The true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.— William Deresiewicz, literary critic
Victorian schools were designed to meet the particular needs of the Victorian era. They were created to turn out “obedient specialists”: adults who could work in factories, assembling components, or as domestic servants, not people who needed to think for themselves.
— Sean McDougall, educational thinker and designer
Students who are not exposed to arts and music in school score lower on standardized tests and have worse communication skills than those who do.
A central challenge for the education system is to find ways of embedding learning in a range of meaningful contexts where students can use their knowledge and skills creatively to make an impact on the world around them.
— Kimberly Seltzer, author and Tom Bentley, author and policy analyst
86% of voters believe that encouraging children to be creative and develop their imagination is necessary to maintain our competitive edge and ensure that we do not fall behind other countries.
Education must shift from instruction to discovery — to probing and exploration …
— Marshall McLuhan, educator and communications theorist
Sources (top to bottom): The American Scholar, “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education”; Futurelab, “The School of the Future”; Office of the Governor of the State of California, “Record Investment in Music, Arts & PE”; Kimberly Seltzer and Tom Bentley, The Creative Age: Knowledge and Skills for the New Economy; The Imagine Nation and Lake Research Partners, The Imagine Nation Poll; Marshall McLuhan, The Medium Is the Massage
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.
— Albert Einstein, theoretical physicist
By 2014, according to our estimates, the U.S. will add another 10 million creative sector jobs to the nation’s economy. The same pattern holds for virtually all of the advanced nations, where the creative class makes up 35% to 45% of the workforce, depending on the country.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.
— Plutarch, Greek historian and biographer
If you create a system where initiative and creativity is valued and rewarded, then you’ll get change from the bottom up.
— Paul Pastorek, superintendent
In the U.S., the nonprofit arts and culture industry generates $166.2 billion in economic activity every year — $63.1 billion in spending by organizations and an additional $103.1 billion in event-related spending by their audiences.
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings in science.
— Carl Sagan, astronomer and author
Sources (top to bottom): World of Quotes, “Imagination”; Richard Florida, Who’s Your City?; Creating Minds, “Creative quotes and quotations: On the Mind”; The New York Times Magazine, “A Teachable Moment”; Americans for the Arts, Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audiences; Wisdom Quotes, “Carl Sagan”
SIR KEN ROBINSON
THE CREATIVITY CHALLENGE
Sir Ken Robinson is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation, and human resources. Now based in Los Angeles, he has worked with national governments in Europe and Asia, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, not-for-profit corporations, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. He is the author of several influential papers and books, including his 1998 report for the U.K. government, All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture, and Education, and his latest book, The Element: A New View of Human Capacity. He argues that to meet the challenges ahead, we must redesign schools to nurture the creativity capacity in all of us.
You’ve pointed out that schools, as we know them, were designed at a particular time for a particular purpose. Can you talk about that? Well, the whole process of public education came about primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the current system doesn’t just represent the interests of the industrial model, it embodies them. To begin with, there’s a very strong sense of conformity. Second, the pedagogical model is based on the idea of transmission. Teachers teach and students learn. That’s buttressed by the idea that the efficient way to do this is to educate kids by age — as though the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. And the third big feature is the hierarchy of subjects: You have science and math at the top, and languages, then the arts further down.
The school buildings represent all of that. You have separate facilities for different subjects. The classroom arrangements are people sitting facing the front where someone’s speaking to them. And there are large examination rooms. It’s the factory model.
You’ve been a professor, an author, a consultant, but you’ve said you were first struck by this as a teenager. What were you going through then? Much as I liked aspects of school, there were things I’d really have liked to do that I didn’t get an opportunity to do. I never did music at school — it wasn’t available for kids on my track. I wanted to do art but I couldn’t because it clashed with other subjects people thought were more important.
It was only when I was 16 that we managed to talk one of our teachers into putting some plays on. And that, to me, opened up a whole other door, a process of working with people differently from conventional academic work.
So I went off and did an English and theater degree, and trained as a teacher. The practice of the arts was thought to have lower status than academic work. And I never understood why that was, because it seemed to me that doing art is as complicated as doing art history; writing novels is a good bit more difficult than writing about them.
So I got very interested in promoting drama in schools, and then it struck me that people who were promoting drama in schools were doing it in exactly the same way as people who were pushing for art and music in schools, but they never talked to one another about it. So I ended up running a big project in the U.K. called “The Arts in Schools.” Lately, I’ve been looking at more creative approaches to science, and technology, and the humanities, and so on.
How would you respond to people who say to a story like yours, “You clearly turned out all right, despite the fact that you weren’t allowed to study the arts initially. So why do we have to change education?” I’m always very hesitant when people say, “Well, it didn’t do me any harm.” I wish I could feel that confident. Of course it’s true that some people get through. But what you can’t take stock of are the countless people who didn’t. In California, the state government last year spent $3.5 billion on the state university system. In the same year, it spent nearly $9 billion on the state prison system. I cannot believe that more potential criminals are born every year in California than potential college graduates. So you can point to great musicians, and great writers — they made it, yes. But an awful lot of them made it in spite of the system, not because of it. If we were to think of the system differently, how many more would flower and flourish? How much better would that make all of our circumstances, rather than having so many people being at odds with one another in fundamental ways, because they’re at odds with themselves?
If we’re looking for new pedagogical practices, we have to have facilities that will enable those to happen.
You’re calling for a redefinition of “back to basics,” for thinking of creativity as one of the basics. The issue here is that a lot of people talk about getting back to basics, but they’re basing this argument on the old economy. The future economies, and the present economy, absolutely depend on innovation and creativity. When I talk about getting back to basics I mean let’s decide what we need to do next. To me, number one is that the hierarchy has to go. There has to be equal weight given to the arts, the sciences, humanities, technology, and physical education. And therefore the facilities in which people are learning have to give equal provision to these activities. If it appears that some activities are more cherished because the facilities are grander, it sends a very powerful message to people about what matters. The physical environment of the building is critically important in terms of the curriculum.
The second thing is that real innovation and creativity come at the intersections of disciplines — the way they merge and blend. So you’d also want school buildings that allowed a permeability of practices, that allowed people across disciplines to work collaboratively. And the third thing, for me, is that, if we’re looking for new pedagogical practices, we have to have facilities that will enable those to happen. So you want flexible spaces where people can group and re-group, where you’re not stuck in one configuration with teachers at the front. The physical environment of the building is very important, but what really makes an institution is the habits of mind that become taken for granted in the community that occupies the institution. An institution is the people and their ways of thinking. If you really want to shift a culture, it’s two things: its habits and its habitats — the habits of mind, and the physical environment in which people operate.
AN EXPERT ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT DELIVERS EVIDENCE THAT STRONG MINDS ARE BUILT WITH ONGOING CREATIVE CHALLENGES AND MENTORING
What does it mean for the brain to go through a growth cycle? Consider the brain’s outer layers, known as the cortex. The cortex supports reasoning and thinking skills through its massive network of connections with the rest of the brain. Whenever neurons fire, a small amount of electrical energy is released. The amount of electrical activity in the cortex shows periodic spurts. These spurts occur at the same time as new skills emerge, say in musical performance or spatial reasoning. The spurts of electrical activity and attendant growth in connections support a new level of development. Just as physical growth shows dramatic spurts, learning also jumps in fits and starts. A child doesn’t learn skills and concepts just once — he or she relearns them at successively more mature levels. But cognitive spurts only show up when children enjoy optimal learning conditions, such as the support of a good teacher or mentor. The figure above shows how students’ ability to think abstractly differs, depending on whether support is available. Adapted from: “What’s the Brain Got to do with it?” For more: www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu
A PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION LAYS OUT THE NEUROLOGICAL BASIS OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S NEED FOR CREATIVE EXPLORATION
The cerebrum at the top of our brain processes conscious thought and behavior. The sensory lobes at the back recognize and interpret current challenges, and the frontal lobes determine and execute an appropriate response. The role of the right and left hemispheres has been somewhat of an enigma.
Elkhonon Goldberg, writing in The Wisdom Paradox in 2005, suggests that the major question a brain must ask whenever it confronts a challenge is “Have I confronted this problem before?” He argues that, in most people, the right hemisphere lobes process novel challenges and develop creative solutions, and the left hemisphere lobes process familiar challenges and execute established routines.
Childhood and adolescence are characterized by many novel challenges, and so the right hemisphere in young people is more robust. As we age, we develop an increasingly large repertoire of routines that we incorporate into the resolution of a wide variety of challenges. Although both hemispheres activate whenever we confront a challenge, the left hemisphere assumes a greater role and becomes more robust as we age. It takes a lot of energy to understand and respond to novel challenges, so we tend to use responses we’ve already developed. We get set in our ways.
Schools are run by older people who know the answers, and the students are young people who want to explore the challenges. Schools thus often teach students the answers to questions they haven’t yet asked, that don’t engage them emotionally. Students obviously need to master basic skills and their cultural heritage, but the challenge for educators is to create the right mix of didactic instruction and creative student exploration — and to reflect this mix in standards and assessment programs. Adapted from: “Cognitive Neuroscience Discoveries and Educational Practices” For more: www.aasa.org
CREATIVITY EXPERT KEN ROBINSON SHARES THE STORY OF HOW AN ACCLAIMED CHOREOGRAPHER ALMOST MISSED HER CALLING
I’m doing a new book on how people discovered their talent. It’s prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman called Gillian Lynne. She’s a choreographer: She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera. Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer?” And she said it was interesting; when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD.
She went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room. She was there with her mother, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while her mother talked about all the problems Gillian was having at school: she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. In the end, the doctor said, “Gillian, I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately. Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long.”
As they went out, the doctor turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out of the room, he said to Gillian’s mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, Gillian said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and the doctor turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
I said, “What happened?” Gillian said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.” Adapted from: Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? For more: www.TED.com
HOWARD GARDNER
SMART SPACES FOR ALL LEARNERS
Howard Gardner is professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In 2005, he was selected by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines as one of 100 most influential public intellectuals in the world. The author of more than 20 books and several hundred articles, Gardner is best known for his Theory of Multiple Intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments.
On the implications for learning environments of Multiple Intelligences Theory: It is important that those ideas, concepts, theories that are worth teaching and understanding be presented in lots of different ways. By doing so, one arouses the various intelligences of young people and also reaches more students. And so, in addition to the traditional schools that prioritize linguistic and logical intelligence, learning environments should allow students to exercise their musical, spatial, bodily, naturalist, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. The actual materials, or layout of the spaces, are less important than the provision of ample opportunity to use these intelligences. So, for example, one need not devote extra space to encourage the use of spatial intelligences; rather one should make imaginative pedagogical use of the spatial arrays that are available — large, small, 2D, 3D, material, virtual, etc.
On what schools would look like if we took seriously the fact that there are differences between children: School would be far more individualized than ever before. In the past, only the wealthy had personalized education. They could hire individual tutors and they could travel wherever they wanted to (though we can do it faster these days!). To start with, each child would have his own computer (laptop, desktop, whatever) and would be able to learn ideas and materials in ways that are comfortable for that child. Young people would also be able to keep their own records of what’s been learned, what’s been produced, critiqued, etc. Some of these materials would be stored digitally, but it is also important to display scientific, artistic, and historic works that have been fashioned by students and teachers. In that way, I think that schools in the future are more likely to resemble children’s museums or exploratoria.
In this context, I call your attention to the Explorama, part of the remarkable Danfoss Universe in Sonder-borg, Denmark. This theme park is the best venue that I’ve seen for observing the various intelligences at work.
The Explorama features dozens of games, exercises, and challenges that draw on different intelligences or combinations of intelligences. These exhibits can be used by children as well as adults of all ages. While the Explorama is not a formal learning environment, individuals can learn a great deal about their own profile of intelligences at the site.
On what learning will be like in future:
Much of learning going forward will occur virtually, at all hours of the day and night, rather than in classrooms from 8–3:30. Also, the role of media centers, and the teaching of capacities needed for effective expression in the new digital media, will continue to increase. Adapted from: Interview with Angelica Fox, BMD, and “Why Multiple Intelligences Theory Continues to Thrive” For more: www.dpu.dk
A PROFESSOR OF ARTS IN EDUCATION ADVISES SCHOOLS TO LEARN FROM MUSEUMS
Active learning occurs when people stretch their minds to interact with the information and experiences at hand. In art museums, visitors are learning actively when they do such things as formulate their own questions about works of art, reflect on their own ideas and impressions, make their own discerning judgments, construct their own interpretations, and seek their own personal connections. These sorts of behaviors are called active learning because they involve acting on available information — including information from one’s own thoughts, feelings, and impressions — in order to form new ideas. Research shows that people learn more deeply and retain knowledge longer when they have opportunities to engage actively with the information and experiences at hand, even if these opportunities are punctuated with moments of passive receptivity. This is a general fact about cognition, as true in museums as it is in schools.
As theaters of active learning, museums are distinct from schools in that they make their educational offerings without demand. In museums, visitors are free to move about at their own pace and to set their own agendas. They are free to choose whether to read wall text or take audio tours, free to follow a recommended trail through an exhibition or choose their own path. Museums invite learning rather than require it, which is why they are often called “free choice” or informal learning environments. This discretionary quality of experience is a feature of good learning generally. Research demonstrates that when people have some degree of personal agency — some range of choice about the shape and direction of their own learning activities — learning tends to be more meaningful and robust. In art museums, active learning and personal agency are natural partners. When we’re in charge of our own learning, we often do find opportunities to engage our minds, especially in environments rich with evocative objects and experiences. Adapted from: “Learning in Museums” For more: www.collegeart.org
HENRY FORD ACADEMY
DEARBORN, UNITED STATES
A MUSEUM SHARES NOT ONLY ITS RESOURCES BUT ITS HOME WITH A SCHOOL
You could easily get lost in the 12 acres of exhibits at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, Michigan. Visitors can see the bus where Rosa Parks made her famous protest, the chair Abraham Lincoln sat in when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre, and thousands of other American artifacts collected by automobile magnate Henry Ford. At the far edge of the museum, visitors come upon what at first looks like another glass-enclosed exhibit. Closer inspection reveals classrooms where high school students study English, math, science, history, and art — just like their peers all across America. The difference: Several times a week, these students put down their books and spread out into the museum and Green-field Village, the 90-acre site that hosts 82 historic buildings, many collected and reassembled by Ford. For example, freshmen learning to use graphing calculators interview museum visitors about their favorite exhibits and then graph the statistics they’ve gathered. For a junior-year biology project, students research agricultural methods on the two working farms in the village and use what they learn to design a farm that could function on Mars. Adapted from: “Creating Classrooms: It Takes a Village — and a Museum” For more: www.edutopia.org
KEY LEARNING COMMUNITY
INDIANAPOLIS, UNITED STATES
THE FLOW CENTER OFFERS A SPACE WHERE STUDENTS CAN FORGET THAT SCHOOL IS WORK
The Flow Center is designed for students to learn how to be in a state of “flow.” What is meant by the term “flow”? It is the state in which you are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; in which you are totally unaware of your surroundings but enjoying your task; in which you are highly or intrinsically motivated. Sometimes students understand the simpler explanation: “getting into the rhythm of things.”
How do we get students intrinsically or self motivated? By offering them activities (games, puzzles, manipulatives, and other challenges) on the multiple intelligences model and by getting them to understand that they can have fun and learn at the same time. We offer a relaxed atmosphere where students are not pressured by the routines of regular class time. By getting students to realize that the thought process used for problem-solving activities in the flow room is the same thought process used in solving problems in other areas of their studies, we encourage them to become productive thinkers. Adapted from: “Key Learning Community — Flow Theory” For more: www.ips.k12.in.us
MINISTRY OF EDUCATION NEW HIGH SCHOOLS
CAYMAN ISLANDS
In 2005, the Cayman Islands government made a pledge to transform their country’s education system. Leveraging the advantages of a small population and a thriving economy, the Cayman Islands Ministry of Education has embraced the ambition of providing a framework of opportunities for all learners on the Islands, and promoting 21st-century teaching and learning that will equip students to compete on the international stage. With that ambition in mind, Cannon Design has been developing a prototype plan for Cayman Islands high schools that is being constructed at three schools. The plan embraces the concept of project-based learning, a learning approach where students develop interdisciplinary skills for living in a knowledge-based, highly technological society.
Central to the plan for Cayman Islands high schools is the creation of smaller learning communities, called “academies.” Each academy is limited to 250 students to allow for a more intimate relationship between learners and teachers and reduce the issues that come with larger schools, such as overcrowding, security, and long commutes.
Every student will have access to readily available technology and inspiring surroundings that exude a strong sense of Caymanian culture, reinforcing the learners’ sense of identity and knowledge of local history. Every academy will have specific spaces celebrating the different modes of learning and the different intelligences, including collaborative spaces for group work, quiet spaces for reflective learning, and “discovery rooms” for multi-disciplinary projects. Trung Le, design principal at Cannon Design, describes the inspiration for these agile spaces:
“For the reflective spaces, we were inspired by the story of Albert Einstein. In 1905, the year he published his theory of relativity, Einstein was working at the Swiss Patent Office. He wanted to work there because the job was easy and, more importantly, the office was quiet, which gave him an opportunity to think through his ideas. Even for those of us who aren’t Einsteins, the reflective mode can be very productive, and many students work well independently. So we’ve designed a quiet space with personalized furniture, technology, and lighting. It’s acoustically private but visually connected to the collaborative space, so there’s always a chance for students to see what their peers are doing.
“The Discovery Studio is a space inspired by the idea that creative people, such as Leonardo Da Vinci, use art and science at the same time to make discoveries. So this is where art and science are taking place in the same area. It’s a large space; one side is all science lab casework, with water and gas. On the other side, it’s all art casework, with storage for art supplies and projects. The space allows students to flow back and forth between rational, logical thinking and something more intuitive and inspired. It’s in that integration of science thinking and art thinking that creativity starts to happen. Architectural studios work the same way: There are no divisions between where we draw and where we do spreadsheets; where we make messes and have group discussions. We’re taking practices that we know work in real life and bringing them to the kids, which promotes ‘design thinking’ at an early stage.
“The Design and Technology building is a media-rich, agile, experimental building that includes space for making things, reinforcing the idea that we all learn by doing, an important concept to remember as we shift from the information age to the conceptual age. By the same token, we’re treating teachers as professionals, and designing workspaces and meeting space for them where they, too, can share best practices, and embark on project-based learning and teaching.” Adapted from: Angela Martins interview with Trung Le, Cannon Design
