Fertile minds need feeding
Are schools stifling creativity? Ken Robinson tells Jessica Shepherd why learning should be good for the soul

A bit late commenting on this article, but I missed it when it was first published.

As always lots of very good observations by Sir Ken

“All children start their school careers with sparkling imaginations, fertile minds, and a willingness to take risks with what they think,” he says. “Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests … Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn.”

Then The Guardian, ever obedient to the idea of the alternative viewpoint, finds someone to claim that all is well and UK schools are doing a wonderful job, with lots of “initiatives aiming to put creativity into the curriculum”. Doesn’t that phrase just make your blood run cold?

Anyway on to the end of the article and

“Robinson is right, [Anna Craft, a professor of education at the University of Exeter and a government adviser on creativity] says; it’s not that we need to “tweak the recipe - we need a new recipe”

Would it be too bold to suggest that the HE community has already found that recipe?

“Bringing this about might take a mass protest of pupils walking out of school because it’s just too irrelevant, she says. But in the end change has got to happen”

This I feel is what we’re already seeing. Part of the mass protest is truancy of course and has been going on for a long time but now there’s the increasing popularity of EHE, parents as well as children are saying that school is “just too irrelevant” or not good enough, or too damaging. Ms Craft’s conclusion, that change has got to happen, is probably right in the long term but in the short term what I suspect we’re going to see is the government fighting the symptoms (trying to put the breaks on EHE by regulating it to death) rather than facing up to the underlying condition.

Last Modified: Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 @ 22:02

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 10:01 pm and is filed under Firebird, Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.