Take a Chance . . . Let Them Dance: Validating Artistic Expression

[NGONGE]

Listned to this guy on Al Jazeerah the other day. He's quite the orator and some of his ideas are thought provoking. What do our resident educators think of the article?

 

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Creativity is a key part of the educated mind.

 

by Sir Ken Robinson

 

 

I heard a great story recently about a six-year-old girl in a drawing lesson. The teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention in class, but during this lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated. She asked the girl, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." The teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." The girl said, "They will in a minute."

 

 

What all children have in common is that they will take a chance. They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. But if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.

 

We run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. Now we're running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

 

The result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The trick is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: We don't grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Or, rather, we get educated out of it. Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

 

Something strikes you when you travel around the world: Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. It doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts--everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there is a hierarchy within the arts. Music and art are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.

 

 

Credit: Christoph Wilhelm

Why not? I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if they're allowed to. What happens is that as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. Then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.

 

If you were an alien from another planet visiting Earth and you asked yourself what public education here is for, you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output -- who really succeeds, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- that its whole purpose, throughout the world, is to produce university professors.

 

I like university professors, but we shouldn't hold them up as the exemplars of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. Typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look on their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

 

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a conference of senior academics and pop into the nightclub on the final night. And there you'll see it: grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting for it to end so they can go home and write a paper about it.

 

So our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason for that. The whole system came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Don't do music; you're not going to be a musician. Don't do art; you won't be an artist. Then: benign advice. Now: profoundly mistaken.

 

Academic ability has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. The consequence is that many highly talented, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at was not valued in school, or was actually stigmatized.

 

We can't afford to go on that way. In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO [2], more people worldwide will graduate from school than did so from the beginning of history to the present. This is because of the transformative effects of technology on the nature of work, and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything like what they used to be worth. When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job, and if you didn't have a job, it was because you didn't want one. (And, frankly, I didn't want one.)

 

But now, kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need a master's degree where the previous job required a bachelor's degree, and now you need a PhD for the job that once required an MA. It's a process of academic inflation, and it indicates that the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet and that we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

 

We know three things about intelligence. First, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement and in many other ways, too.

 

Second, intelligence is dynamic. Look at the working processes of the human brain: Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into unrelated compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

 

And the third thing about intelligence is that it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany, which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. It was prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman named Gillian Lynne. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did Cats and The Phantom of the Opera.

 

Gillian and I had lunch one day, and I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" She told me that when she was at school, she was really hopeless. She couldn't concentrate; she was always fidgeting. The school wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." I think now they'd say she had ADHD. But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware they could have that.

 

So Gillian's mother took her to see this specialist. She sat on her hands for twenty minutes while her mother talked to this man about all the problems Gillian was having at school: She was disturbing people, and her homework was always late, and so on. In the end, the doctor sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me. I need now to speak to her privately. Wait here--we'll be back. We won't be very long."

 

As they went out of the room, he turned on the radio sitting on his desk. When they got out of the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." The minute they left, she was on her feet, moving to the music. They watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, "You know, Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."

 

I asked, "What happened?" and Gillian said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked into this room, and it was full of people like me. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. She eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School and had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet and became a soloist. She later moved on, founded her own company, and met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's probably a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.

 

I don't mean to say we are all dancers. But in a way, we are all Gillians. There are millions of Gillians. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us.

 

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope they are. Our task is to educate our whole being so they can face this future. We may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

 

Sir Ken Robinson [3] is an international leader in creativity, innovation, and educational reform and author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. This article is based on a talk he gave at the 2006 TED conference.

 

Source

[Naden]

Fabulous article! Will be back to comment on a number of points.

[NGONGE]

^^ I expected the nomads working in the field of education to have a word or two to say here.

[Johnny B]

^meaning that Naden is not in the field?

 

Very Fabulous article indeed,just found a tiny drawback in the article, namely, the educational problem the young face is multidimensional, problems vary from hidden ADHD and/or T personalities to indoctrination of all it's forms, which makes the article's subject matter both interesting but gigantic to be concentrated on, hence the risk of being moot to the average.

 

The problem is almost unidentifiable in the third world, where child-care is nonexistent.

[Naden]

JB, the essay presents enough ideas and arguments for a 500 page book. Perhaps the most interesting for me is the true purpose of mass education since its inception and its evolution.

 

The field of education, from what I have observed in my area, trains teachers in the narcissistic, navel-gazing, practice of reflective education. Monitoring one’s feelings yet controlling the thoughts and outlook of children from the beginning. Social engineering at its best. The products are narcissistic, dull, anxious, unimaginative children who become perfect consumer drones and office slaves. When mass education was instilled, it was to take headstrong and independent farmers and farm hands from the field to the assembly line. Owners and predatory middle management couldn’t work with a farmer who works to death when he wants and the land needs, and sleeps for months at other times.

 

The school system also serves a number of purposes including putting children away while parents work, and removing youth who could work from the labour market. It is quite barbaric how so many young men aged 14-19 are forced to shuffle through an ‘education’ they would much rather replace with working and living.

 

All that energy, strength, and eagerness to live are crippled in a classroom headed by mostly sedentary, fat-bottomed, but very comfortably middle-class and middle-aged women, many of whom will never understand what it is like to be a male of that age.

 

Oh, but school systems are very comfortable with 60 or 70%% of boys dropping out in some areas while wandering, unskilled and unguided, back and forth between shoddy attendance at high schools and part time work. No plans for apprenticeships, trades training, heavy labour, or anything that teaches these young people that you could make a comfortable living and start families without being stuck in that hideous limbo of delayed adulthood also known as undergraduate/graduate/professional education.

 

General education – learning to read, write, and do basic math – should take no more than 6-7 years. The mind-numbing rote memorization and repetition of school curricula that justify massive education budgets, while producing youth who cannot spell much less think independently, are unforgivable.

[Khayr]

^^^^

 

Preach on sista souljah, preach on!

 

Do tell about the transformation of the farmer into a ford plant worker who is measured by 'Efficiency' .

 

Is education only a classroom thing? Do we stop learning once the bell goes?

 

But now, kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need a master's degree where the previous job required a bachelor's degree, and now you need a PhD for the job that once required an MA.

So true....I got friends who PH.D's and are now indebted for the rest of their lives to pay for their education and their partner has a Masters, so the two of them are now caught in the dissmal cycle of:

 

• WORK

• Daycare

• Pay Loans

One thing that the western mindset ignores and its that WE ARE ALWAYS LEARNING. Be it the subject is good or bad for us. The only time we are not learning something is when we are asleep.

[NGONGE]

Though I think understand the totality of your argument there, Naden. I am somewhat perturbed by the six or seven year limit you impose!

Surely that is not even remotely enough (leave school by the age of twelve?).

 

I rather find myself agreeing with the author's analysis. He does not fully dismiss current methods of education but would prefer to see more flexibility and creativity allowed. Your method, if I understand it correctly, is a return to the pre education times where a skill and trade were the zenith of every young person's ambition.

 

Don't you think that even those with PhDs (as Khyer says) who sit at home and pass their time on computer games will still add more to the sum total of human knowledge than what a farmer, carpenter or blacksmith would?

 

 

Ps

I always pictured you as a staunch feminist, what is with your emphasis on the future of young men there, sis? Where the girls at?

 

pps

Johnny, I've never been as well connected as you, saaxib.

 

Didn't really know this was her area of expertise. I was rather hinting at the Malikas, Chubakas and Sayid Somal of this site (and any others we don't know about).

[dhulQarnayn]

Originally posted by NGONGE:

 

Creativity is a key part of the educated mind.

 

by Sir Ken Robinson

Ngonge,

 

Ofcourse there is a little truth to that story. But then again; how far do you think people should take artistic expression?

http://www.jibjab.com/view/252163

 

dhulQarnayn :cool:

Republic Of California

[Naden]

Ngonge, the six or seven years are not a limit. Quite the opposite, I think one should be in formal education as long as one pleases. If an education system cannot teach reading, writing and basic mathematics in about 7 years, it will not teach most of its students much of anything. Around here, not even 12 years produce these basic skills thanks to unwieldy, out of touch, and college-admission-obsessed curricula.

 

Neither a skill nor a trade should get in the way of true education and enlightenment, imo. A school system should teach you to read, write and maybe think. Your own open mind and an environment that is curious about knowledge, history, world events…etc, and encourage debate and meaningful discourse that produces an educated mind. There is nothing that says an education is in the halls of universities alone (and most majors are glorified trade schools nowadays, anyway).

 

Do I think that a PhD sitting at home, playing a computer game adds more to human knowledge than a farmer? Depends on the PhD and whether he or she can think, and remain creative and open to discovery.

 

My emphasis on young guys comes from seeing them unsuccessful in life as refugees from public school systems. Girls have a biological advantage; if they don't succeed, early motherhood provides instant social status and preoccupation

[Cara.]

^Yeah, and a young man's social status and busy work is gained by going off to war. Get them to defend the motherland for a few years, they'll come back dying to become a responsible plumber, butcher or carpet washer.

 

Naden, do you think a 60-70% drop out rate for young boys in one school district says more about the young boys or the quality of schooling/social milieu? Ie, what makes a boy attending a suburban private school suitable for higher education while an inner city boy's talents are being wasted and should be funneled towards maintaining roads? Is it even possible to have any kind of standardized education system that is at the same time personalized to each child's talents and aspirations? What do we do about a 12 year-old with no detectable passion for anything? Should we stop teaching them algebra because obviously they are NEVER going to aspire to be mathematicians? At what point do we tell a child "listen, history lessons don't seem to engaging you all that much, luckily if you start a trade school you can afford to raise a family by the time you're 20?"

[Naden]

Cara, education and a university degree exist in intersecting but not completely overlapping spheres for me. If we put private schools and the groomed few aside, public schooling and widespread university admission/graduation were not designed to educate the masses, were they?

 

I pity the lack of options for the boy who drops out of school. The one from a good school district will go on to university, study something that gets him a job and he will be considered the educated class. I take exception to that blanket label. Completing a number of courses does not an educated person make. Trained or skilled are probably better words.

 

A person who maintains roads can go home and have a heated discussion with their family and neighbours about the state of prisons, the worthiness of this-and-that writer, or the merits of boys only schools. I believe that if a good general education does its job, no matter what a person does for a living during the day, they should be able to read and think.

 

If a child shows no detectable passion for anything by 12, then the school system has done its job. Most passions will be replaced with PSAT, SAT, admission essays, and the grind of university admission.

 

If a young person finds history interesting, is the only way to remain engaged in it to major in history in university? If the child loves history, is taught to read and think, and has his/her interests cultivated, he or she will remain students of history for a long time. Even if they go to trade school and raise a family by 20.

[Sir-Qalbi-Adeyg]

Originally posted by Naden:

JB, the essay presents enough ideas and arguments for a 500 page book. Perhaps the most interesting for me is the true purpose of mass education since its inception and its evolution.

 

The field of education, from what I have observed in my area, trains teachers in the narcissistic, navel-gazing, practice of reflective education. Monitoring one’s feelings yet controlling the thoughts and outlook of children from the beginning. Social engineering at its best. The products are narcissistic, dull, anxious, unimaginative children who become perfect consumer drones and office slaves. When mass education was instilled, it was to take headstrong and independent farmers and farm hands from the field to the assembly line. Owners and predatory middle management couldn’t work with a farmer who works to death when he wants and the land needs, and sleeps for months at other times.

 

The school system also serves a number of purposes including putting children away while parents work, and removing youth who could work from the labour market. It is quite barbaric how so many young men aged 14-19 are forced to shuffle through an ‘education’ they would much rather replace with working and living.

 

All that energy, strength, and eagerness to live are crippled in a classroom headed by mostly sedentary, fat-bottomed, but very comfortably middle-class and middle-aged women, many of whom will never understand what it is like to be a male of that age.

 

Oh, but school systems are very comfortable with 60 or 70%% of boys dropping out in some areas while wandering, unskilled and unguided, back and forth between shoddy attendance at high schools and part time work. No plans for apprenticeships, trades training, heavy labour, or anything that teaches these young people that you could make a comfortable living and start families without being stuck in that hideous limbo of delayed adulthood also known as undergraduate/graduate/professional education.

 

General education – learning to read, write, and do basic math – should take no more than 6-7 years. The mind-numbing rote memorization and repetition of school curricula that justify massive education budgets, while producing youth who cannot spell much less think independently, are unforgivable.

Have you read Dark Age ahead by Jane jacobs? She delves into the same issues, western education even in university has always been about credentials rather than education or practical aspects of life.

 

I also notice there is too much emphasis on preparing high school students for university or college instead of promoting trade jobs especially for boy.

 

Western education is very much female oriented. This type of education has adverse affects on boys hence why more girls go to university than boys because for a lot of males don't see the practical application of a university degree and would rather not waste four years learning something that is useless.