Excellent video on education

[Alice]

Check out this video of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson on education and creativity. If the link doesn't work try http://www.ted.com and then look for his name.

 

[Julpost]

Thank you for sharing that. Ds and I watched it together and LOVED it.

[Laura K (NC)]

What a great speaker! I seldom see speakers that skilled.

 

He said something right off the bat that made me uneasy, though. He said (in so many words) that creativity may be even more important than literacy. He almost made the point by the end of the speech, but never quite got there.

 

I was a music major so I know well that some liberal arts degrees like mine are fairly worthless economically. Having raised three very different children I can attest that there are definitely different learning styles, and the child with ADHD might not be best suited for a long school day with no movement, no artistic expression, and worksheets all day. That's one reason why we homeschool.

 

The arts are very important, but you can't just have a child be creative and call it "arts." You certainly can't call it "education." He spoke of the modern education system having to arise out of the needs of the industrial age, and that's certain, but even before then the arts were taught in schools, especially to the children of the wealthy. The arts have always been, and I think will always be, a luxury. I was watching The Mission with Robert DeNiro, and in that movie (which was pretty historically accurate), he was able to win over the natives with music, and the natives had an uncanny affinity for it. Voltaire said those Jesuit missions were a "triumph of humanity." The natives could not play while their bellies were still empty or while there was still work to be done, unless music could be done while working, or art could be incorporated into their work. Discipline is always part of the arts.

 

Classical education is based on the seven "liberal arts": the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) and the quadrivium (math, geometry, music, and astronomy). A liberal arts education used to mean something fairly disciplined, but was still a pursuit of luxury reserved for the wealthy. The poor, who had no access to it, could practice visual arts or music as humans have always done in their leisure, but education, even in the days before the Industrial Revolution, was a discipline.

 

The expression of genius is cultivated by lots of free time that allows for artistic expression. I agree that the child who needs to move should be given instruction on how to maximize that talent, and the child who needs to paint or draw should be given the materials and the space and even the art classes to pursue it. But the speaker seems to be saying that the discipline of modern schools is bad because it only trains people for desk jobs important to the economy, and we can't possibly know enough about the future to train them to be productive members in a society we can't predict. I think he's operating on a very limited idea of the purpose of education as it has always been held, ever since the ancient Greek or Chinese schools or the monastery schools of the middle ages or the universities of Enlightenment Europe. The difference between then and now is that then, the value of education was education itself, largely. The subjects were held in high esteem. Education now is about the child, now, and the child is held in higher esteem than the subject matter. Of course a human life is more important than any subject or discipline, but that's not really the issue in education as it would be in ethics or some other philosophy. A child can't just "do" art for his own sake. He has to do it in part to enter into the Great Conversation. Artistic expression isn't based on any individual. It's based on a larger community than we often realize, that includes the artists that have gone before us, and their older points of view, and it includes our contemporaries, and it includes those who will come after us in the next decades, centuries, and millennia. Art is a discipline and a responsibility, not just a creative outlet because a child has a need to wiggle. Literacy is crucial for any good art education. The child who does art for his own personal goals is immature in his thinking. That's fine, because children are supposed to be immature. :tongue_smilie: Art is very therapeutic and is certainly most often a leisure hobby. Dance, drama, art and music for their own sakes is a luxury, something that all children should have, but not at the expense of the trivium and quadrivium. (Music in the sense of the quadrivium isn't music as this speaker understands it. Though it obviously included "music," it was a mental pursuit heavy in applied math and physics).

 

So I believe one of his first premises was mistaken, that creativity is even more important than literacy. Literacy includes the tools with which to do the arts. An artist who lacks literacy is just indulging in themselves. Great artists have been born that way, certainly, but the aim of education should be to promote literacy (we call that the grammar stage). Then creativity is incorporated into education through the logic and rhetoric stages, applying that literacy to any field. They used to call those fields the seven liberal arts. Now those fields are even more numerous, and creativity is the result of an active, informed mind, whether that mind pursues computer programming, medicine, bricklaying, parenting, dancing, gardening, or anything else.