TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a conference and series of talks which brings together some of the world's best speakers and innovative ideas. It will be featured on CNN every Tuesday.
Wow! SO the talk talk was really profound. I ended up taking notes because he said so many things that really stuck with me and I wanted to share. However I just decided to copy and paste part of the article that summed up the talk (if you don't want to watch the video).
What is the argument? In a nutshell, it's that we're all born with immense natural talents but our institutions, especially education, tend to stifle many of them and as a result we are fomenting a human and an economic disaster.
In education, this vast waste of talent involves a combination of factors. They include a narrow emphasis on certain sorts of academic work; the exile of arts, humanities and physical education programs from schools; arid approaches to teaching math and sciences; an obsessive culture of standardized testing and tight financial pressures to teach to the tests.
The result is a disastrous waste of talent among students and their teachers. To sense the scale of this disaster, you only have to look at the alarming rates of turnover among faculty and the levels of drop out, disaffection, stress and prescription drug use among students. Even for students who stay the course and do well in education, the rules of success have changed irrevocably. Just look at the plummeting value of college degrees.
Reforming these systems is not enough. The truth is that we are caught up in a cultural and economic revolution. This revolution is that is global in scale and unpredictable in nature. To meet it, we need a revolution in the culture of education.
This new culture has to emerge from a richer sense of human ability. To shape it, I believe we have to leave behind the manufacturing principles of industrialism and embrace the organic principles of ecology.
Education is about developing human beings, and human development is not mechanical or linear. It is organic and dynamic.
Like all living forms, we flourish in certain conditions and shrivel in others. Great teachers, great parents and great leaders understand those conditions intuitively; poor ones don't. The answer is not to standardize education, but to personalize and customize it to the needs of each child and community. There is no alternative. There never was.
- Sir Ken Robinson
I found this talk applicable and profound in so many ways. Whew! Well first, since I am in professional school I have found myself leaving behind most things that I "enjoy" in order to learn, retain, and study information for my classes. Currently it is week 11...and I feel like I am coming up against a wall. Not necessarily a crossroads, but I feel like I am struggling in my classes and also struggling with my current lifestyle. I know that most people say you need to sacrifice your time, money and most things now so it can pay off later, but is that how people should live life? Is that how I should live life? What if my time on earth was counting down and I didn't know it...will I want to say the last few things that I did was study for 7 hours for a neuroanatomy exam? Or memorize the arteries/veins in the heart? Or learn where an image is formed when object is placed a certain distance from a mirror? No... I would want to have walked outside and looked at the trees as they turn different shades...or read a really good book..or spent time with my loved ones.
Well such is life...I really need to get back to studying, but before I go..I want to share a random narrative/dream. So first semester my freshman year at Emory...I decided to take a Modern Dance class. I am not sure what attracted me to it, but I really fell in love with Modern. There was so much that was really freeing about it. I planned on being a dance major/minor, but when it came down to it, I never was...why? Mostly because I could barely handle my first major and try and get into professional school...so I pretty much put something that I really loved and valued to the side. I think that is what the "speaker" was getting at...how we give up so much in order to fit into "mainstream" society.
Often people say follow your passion, but I'm not sure if people really mean it..or is it just a phrase that sounds good? Until Next Time...
