that answers to questions and problems generated by students themselves, and gives them just enough external support to help them develop their own learning model as they go. Learning proceeds in just this way, not as a march through a prescribed curriculum, but by exploration, just as the original discoverers of so much human knowledge found their way in their own time.
Is institutionalized education more efficient? Oh, undoubtedly. But what good is doing anything efficiently if it does not ultimately achieve the end at which you originally aimed? What good is efficiently educating our young if those methods actually thwart rather than enhance actual learning?
“At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our conception of ability and intelligence.” Which requires challenging those things we take for granted, what Robinson calls, the “tyranny of common sense.” He quotes Abraham Lincoln, who once said, *we must disenthrall ourselves with those habitual ways of thinking that once served us, but have over time become a disservice to our young. The real difficulty in this that makes it so difficult to “think and act anew” is that, not knowing something, we also don’t know that we don’t know it. We have become enthralled with is the idea of linearity. We have been obsessed with this “linear narrative” because it was once suited to the conditions of the industrial revolution. The problem is, “life is not linear, it’s organic.” We do not follow straight lines from start to finish, rather “we create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to circumstances they help to create for us.” In this sense, all of life is more of a non-linear dance than a linear march through pre-organized curriculum.
It is this habit of linear thinking, he argues, that makes it so “Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects,” which all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. “At the top are math and language…then the humanities…and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there’s hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance, “ for instance. “There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important,” Robinson says. “I think math is important” too, “but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they’re allowed to; we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.”
Robinson tells the story of Gillian Lynne, best known for choreographing Cats and Phantom of the Opera. He asked her during an interview for a book on epiphanies how she had become a dancer, “and she said it was interesting – when she was in school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the 30s, wrote to her parents and said, ‘we think Gillian has a learning disorder.’ She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting.” Robinson added, “I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you?” This is, after all, very similar to the report made of many students today to whom this disorder is attributed: “she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on…little girl of eight.” But, Robinson reminds us, “this was in the 30s, and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point.” While this was met with laughter, and would be funny, if it weren’t so tragic, that today as many as * children per year are diagnosed with ADHD, an average of 3% per year increase of a disease that “wasn’t an available condition” only a few decades ago. “People weren’t yet aware they could have that.”
“Anyway,” he says, “she went to see this specialist…she was there with her mother….and she sat on her hands for about twenty minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it…the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, ‘Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.’ H said, ‘Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long, and they went and left the room. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, ‘Just stand and watch her.’ And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick, she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” The answer was as simple as that.
“What happened?” Robinson asked Gillian. “She said, ‘She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn’t sit still, people who had to move to think.’” Imagine that, People “who had to move to think. They did ballet…tap…jazz…modern…contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, and became a soloist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually…founded her own company…met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history. She’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multi millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.”
For just such reasons, Robinson says, we “need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.” We must “change the metaphor by which we educate our young, from a linear manufacturing model to an organic agricultural model.”
Such methods, along with teachers who appreciate and can facilitate the extraordinary capacities of children, would allow us to create conditions under which our children will flourish. Technology, such as it’s advanced would allow us to customize education to the circumstances of the child, personalize the curriculum to those we’re actually teaching.
“What I think it comes to is this,” Robinson concludes. “Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology, and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth; for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating your children… What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to represent their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way – we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”