Changing Education Paradigms [video]

[achali]

Sir Ken Robinson, education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award speaks on his ideas for education reform.

My notes:
"Our kids are being punished for being distracted [in a society of distractions]."

"The arts are victim to a system that overvalues standardized tests."

"Aesthetic experience -- when your senses are operating at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing you are experiencing, when you're fully alive -- is being sacrificed."

"We are getting our students through education by anesthetizing them (shutting off their senses, deadening them to what is happening around them). We shouldn't be putting them to sleep, we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves."

"We have a system of education that is modeled on the interests of industrialization and in the image of it. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines -- ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines. Or at different times of the day. Or better in small groups that in large groups. Or sometimes they want to be on their own."

"Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the "stuff" of growth."

"It's about the culture of our institutions, the habits of institution, and the habits they occupy."