Great lecture series produced and animated by RSA. This one, narrated by Sir Ken Robinson.
0:25 How do we educate our children so that they can participate in the economy given that we can't predict what it will be like next week?
2:20 Our current idea of public education dates back to the enlightenment.
4:40 Today's children are besieged with info and tech, but get penalized for being bored with traditional teaching methods.
5:50 We are taught to deaden our senses. The arts/sciences suffer.
8:05 Creativity is key to trying to meet the future.
10:05 We all have the capacity to be creative. It mostly deteriorates, under our current educational system.
I used to teach and tutor. I found that a lot of students and even adults don’t know HOW TO LEARN. Our educational system is focused on rote learning and memorization…retain the information long enough to pass the test…however this is not sufficient enough to create true understanding. Society is fixated on passing the test and thinks the test is a measure of how much you’ve learned. However, the whole point of learning is NOT to be able to regurgitate a bunch of facts…it’s to create understanding. You can have tremendous understanding with very little facts. And very little understanding with a tremendous amount of facts. People think that just because you can recite the encyclopedia that makes you smart, but who gives a fuck if you can recite the encyclopedia if you can’t use that information to cure a disease, or generate wealth or fly us to the moon.
ReplyDeleteMath was my best subject in school. However, when I went back to the text as an adult to teach it, I realized that I never learned it how I should have or would have if I actually went along with my teachers. My mind was naturally always focused on understanding, I never took notes or studied and always asked “why”. So as an adult, It pained me to have to teach these kids this math the way that I was supposed to according to the textbooks or curriculums. If I had it my way, I would have taught it to them according to the way that THEY actually learned…we all learn differently and at different paces. However, if you have 30 kids, 1 teacher, and 50 minutes to teach something…what do you think will happen…you do the math :p
I’d prefer to take those 50 minutes and teach the kids how to ask questions, how to be resourceful, how to teach themselves through their own research, how to solve problems, how to listen to their guts and trust their own common sense. Because I found these things to be the foundation for true understanding. If kids have true understanding, there is no need to teach them for tomorrow or any other day, they will be able to learn anything, because they KNOW HOW TO LEARN.
Signed Tye from IBN…I really should be working right now, but I can’t figure out the best way to design this humor page…yet