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15.05.2012 Education

A Transformation In Teaching And Learning

By Anis Haffar - Daily Graphic
Ken RobinsonKen Robinson
15.05.2012 LISTEN

Ken Robinson A presentation by Ken Robinson

Introduction: Ken Robinson’s book, “The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything” was a New York Times best seller and translated into 21 languages.

He is an expert in the development of creativity and innovation in education worldwide. He delivered the following extract, edited slightly for space, at the prestigious TED Conference. His observations are so appropriate for the times, especially for a developing nation like Ghana. Let’s hear him:

Talent as a Human Resource
“There’s a crisis we have to deal with. It is not a crisis of natural resources, but a crisis of human resources. We make very poor use of our talents.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don’t think they’re really good at anything - who don’t enjoy what they do; they simply go through their lives – getting on with it.

They get no great pleasure from what they do – they endure it rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, don’t do this anymore, they would wonder what you are talking about. Because it isn’t what they do; it’s who they are! They say, “But this is me! It will be foolish of me to abandon this because it speaks to my most authentic self”.

And I think there are many possible explanations for it and high among them is education. Because education in a way dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources. They are often buried deep. You have to go looking for them; they are not just lying around on the surface.

You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine that education would be the way that happens but too often it’s not.

Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it’s not enough. Reform is no use anymore because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need is not evolution but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else”.

Innovation in Education
“One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don’t find very easy for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted; things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense. Things that people think ‘Well, it can’t be done any other way because that’s the way it’s done”.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln said to the US Congress, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country”.

I love that word - ‘disenthrall’. That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things; the way that things are.

And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of the century but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotised by them and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now doing this is easier said than done. It is very hard to know what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted.

My daughter never wears a watch. She is 20, and doesn’t see the point. As she says “It’s a single function device; how lame is that!” But you see, there are things we’re enthralled to in education. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Life is not linear, it’s organic.

We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. We have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting into college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college, certain sorts of college. I don’t mean you shouldn’t go to college, but not everybody needs to go, and

not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.” [To be continued]

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