Thoughts on Educational Reform from Sir Ken Robinson and Naval Ravikant

 Thoughts on Educational Reform from Sir Ken Robinson and Naval Ravikant

One of the very first TED talks that I ever watch was Sir Ken Robinson's "How do schools kill creativity," and I was instantly hooked by his ideas of educational reform and his chuckle inducing, conversational delivery of a topic that shouldn't be funny.

You can (and should) watch it for yourself here...

Robinson made numerous valuable points in his speech, and I'd like to discuss four of them here:

1. "Creativity is as important as literacy, and should be treated with the same status" 
2. All educational systems share a common ranking of subjects (in descending order of "value")
• Math and language
• The Humanities 
• The arts (and within the arts,)
• art (drawing, painting, sculpture, etc)
• music
• dance
3. The ranking is rooted in the facts that:
1. the subjects considered most useful for "work" are at the top
2. and academic ability is emphasized because public schools were designed "in the image" of universities, with the singular intention of preparing students for attending college.

      4. Three characteristics of intelligence are that it is:
               1. diverse in how we think about the world, experience it, and interpret it.
               2. dynamic- the brain isn't compartmentalized but interactive.
               3. distinct  - we all have individual values for intelligence and epiphanies as to what we                           should use our intelligence for (Robinson 2007).
 
I am inclined to agree with Robinson's statement that creativity is every bit as valuable as literacy - and I'm a librarian.  Stifling the creativity of children is a crime which creates stifled, repressed adults who don't know how to function socially.

As a student who is far from proficient at any math-related subject, I can attest to the value placed upon those courses in public school because I was looked down upon for not having any skill at them.  However, I do have skills in other areas, like writing, which is not an area that the school systems places in nearly as high a regard as it should. 

I see the disparity between values placed on subject matter all the time, being a librarian at a university, because  students are constantly in conflict over who's MAJOR is the best, or which group of students (in which major) are the most intelligent/or best at some particular skill etc.  Especially between communications majors, creative writing majors, and biology majors, seemingly. 

Robinson's characteristics of intelligence (diverse, dynamic, and distinct) help to support a point made by Naval Ravikant in a slightly unrelated podcast episode by Tim Ferris in which Ravikant explains how he would redesign the education system.  

Ravikant says that educators should focus on teaching children basic life skills as opposed to the memorization of facts, which is becoming obsolete due to the fact that we can now look anything up in about 10 seconds.  Ravikant would have children learn thinks like: how to be happy, details of a proper die, nutrition, and exercise, along with how to build good habits and break bad ones, how to find your spouse, and how to meditate (Ravikant 2016). 

Ravikant goes on to say that we shouldn't educate every child in every subject, but we should specialize, finding out what each individual child is good at.  This, to my mind, only reinforces the thematic importance of creativity from Robinson's TED talk.  Some children will like mathematics and some will like music, and there is no reason to make all of them agonize though the study of both subjects when only half will have the aptitude for half of the information (Ravikant 2016).    

 Children are our hope for the future and they should be given every opportunity to shape that future the way they want to.  It is their world, after all, and they will be the ones living in it.  We need to give them the tools to discover the world for themselves, as opposed to forcing them to memorize facts and random information which they will be able to find in a matter of seconds - if it is something of interest to them or that they need (Ravikant 2016).   
 

The landscapes of education, technology, ecology, and sociology are changing, and we need to redesign the systems in order to facilitate learning in the new environments and prepare our children for the very different world in which they will surely find themselves in the years to come. 


References

Robinson, K. (2007, January 6). How Do Schools Kill Creativity? Retrieved February 7, 2016, from http://www.npr.org/2014/10/03/351552772/how-do-schools-kill-creativity

Ferris, T. (2016, January 30). Naval Ravikant on Happiness Hacks and the 5 Chimps Theory. Retrieved February 7, 2016, from http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/01/30/naval-ravikant-on-happiness-hacks/