Rethinking Education - Ken Robinson

Ken's ideas are spot on; however, I was stuck wrestling with one point - the force of economy's impact on education. When he mentioned this my mind raced from property tax caps to textbook company influences, from ISTEP test results to vouchers for kids to go to a school with a higher grade, from funding for Project Lead to Way to cash per pupil for academic honors diplomas, from contract negotiations to SLO data that keeps a teacher from earning that bonus, from state standards made by the community to the influence of a billionaire on the common core. Everywhere one turns there seems to be many other individuals controlling the working of a local school corporation than the local community. http://wishtv.com/2014/08/28/us-department-of-education-grants-indiana-no-child-left-behind-waiver/

As Ken Robinson mentioned our schools are run like factories. Still today the same business ideas (incentives for a profitable quarter, or a bonus for meeting quota) continue to permeate the thought processes of leaders. How would one measure a student's ability to appreciate aesthetic as Sir Robinson asks us too? We usually measure what is easy to measure and not what is valuable. So, I don't see things changing unless those who need it most create the change.

In every great movement those whipper-snappers of youth have played a vital role in demanding it, creating it, and sustaining change. It happened in New York in 1899 ; it happened in Greensboro, N.C. in 1960. It is happening now in Colorado and in China on much different scales. But it is still happening. So while we adults pressed under the pressure of standards, legislation, funding and the like, squirm because we are uncomfortable following the rules of old knowing we should be doing something vastly different, it is going to take a youth movement to get this paradigm shift to the bank.

Bottom line for me, as I again listen to Sir Robinson, is that I continue to wrestle with the extensive impact that money plays on everything we do.