Sir Ken Robinson, an internationally acclaimed expert on creativity and innovation, and the author of several bestsellers on creativity in education, passed away this August at the age of 70 after a battle with cancer. His TED Talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” is the most watched in history, with 66 million views by people in over 150 countries. We are sure that his influence on the thinking of educators around the world will have a lasting and profound impact for decades to come. We offer everyone in the field of education to honor Sir Ken by reflecting on his ideas of ‘learning revolution’.
According to Sir Ken Robinson, reforming education is rightly seen as one of the biggest challenges of our times. He argued that the challenge is to transform education from a 19th century industrial model into a 21st century process based on different principles.
“Universities have important roles in bringing about the changes that are now needed in education as a whole. Some universities have long been centers of innovation and radical thinking. The cultural and economic circumstances we’re now living in require a radical rethink of how universities work as a sector and of what they’re really for.”
End of industrial system of education
Mass systems of education mainly came about in the 19th century in the context of the Industrial Revolution. Designed to meet the social and economic needs of industrialism, these systems are rooted in a relatively narrow conception of subjects, and consequently, narrow view of intelligence.
The industrial character of these educational systems is expressed through two main principles. First, they emphasize conformity and standardization, which s rooted in the need to inculcate certain skills in the people who were destined to take on certain roles in the industrial economies. At the same time, they are linear: they are designed around various ‘gateways’, which students need to get through to progress to the next stage. Within this approach, vocational programs are generally seen as a lesser species than academic degrees, which is why going to college to do an art course or a dance program is commonly seen as less demanding than studying for academic degrees in universities.
Despite the fact that such systems based on the manufacturing principles of linearity, conformity and standardization have long been out of date, they still exist, even in universities. However, human development is not linear and standardized, it is organic and diverse. “People, as opposed to products, have hopes and aspirations, feelings and purposes.” That is why the existing system often fails both students and teachers. “We have created artificial learning environments for the kids,” Robinson wrote. “We have them in classrooms, in desks, day after day and hour after hour, and then we wonder why they fidget and why they get bored. Because (school is) boring.” He believed education in the classroom should shift away from this kind of an environment to a more diverse one, which would accommodate all types of student learning.
Moving away from the standardized to the personalized
“Education is a personal process,” Sir Ken insisted. Addressing the 2010 TED Conference, he delivered a funny and refreshing look at education today, making a reference to fast food.
According to him, there are two main methods of quality assurance in the catering business. The first is standardizing. If you have a favorite fast food brand, you can go to any outlet anywhere and know exactly what you will find: same burger, fries, cola, décor, and attitudes. Everything is standardized and guaranteed.
Another quality assurance method is the star ratings guides, like Michelin. They set out criteria of excellence and each restaurant is free to meet them in their own way. Institutions can be French, Mexican, Italian, Indian, American, they can open when they choose, and hire anyone they want. Customized to local markets and personalized to the people they serve, such restaurants appear to be much better than cheap impersonal fast food and they surely offer a higher standard of service.
Sir Ken offered educators to address the reform in education system in the following way. “We have built our education system on the model of fast food,” he said – that is, on standardization and conformity. In his opinion, what needs to be done is not to take a single model to scale but to offer a much higher standard of provision based on the principle of personalized learning and to encourage schools and universities to develop their own approaches to the unique challenges they face in their own communities. Robinson said he believes every school should be different because the world is a community of learners, and diversity is an important base to facilitate learning.
“Standardization tends to emphasize the lowest common denominator. Human aspirations reach much higher and if the conditions are right, they succeed. Understanding those conditions is the real key to transforming education for all our children.”
Agile teacher
Robinson saw the main task in facilitating the learning process. Education should be ‘active, nimble and responsive’, while the teacher in it should be an example of vitality rather than passivity. Many forms of understanding that education has to cultivate include factual information, practical skills, and knowledge about the nature of human experience. These all require different strategies in teaching and learning. For example, to learn a foreign language, it would be better to practice with a native speaker rather than just doing grammar exercises. If you are learning to repair an engine, reading the manual is not enough; it needs to be supplemented with stripping an engine down and putting it back together again.
So, what does it mean to be an agile teacher? “People learn in different ways and at different rates… Good teachers are sensitive to those differences and tack and weave accordingly. They draw from a wide repertoire of activities, techniques, and strategies, and adapt them to the needs of the learners and the material.”
The challenge is in knowing how to use the tools
Robinson considered technology as ‘the design and use of tools’. “A pencil is technology. So is a piece of paper or a book or a laptop.” He believed, that good tools can do two things – just like they extend our physical abilities enabling us to do things that would be physically difficult or impossible, they aim to extend our mind: they enable us to think things that might otherwise be inconceivable. The bow and arrow enabled early hunters to capture prey which they couldn’t have done unassisted, while the telescope helped astronomers rethink our place in the cosmos.
“Technology has always gone hand in hand with human culture and innovation. The challenge is in knowing how to use the tools. Faced with the immense capacities of a desktop computer, some people just use it as a fancy typewriter. Others compose symphonies and elaborate works of visual art. The machine doesn’t have the ideas – at least not yet – the users do.” Notwithstanding the fact that digital tools today offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance education in ways that we could not before, they do not replace the need for teachers to understand how learning works and what their roles as teachers are.
Teaching is a conversation, not a monologue
When asked what one quick change that an instructor or professor could make to the way that they teach could be, Robinson opted for turning teaching and learning into “a dynamic process, rather than a one-way channel of transmission.”
Learning is a social and a cultural process, he believed: we learn with and from each other. It can be immensely valuable to stand in front of the class delivering the knowledge to students, but even more important is to engage their minds and hearts in the ideas and materials delivered.
Passion is essential in education. What and how young people are taught has to engage their energies, imaginations and their different ways of learning. “If you are doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you are doing something that doesn’t resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour,” Sir Ken said.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy
This year, the top in-demand soft skill according to LinkedIn, is creativity. It has been at the top of the list for the last few years in terms of what employers are seeking most, and it is understandable. The world’s most pressing problems are not likely to be solved by applying a fixed set of rules to arrive at a single correct answer. They will rather be solved through creativity and divergent thinking with our imaginations running unfettered and any number of potential solutions generated.
The current system of education teaches us that there is always one correct answer, which instills in children the fear of taking risks. Robinson warned us against that. “We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make – and the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” However, “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you are not prepared to think of something original.”
“Creativity is about new ideas. New ideas are challenging,” Sir Ken said. “They can disrupt the status quo; they can involve taking risks; they can make people nervous.’
“Creativity, and its good friend innovation, depend on collaboration,” he went on. Innovation usually results from people working across disciplines or connecting with people in different fields. “We live in highly complicated urban settings and our global systems are deeply intricate, and they all work through collaboration,” Robinson said. Collaboration is at the very heart of the sustainability and nature of human societies and we should have these practices being cultivated in our education systems.
The luminary passed away but his call for creativity caught on, as many educators around the globe start on their long and winding road to the personalized learning environment, with its diversity and collaboration, divergent thinking and agility in the classroom, teaching the people of tomorrow to shape the world they live in.
