Schools kill creativity
Look! Another TED talk that agrees with me exactly!
It's always weird, when you have very strong prevailing ideologies, to find someone that thinks or writes or speaks in exactly the same way.
In this talk, he probably spends too much time being funny (but he is funny), but by the end he builds a fantastic case; a case that I think almost every sensible being will agree with.
My earliest rant on education focused heavily on empowering teachers -- something that I later refined into depoliticizing of education and school specialization. Ken Robinson's anecdote about the ballet dancer at the end of the speech is perfect, to say the least.
I had never considered the 'education is a 19th century construct for the sole consumption by the burgeoning industrial sector' point of view though. Now I can see that it's not so much that education has been politicized -- more that our societal values (or at least those extolled by politicians?) need to be reworked.
For further reading (or watching), check out Charles Leadbeater's recent talk on 'education innovation': http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_leadbeater_on_education.html. Basically, our current model of teaching with teachers doesn't scale to a world with billions of Indians, Chinese, Brazilians, Nigerians -- other methods of teaching are required!
