NSL Blog
End of the line for mass produced education?
May 16, 2013
Extract from No Straight Lines on education.
Sir Ken Robinson famously said: ‘We educate our children from the waist up, then we focus on their heads, and then we only educate one side of their brain. The whole purpose of education is to produce university professors who live in their heads, their bodies are only there to transport their heads to meetings. The current education system educates creativity out of us. We need to educate children holistically. Children have extraordinary capacities for innovation and creativity. And, just as Picasso argued that we are all born artists, social philosopher Richard Sennett says we are all born craftsmen and craftswomen.
The true struggle is to hang on to that creativity as we grow up. The world is engulfed in a revolution, which requires us to think deeply how we prepare our children for the future.
Pretty much every education system around the world has the same hierarchy of education. Is this right? Yet, intelligence is diverse and dynamic. Intelligence engages us totally and collectively. Creativity can be defined as original ideas that have value, and it will be combinations of interdisciplinary capabilities that allow us to reframe the world in a new way. Sir Ken argues that creativity is as important in education as literacy. It will be our ability to imagine and create the previously thought impossible that will build tomorrow’s companies and economies. Our only hope for the future is to redefine and rethink how we educate our children.
Here is Martha Nussbaum exploring how we need to evolve our way of teaching at all levels
Journey further:
