Yet another insightful and fascinating talk from Sir Ken Robinson – beautifully animated by the RSAnimate. As the above animated version is heavily edited – I recommend watching the full version below.
Ken broaches some interesting concepts that I found particularly interesting. For whatever reason, I hadn’t thought the formation of our education being born out economic imperatives. After all, public education is a relatively new phenomena. However, the thought process behind it’s formation and structure was largely driven from industrialised thinking and economic requirements.
I suppose I never questioned it before. And that’s precisely the point Ken tries to make. That the quest to reform our education systems should not be incremental but revolutionary. Rather than continuing to use a mechanistic approach, we should look to scrap industrial thought processes and allow a more organic passion driven system.
In his book “The Element“, Ken analyses the characteristics and traits of individuals that work out of passion. And he finds that the drivers within them are fundamentally different to those to work prescriptively. Those who work out of passion are several levels more engaged, more creative and more satisfied than those who work in prescriptive environments.
I’m curious to see how an organic education system would operate and how effective would it be. Are their lessons to be learned from the explosive growth of the organic web? That less structure can unleash a wealth of creative potential.
I know myself that I learn best through necessity. When I first began working as a web developer I took jobs that I didn’t have the skills to complete. Once I knew what I needed to know based on business needs – I taught myself using online forums and resources. The information I learned is engrained in me far deeper than the knowledge I learned in school. For me, learning through necessity it the trump learning method.
