Activity 4 - Changing Education Paradigms

In the video we can hear Sir Ken Robinson talking about the education all over the world, He says that everybody is reforming public education for two reasons; economic, how do we teach our kids to fit in the economies of the 21^stC. but without being able to anticipate how the economy will look like next week, and cultural, we try to create a sense of cultural identity and make out kids feel from a small community but at the same time we try to take part in the globalization process and be part of the world.

According to the lecturer the problem with our education is that we are trying to meet the future by imitating what they did in the past and this means that we are alienating millions of kids who do not see the purpose of going to school anymore. Before people were educated telling them that if they did well at school and worked hard they would go to university and get a degree and, finally, they would have a job. Nowadays this is no longer true; people do not believe it anymore. It is good to have a degree but this does not guarantee anything and especially if in the route people marginalize what they think is important about themselves.

The current system was designed, conceived and organized for the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. This system was a revolution since before the 18^thC. there were no systems of public education at all, and from that moment onwards they were created in the middle of a controversy. But this system coined many centuries ago is now obsolete. Kids are now living the most intense stimulating period ever, they have videogames, computes, hundreds of TV channels, but we are not using all the potential these channels offer. We penalize them for being distracted so we decide to give them drugs to keep them focused on boring stuff.

Sir Ken Robinson claims that the arts are the victims of all this mentality, we are shutting all our senses down, we are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them when we should be waking them up and stimulating their brains with all the new possibilities the 21^stC. can offer. What this old system wants is to standardize all the kids, but if we really want to change the model of education we should go in the exact opposite direction; we should not label the kids and group them by age, this is not the only thing they have in common. That is what the author means when he talks about changing the paradigm. He thinks that Divergent Thinking is the key factor to take into account when changing our educational system. Divergent thinking does not mean creativity, it is an essential capacity for creativity; it is seeing lots of different answers, different ways of interpreting a question, think laterally, see multiple answers not just one.

The lecturer concludes that we have to get rid of this old conception about academic vs. non academic, abstract vs. theoretical, and see it as it is; a myth. We have to recognize that most great learning happens in group, collaboration is the key, we cannot separate people and judge them separately and create a disjunction between them and their natural learning.

In my opinion, Sir Ken Robinson is completely right, our society has changed a lot, technology now is everywhere and kids are surrounded by it all the time, except at school where they still use textbooks and chalk blackboards. Now things are starting to change with the interactive boards and the laptops, but this is just the beginning, more changes have to be carried out, more investment in education, but the government decides that education is not important and the politics decide to cut the badges. In my opinion this is the worst thing they can do because this is feast today, famine tomorrow. Kids are the future, we cannot save on the future we have to invest on it!