Thanks for your post. I’ve been working all day trying to formulate a response.

You are correct. The Sir Ken Robinson TEDTalk is terrific. The variety of the TED presenters, famous and obscure, speak to the limitless range of human potential.

I agree with the need for many more richer deeper varied arts experiences being made available for every kid in the world. My music education in NJ enriched my life in innumerable ways.
Studying music (up to three periods per day) with professional musicians (expert mentors) in the Wayne public schools laid the foundation for both my Ph.D. in Science and Math Education and being the new media producer for a Grammy Award-winning project this year. Learning to program in the 7th grade, where it was required for every student, helped me develop the habits of mind that serve me everyday.

My social activism and vocation are built upon early success in saving school music from the budget ax at the age of 18. Devaluing the arts is not new or the exclusive fault of NCLB. The nation began losing its soul and sense or priorities decades ago.

Although school was often a mind-numbing, soul-killing experience I learned to play an instrument, love the arts, program computers and compose music in the public schools.

All of these first-hand experiences provide the context in which I can evaluate the frivolous claims of Daniel Pink. I have written a more extensive review of A Whole New Mind on my blog, Stager-to-Go.

Pink’s entire thesis falls apart in the book’s opening paragraph.

“The last few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind – computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers. These people – artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

Such caricatures and simplistic dichotomies not only devalue the “minds” of millions of people, but do great violence to education. Please consider the review I’ve posted. I sincerely welcome the dialogue.

All the very best,

Gary

An administrator (from a previous position)dropped by our room while we were singing letter sound songs and told me to “stop playing and to start teaching”. I couldn’t believe my ears! With the use of these CD’s, not only was I teaching my students phonemic awareness skills, patterns, and rhythms, but integrating gross motor skills as well.

Since I tend to be strong-willed, I continued to sing, dance, and do art on a regular basis. We just made sure it was when the principal wasn’t visiting our hall.

I also agree with David Robb; our next president needs to shift the educational focus away from testing and include artisitic creativity.

If I might offer an additional thought, the change we are looking to create in our schools cannot be mandated system wide. Having worked nationally on comprehensive school reform projects, district/school wide initiatives fail to foster the buy in needed for success. Schools that articulate a mission driven, strategic direction must be willing to “organically” engage each member of the community, and more importantly the faculty with choosing an area that speaks to them. A 9th grader who experiences five periods with five different teachers, some of whom are struggling with a technology mandate will not have as rich an experience as the 9th grader whose day is made up of classes where one teacher weaves technology into a lesson, another multicultural themes, and yet another service learning opportunities.

The approach needs to be left to the individual strengths and passions of our teachers, however, we must agree that each one of us will in turn, select an area where we might innovate, create or inspire a new way of thinking. The direction or mission driven goals of the school need to be articulated and understood by all, and yet, the actual journey toward reaching those goals must be more organic.

As an administrator, asking a math teacher to incorporate multicultural themes in her class may be a stretch, so why not encourage her to go with her strengths and support her to make more use of technology with her Algebra class. The very nature of creativity is the willingness to try something new, scrap an old idea and start fresh. I contend that in order for schools to create environments where they foster and nurture creativity in their students, they MUST be willing to establish environments that make it part of the culture for the adults as well.

I am not proposing that we blow sunshine all the time, but that we truly engage students in learning environments that promote interest, engagement and joy. So this year in my classroom we will not be choosing boring or sucking joy from the students. It’s always good to have a goal, right?

A couple points he made that I scribbled down to consider later…

“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.”

“There are things you can do to become more creative, just like enhancing other skills.”

“We need radical education reform.”

‘Our job in education is to prepare youth for a world we cannot comprehend.’ (something like that- he was talking quickly)

“What really makes the biggest difference in education is brilliant teaching…creative curriculum and delivery.”

“Education is a social system.” (driven by emotion)

‘Academic Intelligence tends to be about increasing math, reason, logic, language vs. the whole mind: emotional, kinesthetic, artistic.’

“Everybody thinks differently, yet we tend to teach everybody the same.”

He also spoke briefly on the concept of Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants (another person’s label) and how computer power was increasing tremendously and not slowing down, to the point where computers may be able to actually learn by rewriting their own operating code within 10 years.

http://cpultzlps.tumblr.com/

It is officially a concensus and I think we should annoint Sir Ken our new Secretary of Education in America.

For the record – I was lucky enough to hear Sir Ken in person a few years ago (not at TED sadly) and it touched me more deeply than any speaker I have ever heard. It was life changing for me in some ways. Thanks for continuing to bring him up.

- Chris

Will, I’m in Korea, but it’s an American curriculum international school. And while we’re not reducing creative electives like the schools in the study you cite, the American stifle is affecting us in other ways.

Case in point: we’re an AP school (despite a movement by teachers to change us to IB instead). I’m taking a UCLA AP Lit teachers’ workshop right now. One of the assignments was to write a lesson plan for teaching poetry.

Because my own high school experience was so “future professor”-oriented in its pedagogy, forcing analytical essay after analytical essay on students, and because I hated that about high school (and thus hated poetry until I had enough time to ‘detox’ after high school and discover literature outside of school), I wrote a two-session lesson plan having students draw two poems, discuss their discoveries from that in filmed videoconferences, and mash those discussions into iMovies.

My AP workshop teacher gave me a B+ because I didn’t assign a “verbally rigorous literary analysis paper” in the unit. (Seeing as how she also disabled all multimedia functions in the class Blackboard, restricting us to text-only for this 5-week virtual class, I wasn’t surprised. But I was shocked, still.)

I posted a link to Mike Tyson’s Mabry Middle School student filmmaking presentation at NECC as a roundabout way of arguing that students can learn more through making films than writing an old paper.

Keep up the good fight.