I just finished watching Ken Robinsons talk on changing education paradigms for about the 5th time.
I still manage to find something new from that talk every time I listen to it. It has some of the most concise and clear explanations for something I've felt for a time.
I've clumsily tried to express the same sentiments in posts such as one on formal vs informal education, and I will continue trying to do so. My hope is to improve my skill towards a level that Sir Ken Robinsons extensive experience has led him.
In high school I was very much an objective materialist. I was mostly interested in physics and IT. And as far as I was concerned, if something couldn't be proven to exist through a model, equation or hypothesis, it didn't really exist.
Somewhere along the line, a desire to have mastery over my mind led to a complete change in my personal paradigms.
A paradigm is a set of assumptions about how something works and the actions that result from it.
For me, the biggest change was how I viewed reality. After gradually transitioning from an intellectual to a meditator, I started to view that which is experienced as truly real. It was then the existence of that which could be explained in abstract terms that became more questionable.
This fundamental shift led to a complete change in my priorities in life, and the path I took. Instead of seeking richness of ideas and material wealth, I started a path of seeking richness of experience.
Paradigm changing moments can be scary because they shift the very ground under us. But they are sometimes necessary. And if done with clarity and intent, we can shift to a better place. Public education is at the brink of one of these moments.
I get a lot from Sir Robinsons talk. It's clear he feels the same, and he has the right amount of experience to be a good judge of this. One point that sticks in my mind is that public education was conceived for a particular purpose. Namely, to educate the masses to drive the industrial based economy forward.
And this kind of education is no longer wholly relevant. When the environment changed from an industrial base to a service base, the skillset needed has changed. Yet we educate our population as if we are a manufacturing based economy. Purely from an economic perspective this makes no sense. Sure, in some parts of the world (like here in Thailand), the economy is based on manufacturing. However even developing economies need to expand into services and innovative industries if they want to grow beyond this.
Our economies have become more diverse, complicated and unpredictable. As Ken says in his talk, we don't know what the economy will do a week from now. And we certainly don't know what it will look like 20 years into the future. So it's impossible to predict exactly what skills children today will need.
As I tried to convey in my above post, informal education concentrates on building learning skills. It trains children in the principles and attitudes they need to educate themselves. In the future. When they need it. We can be pretty certain that people will always need to be able to read and do basic math, but beyond some of the basics, the rest is questionable.
Sadly the talk misses the hardest part, how to change these paradigms and what a future education system would look like.
But the study on divergent thinking is interesting. I think it leaves a clue. Whatever the future looks like, it seems impossible to argue that people will never need critical thinking and divergent thinking skills. Critical thinking enables us to examine existing paradigms for its positive and negative effects, and divergent thinking enables us to create awareness for alternatives. The two go hand in hand in building an individuals healthy mind. And a society of healthy minds is a healthy society.
Whatever the future of education, I firmly believe that it needs to embrace these two skills to take a step in the right direction.
