The Learning Revolution is already happening Sir Ken!
Wednesday, May 26, 2010 at 3:10PM Sir Ken Robinson gave a popular talk at the TED conference in 2006 titled “Schools kill creativity.” He has just released his latest TED talk, “Bring on the learning revolution!”, and I have embedded it below for you to enjoy.
Sir Ken, an expert on creativity and the author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, is championing ideas that unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers have been acting upon for decades (I’ll refer to all these groups as “homeschoolers” for the rest of the article), as this summary indicates:
It’s not about scaling a new solution. It’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum… technologies combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education and I urge you to get involved in it. Because it is vital not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from an Industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow; that’s where children experience life or at home if that’s where children choose to be educated with their family and their friends.
It is refreshing to hear someone with influence support homeschooling, even if ever so delicately, but this support is inevitable given Sir Ken’s thesis that personalized education is the coming revolution. After all, what can be a more personalized education than homeschooling? Every day, for decades now, many homeschoolers have developed their own solutions to create personalized curricula, often using external support; this external support is typically not a public school, but rather a fellow homeschooler, private business or for-profit school.
It is easy for me to be jaded about Sir Ken’s ideas: after all Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and many others I read or have known have said similar things in their works decades ago, and look how much more intense and unfulfilling school has become for children since they wrote. Indeed, I recall that the agricultural versus industrial metaphor was also used by Holt and others long ago, so why am I enthusiastic about Sir Ken’s version of this argument?
Because he is talking to a very influential and international audience of “thinkers and doers” who actually applaud his comments, rather than react with calls to further support conventional school by outlawing alternatives, such as homeschooling (see my posts about Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden to read how some countries are responding to “the learning revolution” in a negative fashion). As these ideas gain acceptance by elite social groups and businesses not only will homeschooling become a mainstream option for more families, but the entire concept of learning as something people willingly do throughout their lives, instead of learning as something we must compel young people to do, will also begin to take root for more people.
Reader Comments (3)
Loved this years talk when I first heard it a couple of weeks ago!
While I don't disagree with your assessment of the TED forum I do feel a bit of caution is appropriate. There is a tendency among such crowds to differentiate the "right" way to do things and the "right" people to do them from the "wrong" way and people. So while home/unschooling may be consider a good idea for other well educated, privileged folks, I can imagine that many would be less willing to "allow" it for those with less education, money, social resources, or other non-mainstream beliefs or marginalizing factors.
As home/unschoolers I hope that we are able to hang together and support each other as more attention and scrutiny comes our way.
Jessica,
Caution is definitely appropriate, especially for the reasons you note. Trying to present home/unschooling as an effective choice for ANY family, and keeping homeschooling as a self-selecting and self-correcting process, is a goal I hope all of us can agree to support.
More attention and scrutiny is coming for us as homeschooling grows globally and political asylum, parental rights, and corporate/education establishment interests collide. I, too, hope we can hang together and support each other in the face this new attention. I'm aware of some groups trying to form around these issues and I hope to write about and/or join them as they emerge.
I agree with you sir. Talent is very precious. Sometimes people are educated but have less talent, and they found no opportunity.