Ken Robinson on Education

I'm terribly concerned that I might be interested in education after all. This is disturbing for me, an avowed professional musician who teaches grade school "just to pay the bills." I'm afraid that if I start participating in the conversation, I'll have compromised my position aloof. If I'm particularly careless I might accidentally stay late or start having conversations with the other faculty members. This has all been prompted by watching this video, a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson on education at a TED conference several years ago. I appreciate Mr. Robinson on several levels. Trivially, he has a charming accent. He speaks with a cadence at the end of his statements that you never hear in American English; it's very engaging. He is also to be highly commended for his use of language, especially on his chosen topic. When was the last time you heard or read someone on the subject of education and you didn't start counting cliches? Contrast Mr. Robinson's thoughts with this recent address by President Obama. The White House address is full of meaningless teacher-babble like "modernizing our schools," "teaching to the test," "out-educate us today, out-compete us tomorrow." Mr. Robinson, on the other hand, doesn't employ a single word without an evocative meaning and value.

Enough, however, about style; the substance of what he says is the really critical part, and here we find ourselves in agreement on several points. First, the world is changing around us, and the instrument of education is our only real hope to keep that change somewhat under control. The technical advances of the past 150 years (I begin with the telegraph) have radically changed the way in which people live in the world. We are presently hurling headlong toward whatever changes the next year of technical advances may bring, without any notion of what those changes will be, and without any realistic opportunity, should we desire it, of putting brakes on the progress. In fact, the world seems only to be changing faster. These changes do not only touch our use of machines. Our political and religious discourse have been funneled through new media, and accordingly reshaped. Sex, after birth control, is changed. Our ideas of privacy and identity are being reshaped. We are deluged with information, images, and ideas. How will anyone learn to make sense of it unless through education? Mr. Robinson argues that education only adds to these problems by "educating children out of their creative capacity."

Mr. Robinson urges us to leave off the practice of stigmatizing "wrong" responses. It is in every child's willingness to be wrong, he says, wherein lies their capacity to be creative; a capacity that we cure them of. He says this comes from an obsession with only one organ of the child's body, and one side of it; a particular set of correct answers to be known and stored in the brain.

Here I would make my contribution to the great conversation Mr. Robinson has started: There is little chance for art if we aren't willing to set boundaries, and little chance for preserving our Western history if we aren't willing to observe what CSL calls the Tao. As regards creativity, it must be observed that most of the great triumphs of the arts have come from strict requirements about form. There are, of course, in most great works (and artists) alterations or progressions of form, but still a fundamental mastery of loyalty to a pre-determined pattern. Mozart was brilliantly creative, but Leopold corrected his mistakes. When Mozart learned composition, he wasn't given a blank sheet of manuscript paper and told to be original; he was given a cantus firmus and told to harmonize it without writing parallel 5ths or crossing voices. John Cage has thrown away the cantus firmus and the rules of counterpoint to liberate his "creativity" and is left still only with the blank paper. The same is true of dance and the visual arts. A child's creative capacity in dance may be a splendid thing, but at some point she must learn the difference between a foxtrot and a gavotte if she wishes to create anything really original; and that means that she can't do the gavotte steps during the foxtrot, or vice-versa.

The parallel truth to the importance of forms in the arts is the truth of form in education. Mr. Robinson advocates that the arts be given equal status with literacy and math. (On an aside, it grieves me to think that "literacy" has somehow become something other than one of the arts...shouldn't it be called the art of letters?) This is a very democratic idea, but I don't think it's quite right, and Mr. Robinson's own example illustrates my point. He has a laugh at college professors for living only in their heads, and leaving their bodies off as some sort of necessary casement for their brain. This is, of course, both humorous and true. But it is also true that the head is the head. If there must be a head (in the authoritative sense), the head ought to be the head of the body. This doesn't mean that there's only a head, or that all the other parts must be headlike, but a head is important in a pre-eminent way, and in a way that fingers or belly buttons are not. Now, what are the things that a child ought to learn in school in order to be a healthy human being in the Western world? If the question were being asked of a child in some African tribe, where there were no radios or books, but a complex system of drumming that was used to communicate, entertain, organize, and inspire, we would say that the child must learn drumming. Even if he wouldn't be a great drummer himself, it would be absolutely vital that he understood what the drums meant; otherwise, how could he participate in his own society? The great storehouses of Western society is our literature. (Using the term in the broadest sense...one might almost say, our literacy). We have other repositories as well; we have classical music, the visual artistic tradition, the ability for rational thinking, and any number of contributing cultural traditions, but it is in light of this fact that the literary arts really do merit their primacy in our education. Our use of mathematics is closely tied to our value for rational thinking (what some call "abstracting") but mathematics has, in my opinion, overstepped its bounds in importance.

My words are not intended to be final words, especially in my own thinking. This talk is a continuing talk, and one that may not have fixed answers at the end. Perhaps in five years we shall have to scrap all the conclusions anyway. But in this grand talk, let's hope for more people who talk like Ken Robinson.