I have possibly one of the first copies (if not the first) of “You, Your Child & School” here in Hong Kong. I was fortuitous not only to learn of its March 11 release just a few days later, but I also had a copy brought over from Canada.
I’m a BIG fan of Sir Ken Robinson. To begin with, where can you find an educator who is also a visionary? Add writer and stand-up comedian, and you have – in one package – Sir Ken.
It’s almost impossible to talk about creativity in the context of education without referring to him. With his latest book, he is bringing his insights to the grass-root, parenting level.
Sir Ken delivered the most watched TED talk, “Do schools kill creativity?“, so wittily and eloquently almost 12 years ago. I’d like to share with you a few excerpts from that talk.
” …. all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. …. creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
” …. kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. …. They’re not frightened of being wrong. …. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
” …. 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. …. by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.”
Sadly, though not surprisingly, we’re well short of the changes that need to have taken place since his talk. I’m talking about at the national / state / provincial level, not individual schools.
Most state education systems have, decade after decade, been employing senior educators who in reality were, or turned into, bureaucrats too afraid to put through the hard but necessary changes and upgrades. To be fair, the societies they served were not open to any “failure” from “high-stake” experiments.
There lies the problem. A risk-averse mindset at the highest levels, after prevailing and filtering down for an extended period of time, became systemic complacency. Those who were supposed to spot the big trends failed to do so. Even as major shifts were taking place, they were slow to react (if they reacted at all). As a result, the education systems they headed up became increasingly ill-equipped to prepare their students for the future.
What state education systems around the world desperately need to do is to learn from the tech world by thinking big, re-imagining and challenging ingrained operating models, experimenting, collaborating, constantly upgrading ….
That’ll require a different mindset, fresh thinking AND, almost certainly, new blood. That won’t happen in a scale broad enough, soon enough.
It’s one of the reasons behind the rapid growth of the International Baccalaureate (IB). Since Sir Ken’s talk 12 years ago, the number of IB Diploma schools has grown by 126%. Over half of them are “state schools”, representing two-thirds of IB Diploma graduates globally each year (Source: IB Diploma Programme Statistical Bulletins). These are schools which chose to leave the state education systems they belonged to for a new one or to offer their students an alternative to state programs in parallel. In either case, what does it tell us?
The thought I wish to leave with you is that with rare exceptions, you can’t rely on a state education system to equip your children for a post Fourth Industrial Revolution world. That’s why I’m so excited to learn that Sir Ken is bringing his insights further down the chain, from “Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education” to “You, Your Child & School“.
Can’t wait to read both.
Fred Chann (fred@parentwithvision.com), Hong Kong
[P.S. I need to declare my (strong) bias towards the IB. I’m an (early) IB Diploma graduate myself. My children are undergoing the Middle Years and Diploma Programs. This is a topic worth a blog post in itself and I may well make it one in the future.]