on education

Last Friday we had the first Imagine Learning meeting of the year. During the meeting we reviewed the progress up to date, discussed the operability of gaiaspace as the main platform for Imagine Learning and set objectives and goals for the project. The following TED video captures the spirit of the Imagine Learning project, our reason for being.

POV on Sir Ken Robinson's Talk: Do Schools kills Creativity

In his talk, Sir, discusses the appropriateness and survival of current education systems. He argues that current systems are killing creativity in favor of literacy.

Ken Robinson cites Picasso: “All children are born artists. The problem is to remain artist as we grow up. ”

It is in children’s nature to be creative, imaginative, to come up with the most innovative and crazy ideas, and this is because they are not afraid of speaking up their minds, of dreaming, and more importantly, of being wrong.
And if we are not prepared to be wrong we will never come up with nothing original.

Ken Robinson argues that our system fails because it stigmatize mistakes. Repressing originality the system grows children out of creativity.

Another interesting thought brought up is the overrating of the brain. He states “people live in their heads, dis-embodied, using their bodies as means of transportations from meeting to meeting”. Are we forgetting that all the information that our brain processes comes through our other five senses? Sight, smell, sensory… Shouldn’t we be coming up with new ways to stimulate these?

Our current education systems were born meeting the needs of Industrialization, as a means to fit that particular chain system, just like today’s high school is a means of getting into University: we go to high school so we can go to university so we can get our Masters and then our PHDs. It’s a vicious circle. Because everyone is fitting in the same system and our system mass produces graduates, today degrees aren’t worth “anything” (frightening thought given that I am in school…)

The destructive nature of humans, is leaving it’s mark not only on the surface of the earth but in the human spirit. We must find a way to overcome this, we must treasure the gift of the human imagination before it’s too late.