Unless you walk out into the unknown, the odds of making a profound difference are pretty low.
– Tom Peters
One of the outside interests of this agency is learning creativity. We want to start this article with a very creative 3-minute video done by a young student. His subject? The need for change in our education system.
We are ones that believe that not enough is being done to increase the learning of creativity in our schools. So, therefore, we like to read and engage in discussions on ideas on learning reform and creativity in our schools.
Change and learning creativity.
Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don’t need banks. They got no money in the banks.
Who created that business model? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because the banks didn’t care. It wasn’t about the customers. It was about banks. They created something that worked for them. How could you go to the bank when you were at work?
It didn’t matter. And they don’t care whether or not a customer was upset he couldn’t go to the bank. Go find another bank. Yes and they all operate the same way, eh?
Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea. Maybe they should keep the bank open when people come home from work. They might like that. What about a Saturday? What about introducing new technology?
And so technology can contribute to change. Things can change. Yet not in education. Not even with the introduction of technology. Why?
Poor kids lose ground in the summertime. The system decides you can’t run schools in the summer. Why?
You know, I always wonder, who makes up these rules? Did we ever do it? Well, it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools that were open all year. They were open all year because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day. They didn’t have any place for their kids to go. It was a perfect place to have year-round schools. So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods.
So why don’t we?
Educators and those who want to contribute, there’s some stuff we can do. And we’ve got to do better. We have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide support to young people. We have got to try new things much more often. We’ve got to be creative and we have to let the students be creative to learn creativity. We’ve got to give them all of these opportunities.
Here is another short 2-minute video we would like to share. It is about the next generation learning in our education system. Also done by children. Even younger.
Kids bring to the curriculum vast differences– differences in gender, maturity, personality, interests, hopes, dreams, abilities, life experiences, situation, family, peers, language, ethnicity, social class, culture, probable and possible futures, and certain indefinable qualities, all combined in dynamic, continuously evolving ways so complex they lie beyond ordinary understanding.
Today’s reformers seem unable or unwilling to grasp the instructional implications of those differences and that complexity. They treat kids as a given, undifferentiated except by grade level, with the core curriculum the lone operative variable.
It’s dumping creativity on the street.
So here is the thing. Our students recognize the problem. Why can’t education leaders?
Remember … we can truly understand facts about learning only in contrast to other facts.
