C’mon, lets do it!
1. Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! – “The revolution of organic education and personalized curriculum.”
2. Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity – “There is no school on earth which teaches dance daily to a child as mathematics is. Why not?”
3. How public education cripples our kids, and why – By John Taylor Gatto – “The reason for your boredom is you.”
“Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology – all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.
First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
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3. Sir Ken Robinson – Hammer Lectures –
1. We take age for granted in school, we divide on the basis of age as if its the most important common thing they share, its not.
2. Human beings are organisms. Organisms enrich themselves and the environment in which they live. As plants, humans need to grow themselves. We just have to provide the conducive environment for the same.
3. Michael Angelo said, “I did not make David, it was there inside the stone. I just had to carve out those parts which were not David.”!!! Apply this analogy to an individual’s self discovery – You just have to remove that part of you which according to you (your gut feeling or instinct and simply by the feeling) is not you! That’s it!
4. Change at the system level is not as important as the change at an individual level. We first need to let go what we take for granted. If each one of us here takes the responsibility of spreading Sir Ken’s ideas and pledges to work for them in any-way whatsoever, this revolution is sure to take the world by storm and the system will have to change in the flow.
5. Enough of talking, now act we must. Lets spread Sir Ken’s message as far as we can, our own school and university professors, blogs, media publications, facebook and other social networking sites, eminent politicians, influential leaders etc. And obviously if you yourself can do something, go ahead, just do it.
4. Hillary Clinton, Aamir Khan with Arnab [Teach India] – “Don’t let schooling come in the way of education. Let good quality teaching and education methods help a child discover his/her unique talent.”
A Probable model
Here’s a probable model which our current education systems can follow –
The system should be open to any individual (or a group) to come up and apply to start a new specialised branch. After proper approval that branch will be their responsibility. They have to be passionate enough about that area and be willing to popularise and expand it so that the required expertise and money comes in. The responsibility of the system is to provide all the basic requirements at the beginning and monitor its growth. This will give the widest of variety to students. No age bar for enrolment and students get a wide choice. I believe specialisation is the solution.
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Change Now 