Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about U.S. school reform (it isn’t good)
The previous post is an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Lou Aronica, titled “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Changing Education.” Changing education is what Robinson has been all about for some years, as a professor, author, and adviser to governments and numerous nonprofit organizations around the world. From 1985 to 1988, he was the director of an initiative to develop arts education in England and Wales that involved a few thousand teachers and artists. He served as the head of a national youth arts development agency in the United Kingdom called Artswork. Robinson was a professor of education at the University of Warwick for a dozen years, and in 1998, he was appointed by the British government to lead a commission to examine creativity and education. He has written several books on creativity and learning, and in 2003, Queen Elizabeth II of England knighted him for his life’s work.
Robinson became famous worldwide in 2006 with his Ted Talk “How Schools Kill Creativity,” which now has more than 32 million page views on the TED Web site, with millions more views on YouTube videos of the same talk. His life’s work has been based on the belief that schools can and should nurture creativity in kids through instruction that is personalized and customized for the communities where students live. I talked to Robinson (who, incidentally, is very funny) about his book and his views of U.S. education reform. Here are excerpts of that conversation:
Q: Tell me about the new book.
A: I’ve been concerned about education obviously for a long time now. A lot of people know me best, I should think, through the TED talks I started giving in 2006. I remember I was actually at an event at a university in the Midwest last year, in Michigan I think it was. And I was there to talk to all the students in the basketball stadium, and over lunch one of the faculty, as I mentioned in the [new] book, said to me, “You’ve been at this a long time, haven’t you?” And I said, “What?” He said, “Trying to change education. What is it? Seven years now?” Since the TED talks. I said: “Yes, I’ve been alive before that. I’ve been doing this a long time.”
I’ve been involved in education all my professional life, since my early ’20s, and I’ve done a lot with systems reforms, with governments, school districts, different countries. And it’s all been empowered by the same set of principles, which is reduced to the fact that I think our systems are outmoded. They make poor use of people’s talents. And we can’t afford that socially, culturally or economically anymore. We do need to think very differently about how we educate kids… Now people keep asking me this: Supposing we agree with that — and a lot of people do — then what do we do about it? This book is my summary of what I think the sort of education I am recommending looks like and how we can make that happen for more kids, for all kids.
Q: What kind of education are you talking about?
A: It’s to make education more personalized for students and more customized to the communities in which they are part of. The reason I say that is that education has become, over the past 20 years particularly, increasingly seen as kind of a strategic issue for governments. Years ago, countries didn’t pay much attention to what was happening in other countries in terms of education. People in France weren’t much interested in what was happening in Germany and Italy …. Nowadays people compare the systems like they are defense policies or economic policies, and it is because people all around the world recognize that education is absolutely fundamental to economic growth. In fact, it is fundamental to the social fabric, fundamental to cultural development and so on. And the interest in all of these things has been driven very hard by the publication of these Sir Ken Robinson has a lot to say about U.S. school reform (it isn’t good) - The Washington Post:
