RSAnimate on Sir Ken Robinson's talk (part of it anyway) on Changing Education Paradigms, on the occasion of his acceptance of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin Award.
Good stuff.
01/22/13...adding his TED Talk...
Here is the full talk - @ 55 minutes:
Here's more info on RSA, from their website:
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Showing posts with label On Education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label On Education. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Sunday, December 9, 2012
Race To The Bottom
[Photo by Tony J Case on Flickr]A "must listen" on the state of the American Education System - there is no difference between Dubya's "No Child Left Behind" and Obama's "Race To The Top" - standardized testing based educational system - with Diane Ravitch, former U.S. Asst. Secretary of Education - 32 minutes...but truly important stuff..."education in Finland, a commitment to the life of the mind..."
http://www.smileyandwest.com/this-weeks-show/the-conversation-diane-ravitch/
Listen or Download Podcast: http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/tavis/local-tavis-1022267.mp3
And one more link: (cuz sometimes links get broken) http://smileyandwest.ning.com/forum/topics/the-conversation-diane-ravitch
Diane Ravitch's Website
Diane Ravitch's Blog
"Congress doesn't know what to do with 'No Child Left Behind'. It should be thrown out. It's been a failure. We've had it now since 2002. In January of 2002 is when George W. Bush signed it. Congress is just frozen in place, they don't know what to do other than to keep collecting test scores. The Obama administration has not really thrown it out. They created a system of waivers where states can opt out of the November 2014 deadline. There is this crazy idea that by November 2014, 100% of the children in the U.S. will be proficient, and if they're not proficient, then you start getting rid of the schools, close them down, privatize them, give them to the states, all sorts of punishments come into play for not reaching an impossible goal." [Diane Ravitch]
At about the 20:00 minute mark...half a trillion dollars just sitting there...that the profiteers/privateers are just salivating over...much (if not all) of the push for privatization is coming from Wall Street...they are having seminars and workshops to talk about how much money there is to be made by privatizing the education system...then we have U.S. elected representatives in the pockets of the moneyed Wall Street carpet-baggers and their moneyed money mongers...it's all so clear...yet we do nothing about it...
We are witnessing the beginnings of the privatization of the public education system in the U.S. by the right wing. It is a system that has been set up to be doomed to fail so that the profiteers can step in and begin to plunder yet another area of taxpayer funds/cash flow stream...this is my opinion...no evidence of this...it is a gut feeling...and I trust my gut...
Monday, September 24, 2012
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Do schools kill creativity?
What a stupid fucking question. The media always comes across as surprised in their tone with questions like this.
Of course schools kill creativity. They murder it. They decapitate it in a most heinous and vicious manner.
Schools are about conformity, not creativity.
I took a creative writing class in high school. The teacher was late, and I was reading a book sitting in my undersized desk. All the other kids were cutting up and throwing paper airplanes and running around - things intellectually stunted, cognitively impoverished high school kids do.
When the teacher walked in, she was angry, made everyone sit down, and said "I want everyone to write twenty lines with the sentence 'I will not misbehave in class'..." My first thought was that I was not misbehaving, so that I should not have to write lines. Remember writing lines - punishment writing the same sentence over and over?
My second thought was that this was a creative writing class. Had she asked everyone to write one paragraph on why we should not misbehave in class, I probably would have done it. Even a one page essay would have been acceptable to me.
As I sat reading my book whilst everyone else wrote their asinine lines, the teacher noticed, walked up to me and asked "Why aren't you writing your lines?" I said, "Well, I wasn't misbehaving like everyone else, so I assumed I didn't have to write them." She said "Well, you do". I went back to reading my book. She said, "If you insist on not writing your lines right now, then turn in fifty lines to me tomorrow".
When I didn't turn in the fifty lines the next day, it went to one hundred lines, then five hundred, then one thousand, then two thousand - for each day I showed up without the lines. When I showed up and didn't have the two thousand lines, she sent me to the principal's office. I explained my position to him and he said "Just write the original twenty lines and you can go back to class". I said, "I'm not going to write the lines". He said, "Until you write the twenty lines, you can just sit here outside my office during this class".
So I reported to the floor outside of his office for a week or so - in lieu of showing up in class. I continued to read my book during that hour. After a week or so, he stopped checking on me, so I started going back to class. No questions asked. No lines. No nothing.
The book? It was a book of essays by Henry David Thoreau - including "Civil Disobedience".
Here's the talk on TED that prompted this post...Sir Ken Robinson back in 2006...thanks to Nuit for the find...
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Of course schools kill creativity. They murder it. They decapitate it in a most heinous and vicious manner.
Schools are about conformity, not creativity.
I took a creative writing class in high school. The teacher was late, and I was reading a book sitting in my undersized desk. All the other kids were cutting up and throwing paper airplanes and running around - things intellectually stunted, cognitively impoverished high school kids do.
When the teacher walked in, she was angry, made everyone sit down, and said "I want everyone to write twenty lines with the sentence 'I will not misbehave in class'..." My first thought was that I was not misbehaving, so that I should not have to write lines. Remember writing lines - punishment writing the same sentence over and over?
My second thought was that this was a creative writing class. Had she asked everyone to write one paragraph on why we should not misbehave in class, I probably would have done it. Even a one page essay would have been acceptable to me.
As I sat reading my book whilst everyone else wrote their asinine lines, the teacher noticed, walked up to me and asked "Why aren't you writing your lines?" I said, "Well, I wasn't misbehaving like everyone else, so I assumed I didn't have to write them." She said "Well, you do". I went back to reading my book. She said, "If you insist on not writing your lines right now, then turn in fifty lines to me tomorrow".
When I didn't turn in the fifty lines the next day, it went to one hundred lines, then five hundred, then one thousand, then two thousand - for each day I showed up without the lines. When I showed up and didn't have the two thousand lines, she sent me to the principal's office. I explained my position to him and he said "Just write the original twenty lines and you can go back to class". I said, "I'm not going to write the lines". He said, "Until you write the twenty lines, you can just sit here outside my office during this class".
So I reported to the floor outside of his office for a week or so - in lieu of showing up in class. I continued to read my book during that hour. After a week or so, he stopped checking on me, so I started going back to class. No questions asked. No lines. No nothing.
The book? It was a book of essays by Henry David Thoreau - including "Civil Disobedience".
Here's the talk on TED that prompted this post...Sir Ken Robinson back in 2006...thanks to Nuit for the find...
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
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