Public schools - and the needs of others

Ken Robinson - "How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything"

 “Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism - they were created in the image of industrialism. 

In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. 

This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. 

Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. 

Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. 

They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. 

I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.” 

“When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.”

“The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you’re resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive.”
 

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”

“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations ... Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”

 

 “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

 

“If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn't have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn't have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.”
― Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative