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Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Paradigms Part 1


Bronium

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This will be the

you want to watch. Trust me. You want to watch the whole thing. It's entertaining and it's fascinating.

 

Since it's a fairly long video, I'll break it up into parts and address each of the parts individually. And then I'll put the parts in parts, cause this'll get too long otherwise.

 

See, the problem with schools is that fact that they utilize on type of intelligence. Academic intelligence. And they only focus on that. The arts focus on other aspects, but since it's not academic intelligence, it's not given priority. Which I feel, is one of the reasons why school kids get left behind. I'll talk about this later on.

 

I'm not much of a fan of this. I mean, I don't think I've actually lost my ability to imagine. And I think it's because I've been fairly lucky to have great teachers. I've never been discouraged against asking questions, and I've always asked insane, seemingly pointless questions, just for the hell of it. I mean, I still imagine a lot. I'm fairly sure I'm not the only one who still pretends their in Hogwarts. I'm not sure how school destroys our ability to imagine.

I mean, it gives me restrictions, but don't mistake that as trying to restrict our ability to imagine. Restriction inspires novel ways to get around said restriction. I mean, take his paper clip example. The "smart" kids made the paper clip, not a paper clip. And I think that's breaking the rules. When does a paper clip, stop becoming a paper clip? A real genius would keep the paper clip as it is, and see how you could use said paper clip in intuitive ways, so as to get around the restrictions caused by the paper clip being a paper clip. Restrictions inspire creativity and school gives a good level of restrictions to inspire creativity.

 

We have this idea that being intelligent is about knowing you unit circle or your special triangles (but seriously though, learn that stuff. It helps a lot). And while this is one form of intelligence, I believe there are other forms. Like interpersonal intelligence, knowing how to communicate with another, is a form of intelligence. And some people are fantastic at that. Yet there aren't any classes that try to tap into that kind of thing and properly utilize it. Many types of intelligence gets left behind, simply because it isn't considered to be important. And see, the reason why art classes aren't considered to be vital, is because they don't tap into academic intelligence the way maths does. And it's a shame, because it utilized other forms of brilliance.

I'm an optimistic person. I think people are really amazing at a few thing and generally shit at others. And a lot of people who don't do well at school have a different kind of intelligence. And this intelligence isn't being utilized. And you can understand why most people don't find school helpful. It's designed to help those who are already intelligent academically. And statistically, there are a lot more people who aren't like that.

 

I think I wrote about this before. Schools seem to stagnate. They seem stubborn to change. They want to work in the ways of the past, at the time of their foundation. Yet society has changed. The world has changed. It has moved past the education system. And it's about time schools tried to catch up.

 

I get so riled up when people talk about ADHD. I hate how it's given to so many people, in an effort to make them "focus". Society is trying to make kids who don't have academic intelligence, something they're not. They realize that because they don't have it, they can't teach them. So they just use some other sort method as to replace that academic knowledge, and it just wastes time. Schools are trying to standardize everything. And it's not working.

 


Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that academia isn't useful. I'm now even saying that it's impossible for someone to learn the same things we learn today. I'm just saying, the way we teach these things need to differ for different people. And it's unfortunate we don't do that.


 

This is a fairly long piece. And I think I'll address the rest in Part 2.

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The school system also places a huge emphasis on remembering useless facts, like when the Battle of Hastings was, which is completely irrelevant as knowledge. There is no point in having people who can remember facts, it's more important to have people capable of interpreting them. It's already a huge enough travesty that some people within education place a high amount of emphasis on parroting.

 

But even so, there is a system where the is academic priority.. Things aren't more important or ostensibly better, a person needs to have a varied life. And I would even argue, that a creative scientist is better then a by the book one, so we need to have creative people in good positions. And being creative is not limited to how good someone does in art.

 

I've been following sir Ken Robinson's stuff recently, and I can agree with what he says, There are many great flaws within education, and we can make it better, we should just try.

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