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Sir Ken Robinson: Building a Culture of Innovation

 

Sir Ken Robinson: Building a Culture of Innovation from AERO - Education Revolution on Vimeo.

Here are some highlights:

  • If you understand No Child Left Behind then you understand irony.
  • If we are to have a learning revolution, we need to think differently about ourselves and our children and then we have to act differently.
  • Being good at something you don't really care for is often fruitless. 
  • If you love something you are good at, you never work again.
  • Education has got to cherish the diversity of individual talent but our current focus on uniformity is stifling teachers and students.
  • Creativity is the natural mode of humanity.
  • Imagination is the ability to bring to mind things that aren't present.
  • It's only when we suppress empathy that we are capable of doing things to each other that are literally unimaginable.
  • Creativity is putting your imagination to work. Creativity is applied imagination.
  • We can't afford schools that suppress creativity and diversity.
  • In place of creativity, in most schools we have a culture of compliance.
  • Supply and demand thinking can't be done successfully in schools.
  • Life is not linear, it's organic. Schools are nothing if not linear. See the problem?
  • No one gets their resume with their birth certificate.
  • Most people's resumes are a work of fiction.
  • We openly and actively lie to ourselves and others when we try and hide the chaos we are actually living.
  • Everyone's life is unique because of the choices we make, the circumstances we've responded to, and the paths that we've taken.
  • We are educating children to lose control of their own biographies.
  • We need make school more personalized and customized and less impersonal and uniform.
  • Most curricula is desperately narrow and rigid.
  • Great teachers know that their job is not to teach disciplines or subjects but students.
  • Pedagogy gets lost in a standardized curriculum where the art of teaching is replaced by the dead language of delivery.

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Joe Bower

Joe Bower teaches in Alberta, Canada.