Reflection on video of Sir Ken Robinson
Sir Ken Robinson asks the question “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” As I viewed the video posted by Dr. Stordy on our course blog and the video posted by a classmate (Jonathan) on his blog I could see clearly that some of the points Sir Robinson made are true in my school.
Sir Robinson presents the ideas that children have a large capacity for innovations and that they will take a chance. Children start off not being afraid of being wrong but then as they grow older and approach adulthood this changes and by adulthood they are afraid to be wrong. Sir Robinson wonders if we are educating our children out of creativity and I wonder this as well.
Sir Robinson’s description of the hierarchy of education that was put in place because of industrialism and because we were educating children for what we thought would be useful in their future ‘jobs’ is chillingly the same as our education of today. Even though our world as gone through many changes, and is changing daily with regards to social changes, cultural changes, technological changes etc. our education system has not changed a whole lot. We still call our math, science, language arts and social studies core subjects, while the arts (music, drama, art….) are just considered electives or secondary subjects. We are living in a country, a world, where health problems due to obesity is growing rapidly and yet our education system is cutting back on the number of physical education classes in our schedule.
Just like this hierarchy of education has been around for decades so has the school year from September to June. When children return to school in September (especially children who struggle), we have to spend several weeks reviewing last year’s concepts because they have had such a long break in schooling. Why are we still taking a summer break? Children used to take the summer months to help their parents on the farms or with the fishing. Across Canada today there are few families who need this assistance. So why have we not begun a semester system?
One part of the videos that struck home to me, especially since our government is implementing an inclusion model, was the part where children are grouped according to their age not ability, or interests or any other grouping, just age. As Sir Ken stipulates, “age is not the only thing that children have in common.” A child that is born by 11: 59 pm, December 31st, is considered ready for Kindergarten whereas a child born 12:00 am, January 1st is not ready until the next school year. This has never made any sense to me. We have been implementing “inclusion” at our school for the last five years; however this year we are ‘officially’ piloting the inclusion model. I’m hoping that some direction and clarity will be brought to light on what exactly inclusion means for our children because I’m afraid that what we have been doing in the name of inclusion is really ‘excluding’ our children. Just because a child is sitting inside the four walls of a ‘regular’ classroom does not mean they are feeling included. If I were sitting in one of my son’s engineering classes, where I could not understand anything that was being taught, I surely wouldn’t feel included would I?
I really hope that we can get to the point where we are putting the interests and the needs of the child first. Where we can allow our children to be creative and have “original ideas that have value” (Sir Ken Robinson, video).
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