With its insight into the ineffectiveness of education reform over the past few decades, Robinson's piece will make for interesting reading for anyone concerned with education policy.
Changing education paradigms
Synopsis
Arguing that the current education system was conceived in the enlightenment and industrial revolution, Sir Ken Robinson sets out two reasons for the drive towards reform. He argues there must be an economic reason – how do we educate our children to take part in the economies of the 21st century? – as well as a cultural reason – how do we give our children a sense of cultural identity, while still teaching them how to thrive in the global village?
The problem Robinson agues, is that schools and school boards attempt to meet the future through the processes of the past, and in doing so alienate millions of pupils. Traditional methods of teaching are structured on ways of conveying information that require pupils to comply with very strict authoritarian rules on what it means to learn.
Rather than promoting and fostering the exploration, pupils are subjected to rigid forms of education, which do more to limit their scope of the world than broaden it. Robinson argues that we have to move away from the old concept of education as being either academic or vocational, and recognise that most great learning happens in groups, through collaboration across these arbitrary boundaries.