In his book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, author Sir Ken Robinson, teaches us a couple of insights about how modern education should be taught. In a previous article, we discussed a video of Sir Ken as he discussed how a child’s creativity is killed in school.
According to the video, children are naturally creative in the sense that they will approach any situation without the fear of making mistakes. By not being afraid of errors, children are allowed to explore things, experiences and thoughts without feeling ashamed or embarrassed. It permits them to explore their individuality – which is a great stimulator of new ideas and innovative thought processes.
But once they get to school, they are taught how to conform to the general way of things. This, according to Sir Ken Robinson stifles their creativity because they are made to view mistakes as something wrong. It makes them strive to avoid making mistakes.
While our educational system means well, it is obvious that there is something wrong with the system if it kills the creativity in children. This is probably why Sir Ken Robinson encourages us to revolutionize modern education. We need our kids to be educated – but it has to be done in such a way that will fuel their individuality. They should not be pushed into a mold of conformity because it will keep them from discovering something new.
The leaders and elders of today should guide the youth of tomorrow – that is true. But the goal should not be to turn the youth into the exact same mold as their elders. They should be guided to make their own path and thus develop the skills that will make them even better than those that went before them.
In the book, The Element, Sir Ken Robinson is quoted to day:
“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed – it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.”
(Source: The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
The great thing about technology today is that education is easier to acquire. Some people do not even have to go to a traditional classroom. Studying online can be an option for stay at home mothers who failed to complete their studies because of early pregnancy. Training a skill is now possible for a disabled individual because they do not have to physically transport themselves to where the instructor is.
Revolutionizing modern education is not as complicated as you think it will be because we already have the tools before us. We can equip the youth to answer their own questions by making it readily available online. This will not only teach them independence, it will also allow them to learn at their own pace. We can create technological advancements that will nurture individual ideas while ensuring that it will remain true to the general goals of society.
While we let them explore things on their own, learning management systems (LMS), will let educators closely monitor how effective the method is in teaching students. It allows a more customized education without letting students run loose and thus fail at educating themselves.
In the end, Sir Ken Robinson has a point is his suggestion to revolutionize modern education. It can be changed and improved and all we have to do is to implement it. In his book, he has a couple more insights that could help you understand this very important subject.
- The Element is about discovering yourself, and you can’t do this if you’re trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can’t be yourself in a swarm.
- One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast-food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort.
- Our task is to educate their (our students) whole being so they can face the future. We may not see the future, but they will and our job is to help them make something of it.
Image courtesy of Ambro for FreeDigitalPhotos.net.