Ken Robinson: Our Current Education System

I watched to a blog video on TED.com by Ken Robinson about education paradigms and he answered questions I personally had about our Education system in the United States. Ken Robinson discussed how our education system is essentially keeping our children’s education potential to a minimum.  The main points I took from the video were the current education system is outdated, and the topic of “divergent thinking”.

Ken points out how the current education system is failing our children and is based on separating each child and prejudging their educational capacity. For this reason the smart are getting smarter, while the others are staying at the same level or falling behind. A study was done asking kindergartners how many uses for a paper clip they could think of.  98% gave 200 or more uses putting them at genius intellectual level. The study continued retesting every 5 years until they were 15, and every 5 years the number scoring 200 decreased. Ken says this digression is because age 15 most of us have some type of formal education, which teaches there is one answer and one answer only.  Which brings me to my next point of “divergent thinking”.

“Divergent thinking is not the same thing as creative thinking” Ken states. Divergent thinking is seeing many answers to a solution and many different solutions that may work. Ken discusses how divergent thinking is good and many children think this way but are essential told not to think this way.  Instead they are told again there is one answer and one answer only. Divergent thinking is necessary to keep up with world and economy today, but because children are being program to only think of one answer they are not using their creative like they should be.

Being a director of an education program this subject matter is very important to me, and how Ken broke down the current education system made sense to me because I can relate to what he was saying.  I have students that go to Creative Arts Schools and students that attend traditional schools, and those at the creative arts schools tend to use more divergent thinking when it comes to problem solving. I am not an expert nor have I done a study, but after watching the video a lot of the different ways my students problem solve made more sense to me. Encouraging “divergent thinking” is a positive move in changing and potentially bettering our current education system.

Watch the full video at

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms.html