Ever
since the birth of this wonderful nation, a presiding issue has been education.
Education is one of the most important aspects of our thriving society, but the
system needs to be updated and refined. How can we maximize results and prepare
our future generation for the larger world they are entering. With
globalization and faster transportation, people from all over the world are
interacting more with each other then ever before. We as a nation are behind in
our educational values from many other nations and we need to catch up. Some
professionals and organizations have already started thinking about and
analyzing this issue.
A
global conference called TED is held at various locations around the world. TED is a nonprofit devoted to ideas
worth spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together
people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. The speakers at
these conferences are experts in their fields and bring excellent ideas to the
table. On man at the 2006 Monterey, California convention has been studying
educational practices almost all his life. Sir Ken Robinson makes his case
focusing on the arts. In his talk, he explains that not every student learns
the same or enjoys the same subjects. He speaks mainly of the arts and how
children need
them in addition to the core subjects to develop the mind. “Creativity today is
just as important as literacy” (Sir Ken Robinson). Creativity is a necessity to
child development. If children don’t know the answer to something they will
still have a go at it and will probably come up with something original if they
are wrong. It is better to come up with something rather then nothing at all
(Sir Ken Robinson).
What solution does Sir Ken Robinson
suggest? He claims to rethink intelligence and the current fundamental principles on
which were educating our children by adding more emphasis in the arts for an
uncertain future. The educational system America has now was created to meet
the needs of industrialism, which was 100 years ago (Sir Ken Robinson). The
world has changed now and people who couldn’t be artists or musicians in the
industrial era have more opportunity for that type of career today.
Another change
in society Sir Robinson mentions is the issue of academic inflation. Jobs that
used to require a BA now require an MA or PHD. “To many kids these days are
coming home after getting a degree and carry on playing video games because
they can’t get a job” (Sir Ken Robinson). He talks of how the minds of children
today are strip mined for a certain commodity rather then searching for other
resources the particular child’s mind might have. Starting with kindergarten,
the system prepares and aims children for university acceptance. Knowing this
the question “should every child go to a university?” pops up.
A study
conducted by Earl Shorris would suggest that every person has the ability to go
to college. His study consisted of teaching the humanities on hand picked extremely poor individuals in the Bronx. He stated that
“The humanities are a foundation for getting along in the world, for thinking,
for learning to reflect on the world instead of just reacting to whatever force
is turned against you” (Shorris, Earl). He paid for everything including subway
and food fare as long as they came to class and worked harder then they ever
have before. All of the teachers were accomplished in their fields of
philosophy, poetry, art history, logic, rhetoric, and American history. All of
these subjects I think Sir Ken Robinson would agree are important to education
as a whole and the development of the mind. When kids don’t receive these
humanities as children, they have a lot of catching up to do when they get to
be adults. He finished the course with tremendous results. “A year after
graduation ten of the first sixteen were attending 4 year colleges or nursing
school; four of them had received full scholarships to Bards College. One of
the students was fired from her job for trying to start a union” (Shorris,
Earl). Earl Shorris proved his idea of the humanities and would like to
implement them on a larger scale once he receives the funding.
Another woman
did the same type of study, but with students that are already in school. Jean
Anyon author of Social Class and the
Hidden Curriculum of Work selected schools in areas with distinct
demographics in the economy levels of the families. She separated the schools
into 4 classes: working class, middle-class, affluent professional, and
executive elite. She found major differences in the styles of teaching from
demographic to demographic. The school that had the most common traits of Sir
Ken Robinson and Earl Shorris’s ideal school system would be the executive elite schools. In their system they focus on Shorris’s
humanities and leadership. The students basically have free reign over the
classroom and the teacher is there to keep order. The students are pushed to
answer questions on their own through reasoning. The lower working class
schools are very different. The working class schools focus more on the ability
of the student to follow steps and directions. It is repeat, start over, and
then repeat again when it comes to math, history, english, pretty much every
subject. She found it
shocking how different the schools educational systems were “Not so much in
resources as in teaching methods and philosophies of education” (Anyon, Jean).
When you look at these teaching styles you can definitely see a correlation to
which type of jobs the students go into.
Sir Ken
Robinson says we should focus on creativity and the arts. Earl Shorris says we
should focus on the humanities. Jean Anyon researches the actual act of
education in children and how the educational system works. Sir Ken Robinson,
Earl Shorris and Jean Anyon have the same ideas of education but came to their
conclutions in different ways. Their focus is on problem solving and creativity
for the future generation. People in today’s world have to be adaptive to the
rapidly changing world. Globalization is changing the way we think and the way
we have to learn.
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