Anyway, the presentation was about our educational system and what should be done to return it and its results to the model system it use to be. The video by Sir Ken Robinson is titled “Do schools kill creativity?”. It’s about 20 minutes long, well presented and delivered with a nice amount of humor.
My take on it was the deficiency in the school structure and not that we should let students dance in the hallways... less on memorization and more on problem solving. It’s essence is that the top down, strictly regimented delivery with little allowance for deviation or creativity is killing our children’s ability to reason and imagine. It constrains teachers and administrators from trying new methods which might achieve better results than envisioned by our so-called educational heavyweights.
It occurred to me that the United States, as a country, is suffering from the very same problems in the way that it is being governed. The country is like a mature suburb community with a neighbourhood association; highly restrictive, overgrown shrubbery and cracked pavements. The difference of course is that with the neighbourhood, you can choose to live elsewhere with different rules(or few rules at all), different people with different tastes in shrubs, Christmas decorations and social environment(Except of course where the government has imposed rules from afar). Everything from education, politics, social values, personal safety and business is stifled by the idea that central planning can make us a happy and more prosperous while the ideas of independence, freedom of choice and room to be different are somehow insidious....
Some people react strongly to Ken Robertson’s admonishments... They defend the system that is in place. We are told that he is wrong because literacy and numeracy are the basis of creativity yet can’t explain why so many children leave school as functional illiterates. They say that were it not for the rout memorization we would have had no Shakespear but as Einstein once said: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." Critical of his words they say that discipline in school is a far bigger problem than conformity... Seems to me that government long ago stuck its nose into that arena as well...
Einstein also said: "To me the worst thing seems to be a school principally to work with methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments, the sincerity and the self-confidence of pupils and produces a subservient subject."
But then again, that is some peoples idea for education in the first place.
We hear from John Podesta former Chief of Staff for Bill Clinton, advisor to President Obama and founder of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress that he can't understand why people object to Common Core school standards as "The children belong to all of us"
...In other news we hear that third hand smoke is harmful to your health....
former
chief of staff to Bill Clinton and now an adviser to President Barack
Obama - See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/panelist-podesta-think-tank-common-core-children-belong-all-us#sthash.VFOhDGJP.dpuf
At the end of the room a loud speaker projected from the wall. The Director walked up to it and pressed a switch.
ReplyDelete"… all wear green," said a soft but very distinct voice, beginning in the middle of a sentence, "and Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I'm a Beta."
There was a pause; then the voice began again.
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able …"
The Director pushed back the switch. The voice was silent. Only its thin ghost continued to mutter from beneath the eighty pillows.
"They'll have that repeated forty or fifty times more before they wake; then again on Thursday, and again on Saturday. A hundred and twenty times three times a week for thirty months. After which they go on to a more advanced lesson."
Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too—all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!
The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can't get. They're well off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.(p.220)
ReplyDelete"We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters. We are God's property. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way–to depend on no one–to have to think of nothing out of sight, to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man–that it is an unnatural state–will do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end."
Wiki, Brave new world