Sir Ken Robinson, the untold true story behind the man who gave the most viewed TED Talk in history and created a revolution in education. FETC 2018: Ken Robinson argues 2 key points in support of creative schools. The problems facing education, however, are very serious, he noted. Identifying what he described as an issue of a reform movement that favors conformity, compliance and competition versus the natural inclinations toward diversity, creativity and collaboration.
I was stunned. In all honesty, I had never even heard that question voiced. Our education system today was created in very different times. We were not a connected society the way we are now. I shared my Sugata conversation with Sir Ken Robinson, and asked if it was okay to question the need for education.
Sir Ken said “Sugata has shown through his work that not just kids, but people in general, are perfectly capable of organizing their own learning, that people are natural learners. Left to their own devices, it's extraordinary what even very young kids will figure out.
There are three terms which are often used interchangeably: learning, education and school.
Learning is a very natural process. We've demonstrated as human beings that we have a tremendous appetite for learning. Very young children are born with a rapacious appetite to discover the world around them. Learning is a process of acquiring new skills, knowledge, and understanding. We don't need schools for people to do that. We learn in all sorts of ways on our own and in collaboration with other people. Although learning is natural, much of what we do learn is cultural, and it's a very social process for the most part. Even when we're learning on our own, we're learning from the people around us.
One way of defining education is that it's an organized program of learning; and, of course, people can organize their own programs of learning. It's what self-education means. But we have developed systems over a long time ─ national systems of education ─ on the belief that there are some things that, collectively, we want successive generations to learn, things that are important to us culturally or economically. And part of my case has been that the systems that we have now were developed in other times for other purposes. In many ways, the systems themselves, in their structures and ways of working, are anachronistic. They are also obstructive to the realization of the talents and abilities that many people have, and to the competencies they need to acquire now.
School, in a more narrow but important sense, is a community of learners, because we do learn with and from each other. That's what a school is. It's a community of people who come together to learn with and from each other. I do think that schools are important in that sense ─ the school as a community of learners who come together to learn with and from each other.
The thing is, we've come to associate schools with particular types of institutions which have developed over the past couple of hundred years. The school is a place where there are separate classes; different age groups; bells and whistles; schedules and time tables; and exams and tests. None of those things are necessary to the conception of a school and there are multiple examples in alternative school movements, in democratic school movements.
I do see a place for schools. In fact, Sugata does, too, because the school in the cloud is still a school, and the kids that gather around computers are self-organizing in groups of learners. They are schools effectively.
There's much more room now to rethink how schools function, how they work and how people organize their own learning. There’s also a desperate need to rethink the very basic assumptions on which mass systems of public education have operated for a very long time. I don't think we're at the point where we can ─ in the interest of kids themselves ─ simply say we can get rid of any form of formal structure for schooling. That may be a long-term evolution of the way we approach learning and the tools that are available to us, but I don't think we're quite there yet. But it's important that we rethink the way schools currently operate and the way these systems have evolved and look at their strengths and weaknesses. They're not without strengths. There are wonderful schools all over the place.
But the dominant systems ─ for the most part, perpetuated through public policies for education ─ tend to perpetuate practices which are unhelpful for most kids in the way they want to learn, or certainly in helping them discover what their real personal individual talents and abilities are.”
Voices like Sir Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra may, in fact, give educators permission to make the long-needed changes they want to make. They work within a system that relies more upon the needs of the system itself than the needs of the learners they so desperately want to serve.
If Sir Ken is right, the changes are inevitable. The business of education may be moving towards an inextricable shift in values and efficacy. In the U.S. alone, we spend more than a trillion dollars on an antiquated enterprise that yields marginal results. Internal arguments about minor changes in our education system are akin to two fleas arguing over who owns the dog. Instead of arguing, we should challenge our own long-held beliefs and ask some very different questions.
Our new Learning sections will feature a question-and-answer segment with an education expert. For our first installment, we’ve chosen Sir Ken Robinson, a best-selling author and longtime advocate of transforming education. His latest book, “You, Your Child, and School,” was published in March by Viking. The following interview was edited and condensed.
Your new book offers wide-ranging advice for parents as they try to manage their children’s education. If you had to choose one takeaway, what would it be?
Parents have more power and more choices than they may realize in educating their children. Many parents are worried about how the world is changing and the uncertain futures their children face. Parents are especially anxious about education. They worry that there’s too much testing and competition, that the curriculum is too narrow, that their children are not treated as individuals and that schools are not cultivating their curiosity, confidence and creative talents.
They worry about how many young people are being medicated for “learning problems.” They worry about the rising costs of college and whether their children will eventually find a job, whether or not they go to college. Often parents feel powerless to do anything about all of this. The good news is that a great many educators share these concerns and are also campaigning for change.
While it’s reasonable to lay heavy responsibility on parents for charting the path of their children’s education, they are no match for the bureaucracy of any single school, let alone a state or federal Department of Education. How can parents expect to have any real impact?
The challenges parents face and the options they have are naturally affected by their circumstances. Parents living in poor neighborhoods with limited resources face different challenges from those in wealthy suburbs with paid help. Some parents can pay for the education they want; most cannot.
In general, they have three options: They can work for changes within the current system, particularly in their children’s own school; they can press for changes to the system; or they can educate their children outside the system. Whatever their circumstances, parents are not powerless and their voices must be heard.
Is there one school system you think is doing things right? And if so, how?
Governments everywhere are trying to improve education. For decades, the main strategies have been standardization, competition and incessant testing, especially in literacy, mathematics and science. It’s been a partial success at best and in many ways a dismal failure. The story in Finland is different.
Finland is regularly at or near the top of international league tables in those disciplines but its success is much broader. Significantly, there is no mandated curriculum in Finland. Schools are encouraged to follow a broad curriculum that includes the arts, sciences, mathematics, languages, humanities and physical education. There is hardly any standardized testing. Finland invests heavily in the selection and training of teachers, and teaching is a high-status profession.
The Finnish system is not perfect and it’s still evolving, but it’s succeeding against a wide range of measures, where many other systems fall tragically short, and it’s doing that by following a different path.
You talk about the stress students are under these days. What’s the best way for a parent to ease that stress, while still keeping their students competitive in a very tough and demanding global environment?
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In the United States, more than eight out of 10 teenagers experience extreme or moderate stress during the school year, including headaches, loss of sleep, anger and irritability. The main causes include anxieties about academic performance, the pressures of testing, and parental pressures to excel at school and get into a good college.
Many young people feel overscheduled with nearly every waking hour being assigned, plotted and planned with little time for just “being a kid.” Parents can help in three ways: by learning to recognize the signs of “toxic” stress, by easing the pressures at home through encouraging more downtime and by working collectively with the school to reduce some of the avoidable causes of stress, including the often excessive levels of homework and testing.
You have been critical — as have many — of standardized testing. If you could change it, how would you do it differently? End it altogether? Change the format? Do it less often? And if the last, how do you ensure that students are learning what they need to know?
There was a time when school students could expect to take a few tests each year. Now they face a seemingly endless steeplechase of tests, sometimes starting in kindergarten.
High-stakes testing was meant to raise standards in education. Instead, it’s generated a dreary culture of incessant competition, which has soaked up billions of taxpayer dollars with no significant improvement in standards, causing enormous stress for teachers, children and their families. Constructive assessment is an essential part of high-quality education, and some forms of diagnostic testing can be helpful. The usual forms of high stakes testing are neither constructive nor essential.
The proper purposes of assessment are to support and improve student learning and to provide an informative record of their achievements. There are many better ways to do this than through the barren rituals of bubble tests.
What is your view of charter schools? Would you encourage or discourage their existence?
Charter schools are independently operated public schools, which have freer rein than regular public schools in what they teach and how they are run. In themselves, they are neither better nor worse than ordinary public schools. Some are very successful, others less so.
One argument for charter schools is that they can invigorate the public sector by spreading new practices. Some do and some don’t. Another is that they give parents more choice in education. The choice can be more apparent than real. All schools have limited spaces, and popular ones soon become oversubscribed. Either way, for most families, public schools are still their best opportunity in education.
If you were the United States education secretary, what is the first thing you would do to change the American school system?
What is education for? In my view, it is to enable all students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. The proper role of government is to create the best conditions for that to happen.
If I were secretary, I would encourage all schools to adopt a broad and balanced curriculum including languages, math, the arts, sciences, humanities and physical education, and develop nonstatutory guidelines and resources to support them. I would roll back the current testing requirements in favor of more informative approaches to assessment. I would support the comprehensive development of early-years education. I would institute a “soup to nuts” review of the selection, training and support of teachers. I would introduce incentives for creative partnerships between schools, families, cultural organizations and the private sector.
In these and other ways, education can and must change — for all our sakes.