I’ve been frustrated with our Christian educational system since I was in elementary school. Now, as an adult, I understand it a little better and know why my desire to experiment and try new things was usually met with, “Tim, sit down and stay still! Pay attention to the teacher!” In this video, Ken Robinson addresses the problem with the educational system. Where was this when I was a kid? How can we revamp our church’s approach to Christian education to reflect what he’s saying?

(ht Lelia Thomas via Ben Gray)

My Notes:
Kids starting school this year will retire in 2065, but we have no idea what the world will look like in only 5 years.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time kids are adults, most kids have lost that capacity. In our educational system, mistakes are the worse things you can make. We’re educating kids out of their creativity. We don’t grow in to creativity, we get educated out of it.

There isn’t a school on earth that teaches dance to kids the same way we teach math.

The whole purpose of education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Professors look at their bodies as a form of transportation for their heads.

Education is based on two things:
1. The most useful subjects for work are at the top.
2. Academic ability dominates the system because our universities have set it up that way.
The consequence is that many creative brilliant people think they’re not.

We’re experiencing academic deflation. College grads go home and play video games now because a minimum of a Masters is now required for a job that a Bachelors degree used to meet.

We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
1. It’s diverse.
2. It’s dynamic.
3. It’s distinct.

Some people have to move to think, not sit still in a sterile room.

Our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of human capacity. Our education system is strict and for the future, it won’t service.

We need to celebrate the gift of human imagination and use it wisely. Our task is to educate their whole being even though we may not see their future.

Posted on May 14, 2007