Creative Schools - Sir Ken Robinson

Question 1

Lesson 1: Schools aren’t meant to make you better, they’re designed to make you an obedient, productive employee.

Have you ever thought about why schools are the way they are? What they were created for?

When you dig deep into the books of the history of education, what you find isn’t all too pretty. Before our Western, formal school system was introduced, only few people were schooled. Usually the sons and daughters of rich people would have private teachers to teach them in a variety of subjects like history, art, math, language, biology and music.

Why the sudden change? Why have everyone learn these things? Because after the industrial revolution, people would need them to do their work.

It’s simple. To do highly standardized factory work, people would need highly standardized factory knowledge. So at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century Western governments introduced mass education built around conformity and obedience, using the same linear processes that made factories so efficient.

100 years later our kids still run through the same standardised, test-infested machine, to become cogs in the system when those cogs have long stopped being valuable.

Schools are not designed to make you smarter. Right now, they’re designed to make you a productive employee, who doesn’t ask too many questions.

Lesson 2: Try to think of yourself as a gardener when you want to teach someone something.

Can you remember a time when everything was interesting? When you wanted to touch, feel, look at and explore the whole world?

Answer 1

You might not remember it, but there was such a time. It was when you were four years old. And then you started going to school. All of a sudden, you had to do stuff. Not because it was fun. But because it was required. And you started disliking books, disliking the subjects, and you stopped exploring.

If you didn’t and you liked school, there was only one person responsible for this: your teacher. Great teachers nurture the creativity and curiosity of kids. They expand it, instead of nipping it in the bud by making their lessons boring.

We all teach at times, whether to our friends, family, kids, or actual classrooms. When we do, Ken Robinson suggests we think of ourselves as gardeners: we can’t force our “plants” to grow, but we can feed their natural desire to do so.

Lesson 3: What our kids really need to develop are curiosity, creativity and criticism.

In today’s world, kids don’t need to remember facts or hard skills. They’ll learn most of those during their careers.

Instead of skills, we should teach our children competencies.

The world is changing fast, and there’s no way to predict what subjects will be useful tomorrow. Some things, however, are timeless. Like these three:

Curiosity – the constant drive to pay attention to the world and ask questions about it.
Creativity – the ability to come up with new ideas to solve complex, interesting problems and implement them.
Criticism – the courage to question even the answers to their own questions, filter out facts from opinions and distinguish the signal from the noise.

If we do nothing to be good parents, but instill in our kids these traits, I’d say we’ll have done a decent job.