Education.
If you are a normal human being, all the blood just drained from your face when you saw the word education appear on this page. Universally, in every culture in every land, people say that education is at the top of their list of objectives for their society, but walk into a cocktail party and start talking about education, and witness an exodus. Of course we want education for our families and ourselves, but do we really have to think about it now? After all, that's what our school boards and our state and local government are for: educating our precious young.
There's where we're wrong. First of all, there was virtually no public education before the nineteenth century. It sprang up in Victorian times to bring literacy to all in an effort to give children the tools they would need to fill the assembly lines and desk jobs of the industrial revolution, People knew there'd be a need for accountants, laborers, and managers in the workplace, along with doctors to take care of them and policemen to keep the peace.
Education was a means of giving the common man the fundamental tools to exist in an industrialized society. It still is, And education itself has become an industry. In the next thirty years, more people will graduate from colleges and universities than have graduated since organized schooling began. A huge workforce is on the way all with college diplomas, all looking for jobs in the industrialized world. Either you will be one of these people, or one of these people will be after your job.
Children starting school now will retire in 2070, We don't have a clue what the world will look like then. Most of us don't have a clue how to fully prepare our kids for a field trip today, much less ready them for life in 2070.
While i acknowledge that there are amazing people working in education who are far more qualified that a cartoon producer to question our curriculum, here's a thought. Let's not train kids for jobs only. Let's train them to be adaptable, creative, and improvisational so that they will be able to move with the flow of time. Let's train them to ask questions and offer up answers without being afraid to make mistakes. Kids have a vast, unending built-in capacity for creativity.
Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll try. They are not frightened of being wrong. In modern education, we stigmatize mistakes with failing grades, and we create a deep fear of them. We educate kids into a small, safe place of right answers, when in reality the world is made up of questions that have no right answers.
Every education system around the world, without exception, has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are subjects we all need: mathematics, languages, and the humanities, and at the bottom the arts. It's universal. But what if visual expression, musical expression, and movement were as important in education as literacy? And what if we treated them the same?
Creativity is diverse; we think visually and with sound and we use the whole body to express ourselves, sometimes with gesture or abstract movement. How many schools teach dance to every student the way we teach math to every student? We all have bodies, and we use them not just to carry our brains from place to place. To create is to call on every aspect of our brains and bodies to fire in an interactive storm of connections. We don't need to be taught this when we're children; we know it already. But we do need to give kids permission to hold on to all those attributes as they mature.
So often we abdicate responsibility when it comes to education, thinking of it as something for someone else to take care of. I have great respect for all my teachers, who are in no small part responsible for what i am today, but in the same breath i promise you that no one out there is going to pay more attention to your education or your child's education than you. If education is a force, then it is your force to control, and not a force for you to delegate to someone else.
Change your concept of education from something that is supplied by the state to a force that is yours to use as a tool to investigate the richness and limitless capacity of human beings to be creative. Otherwise, no matter how noble your intentions, you are using education as a manufacturing operation in which each kid is trained as a commodity to fill a desk in some future world that you don't yet understand.
This is a section of a book i am reading called Brain Storm by Don Hahn
this book talks about how to get your creative juices flowin'
and how others create and how others have different ways to create art.
its a very informative read. and i love it, it encourages me to be more motivated to create.
i particularly liked this section because education is a touchy subject, sometimes i feel like schools have forgotten the arts, and i feel like kids, anybody, everybody needs more passion in their lives. im not saying that you cannot have passion with doing math, but passion that comes within when you create something with your hands, your heart. Passion, like when you listen to your favorite song.
