Ken Robinson, the host of the conference, pointed that the world wide education system is focused on teaching to the students that there are centain and few ways to be successful in life. Robinson supported this point stating that around the world, the most worth subjects in every education system are the same ones. In fact, at the top of the most worth subjects is Mathematics, second Languages and third The Humanities. On the other hand, the less worth subject is The Arts which is at the bottom of this type of list that classify the school subjects from the most to the less worth of these subjects. This is proved in the daily life of every school student, when he/she is having a talk with his/her father o parents about their future and wath they would like to be or to study. It is common that parents tell their children that being a musician or something ralted to The Arts is not a safe way to be successful in life. But being a lawyer, an engineer, an architect or a doctor is a safe one.
Robinson stated related to the previously mentioned that 'very crative and brilliant people think they are not intelligent, because they were stigmatized at elementary and highschool, since they were not good enough in some subjects. So, we were born as creative people, but we grow as no creative people, because of tendency to educate people to study those validated successful carrers'. Furthermore, he mentioned that,' human beings has focused just on their heads, on their brains, on their minds, forgetting that they have got a body which needs movement to live. This is the case of some people that need more than their minds to think, in fact, they need to move to think which is the case of dancers, sportsmen/women, artists or musicians. In the end, if we want to get an original idea we have to be prepared to be wrong in some moment of our lives, since we can learn, because commit mistakes. Thus, nowadays, the children are growing frightened to make mistakes, which means no original ideas, no creativity, no learning process and waste of their intelligence'.
Afterward, he mentioned that what he was stated previously proves that there are many type of intelligence, and that intelligence has three main characteristics: Diverse, which means we can think, because we receive differente stimulus, from the enviroment where we live in, that we perceive through our senses; Dynamic, we can get ideas from different sources of information and mix them to build a new concept; Distinct, which significates that there are different and several type of intelligence and knowledge, and every type of intelligence is valid to be considered as a souce of success.
Finally, Ken Robinson told that 'we should think about how to improve our learning process and how we could better use the intelligence human capacity to try to find out the way to improve our life quality without damaging the ecosystem, because if we keep living in this way the entire human race would probably disappear from the Earth'.
In conclusion, I fiercely believe, this video shows what we should try to do as teachers to-be. Due to the fact that in our society we can daily see many children and teenagers wasting their lives in dishonest activities (for instance, commiting crimes) or doing some activities that do not make them happy at all (for example, when they must work, because they have not found out what really fulfill themselves or when they have to study something that they do not like completely or at all, since they got no more choices). In other words, we should help children to find out their own path, and also letting them to be creative, respecting their thinking, their tastes, their learning processes, their original ideas and their skills. This should be the real purpose of a teacher, to let flow the creativity of students, to guide the students, helping them to find out their essence and to take advantage of their essence, helping them to be successful and happy.
Robinson, Ken. "Schools kill creativity". TED(2006). Online.
I really agree with you, once we go into educational different points of view in depth we realize there's a lot to improve more than vainly criticize, it`s necessary to start thinking of ourselves and our students as individual people whith different skills and flairs and to recognize, value and exploit that.
ReplyDeletegreat comment on the topic.
rgds!
p.s.:there's also a great talk by Isabel Allende on that site, I recommend it!