Post written by Laura Varlas
Like most teenagers, Sir Ken Robinson had no idea what he wanted to be when he grew up."Life is a constant improvisation. How many of you, at the age of 15, accurately anticipated the life you've had?," he asked at his ASCD Annual Conference general session presentation last month.
"Your résumé conveys the myth that this was all planned. The last thing you want to do is convey the actual chaos you've been living through."
The path through your life appears as you take it, he explained, and finding your element implies tuning your ear to that inner voice that guides you along the journey. "It requires looking both beyond yourself and more deeply inside yourself to plot a course through your own talents and interests," Robinson noted.
Robinson fears that education is trending increasingly away from helping students find their element.
"Politicians talk about getting back to basics as a finite set of disciplines, but the basics of education are really a set of purposes—why are we doing this in the first place?," Robinson asked. He outlined four major purposes for education and the challenges to realizing these purposes in the current state of industrialized education:
- Economic: "We expect education to facilitate growth and stimulate our economy, yet we are still operating under systems designed to support the Industrial Revolution."
- Cultural: "You need a broad curriculum, not just STEM, to be able to meet our cultural goals for education: tolerance, understanding, and a sense of identity."
- Social: You don't restore confidence in political processes simply by talking about them; you have to Sir Ken Robinson: Reclaiming the Elemental Purpose of Education — Whole Child Education:
4-21-14 The Whole Child Blog — Getting Back to the Real Policy Basics — Whole Child Education
Getting Back to the Real Policy Basics — Whole Child Education: Getting Back to the Real Policy BasicsPost written by Howard Adelman, PhD, and Linda Taylor, PhD, codirectors of whole child partner Center for Mental Health in Schools at UCLA. The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child Model provides another opportunity to get back to policy basics. A fundamental societal need is to end the marg