Revolution.

An interview with Sir Ken Robinson on revolution ...

From the introduction ...
School is broken. Like health systems perpetually “in crisis”, it is a reliable truth of the Western world that our education systems will always fall short. Despite a century and more of Steiners and Montessoris and Unschoolers scratching at the edges for new ways and better ways, we in the mainstream remain stuck not more than a few feet from the Three Rs. As it was true in Victorian times, as it was true in the 1950s, so it is true now—they fuck you up, your English teacher and your Maths teacher. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, and add some extra, just for you. Sir Ken Robinson has never been much of a one for accepting the status quo, either of the system or of the self. There can be no more popular evangelist for the place of creativity in education than he.

From the interview ...
You can have revolutionary movements which are focussed rather than comprehensive, and when I talk about a revolution in education, I’m not suggesting that we shut all schools down and get rid of all publishing companies and abolish every form of testing, because some of those things have, and continue to have, an important place. But it’s about readjusting the relationships between all of them, and certainly attacking some of the central tenets of the system, which are premised on an industrial model of education. We need more of an agricultural model of education, one that recognises that we are dealing with people who are organic and that we should be applying principles of ecology into schools, and that we should be recognising the job of education is to create a climate in which people learn enthusiastically, and with confidence, and that the starting point for great education is to engage people’s imaginations, their talents and their passions. To do that, we need to start from the other end. We don’t go to the far end of standardised testing and say, ‘Well, the problem is that we need better tests.’ We have to go to where the action actually happens; we need better classrooms, we need better teachers, we need conditions under which teachers can be creative, under which they can organise the culture of their own classrooms and their own schools in a way that takes account of people who are actually there and present in it. That’s the kind of revolution I’m interested in.

Read the rest at Dumbo Feather.