This is a speech by Sir Ken Robinson and the video drawings are by RSA.org. This video is called changing education paradigms. For those of you who do not know what a paradigm is (I didn't and I had to look it up) it is a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them, especially in an intellectual discipline. The point of this video as I see it is to show us how educations practices are quite out of date and is in great need of a change.
The first point he makes is how we are suffering from an academic system where people are labeled as "academic" or "not academic" and as of late I would like to add, "college material" and "not college material". What is very sad about this is that children really could be quite brilliant in some areas but do not know they are because they are being judged on a "one shoe fits all" academic basis. I know what Sir Ken is saying is completely true. All children are not born equal. It is hard to accept sometimes but it is true. I can trace this back to the seven styles of learning. Their are seven different styles of learning and no one learns in all seven. Children and adults all learn in different ways and are better at some than others. Just for the styles the actual intelligence of a subject is always going to be different. Math come easier to some while reading and writing comes easier to others. It happens. So knowing this, why are children all subjected to standardized testing which only grades what you know according to some subjects? If it is standardized testing then why don't we test ALL of the standards and not just five subjects?
The next point I would like to come across is the ADHD "imaginary" epidemic. I disagree and agree with Sir Ken on different points on this topic. First of all I would like to say that my younger brother has been diagnosed with ADHD and I believe he does have it. My brother was failing every subject in his fifth grade class simply because he could not sit still long enough to learn anything. He was up disrupting the class, obsessively tapping, and talked at such a speed that it was difficult to understand what he was saying. After being diagnosed he was given a medicine called Concerta. His grades went up to straight "A"s over the next two months and his relationships with other children and siblings also improved. I realize this is a super specific case, but I wanted to stress that some children can benefit greatly from a little medication. I would hate to think what would have eventually become of my brothers education had he continued without the medicine. After that being said, I completely agree that many children are being misdiagnosed. Children being hyper because their parents give them candy and soft drinks is NOT an excuse to medicate a child. Just because children are hyper in class does not mean that the child has ADHD or that just because the teacher does not want to deal with a hyper child is a good reason to medicate the child.
The last thing I want to go over on the ADHD topic is does it affect the child's creativity or the real them? The video showed the children who are on concerta looking like zombies but here is what I have to say. The children who actually have ADHD are not going to be zombies but like normal children's level of concentration and focus. Also if you give most ADHD medicines to normal adults or children they have the opposite affect and make them hyper. So I do not believe any child is going to turn into the zombie that was portrayed. I believe that many children are being misdiagnosed due to parents and teachers not wanting to deal with children who are a little bit hyper, but that is what you should expect when you go into education or decide to have children. If you do not have time to deal with children or spend the extra time with them then DON'T have them and DON'T go into education!
The last issue that I would like to address is why we educate by groups and age. The best reason for this I can come up with is the fact that we try to judge how well a student is doing based on how well the other students are doing. Of course, if we are trying to raise standards we should not be judging children on where the others are at but by where we want them to be and the goals that we want them and ourselves as teachers to achieve.
I think Sir Ken has really thought about how our world is now and how it used to be. The only thing left to do is move towards the future that is unknown. We can control our future and I believe he did a wonderful illustration of some of the problems we need to try fix as a whole. After all, he did say we do our best imagining when working together.
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