(Written July 30, 2011.)
I'm a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson. Anyone who has known me for any time has been forced to watch one of his videos or listened to me quote him. His first TED talk, entitled, "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" has been viewed 9 million times. If you've not availed yourself of the opportunity, you should go watch it immediately.
He also has a very entertaining piece from RSAnimate entitled, "Changing Education Paradigms". In it, he outlines the history of educational systems around the world and why they emphasize the things they do. One of his chief contentions is that modern education systems are made in the image and serve the ends of the Industrial Revolution. While not the first to note this, Sir Ken highlights the more humorous aspects of this phenomenon. One of his chief concerns is that we are educating people out of their creativity and away from their natural talents. We are doing this because our education systems were built to develop a narrow set of human capacities most useful for work in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Many have responded to these concerns in admirable ways. The Partnership for 21st Century Learning developed their framework around those skills and content areas necessary for the new workplace: creativity, innovation, collaboration, information and communication technologies, critical thinking, leadership and others. Recognizing their own image in this list, arts educators applauded these. The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) organized work on common state standards (the "Common Core") in English and Math, which include "anchor standards" in grades K-12, designed to promote college and career readiness. Teachers and parents will be able, it is thought, to see how ready for college their 5-year-old is.
The discussion in education is moving away from the topic of "reform." Robinson and others have argued for "revolution" or "transformation" of education systems. The problem is that many have yet to challenge their own long-held assumptions about education.
In my opinion, the chief assumption of public education systems everywhere is that education is to prepare students for work. One of the reasons that arts programs have historically been viewed as dispensable is that most thought it unlikely that large numbers of people would find gainful employment as painters or guitarists or whatever. Algebra and English and the lot were viewed as essential to entering the 20th century workforce in a way that dance was not.
I would like to comment here about our use of the word “talent,” because I think it reveals a great deal about our view of intelligence as well. Most people describe someone who plays the piano or dances well as “talented.” Yet we describe someone who is good at trigonometry or chemistry as “intelligent.” Knowing what we do now about human cognition, this seems an arbitrary distinction. I remember a conversation with a colleague a couple of years ago where she insisted that you could not teach someone to sing – the person was either born knowing how to sing or not. This is complete nonsense and demonstrably false. Thousands of children are taught to sing by music teachers every year. The fact that some people seem to be “born singers” in no way negates this. Some children seem to be born writers, yet no one would think of suggesting that we stop teaching all children to write.
Designating some human capacities “talents” has allowed us to wash our hands of developing these in our school systems to some degree. That our deepened understanding of human intelligence, especially the work of Howard Gardner, et al, has not driven us toward a broader curriculum, may indicate that those decisions are made for political rather than educational reasons.
As a consequence, even though it has long been possible to get a job as a violist or an actor, it was assumed that those in possession of these “talents” would gain the prerequisite skills quite apart from education. It seems unthinkable that we would make the same assumption about engineers or physicists.
The workforce has changed radically in the last twenty years and will continue to change for the foreseeable future. It’s become common in education to quip that most children are being educated for jobs that do not even exist yet. Who was educated to be a smart phone app developer or a viral marketing consultant?
Not only is the workforce changing, but views of work itself are changing. To many people in the mid 20th century especially, work was seen as a necessary process for obtaining the life one wanted: bread on the table, shoes for the kids, then later an automobile, your own home, several televisions, etc. You may have taken a job in a factory or mine and viewed that as merely a means to an ends. While it is true that there are still those who view work in this way, there seems to be a growing number who expect work to provide personal satisfaction. According to a report from the Conference Board in 2010, job satisfaction among Americans is at 45% - the lowest since the report began examining that data in the 80s. Chief among the reasons was that workers found their jobs uninteresting.
Why should this be? It’s difficult to imagine that working in a factory stuffing cardboards into shirts was all that interesting in 1960. Are we just less content and grumpier than our parents and grandparents? Perhaps, but there may be other reasons.
One, as Robinson has noted, is that we are living in the most stimulating time in all of human history. Talking heads are fond of imagining what George Washington might say about the economy or how Abraham Lincoln might view the war in Iraq, but I’m guessing that if we showed them an iPhone their heads would probably explode. One can imagine John Adams in the passenger seat of a Mustang cruising down an eight-lane highway at 80 M.P.H. holding on for dear life and screaming for the witches to stop their demon metal horse carriage and let him repose in the nearest apple orchard.
We take for granted the constant stream of media in our lives. Yet many go to workplaces that haven’t changed that much since their parents’ times and find them boring. Workers in 2011 want stimulation at work, they want to use social networking, they want to view cat videos on YouTube, they may even want gaming.
Other ways our lives have changed are causing us to seek meaning in our workplace as well. Many do not find personal meaning in religion or family the way that past generations did. While I will not argue that this is a good, or even neutral, thing, it means that work plays a larger role in how we make meaning for ourselves. We want what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow” – that feeling of timelessness and purpose as we are engaged in an activity that maximizes our talents.
It was easy to see “work” and “life” as separate worlds in the mid 20th century. The worker, usually the “man of the family” would go to work during regular hours, wearing his “work clothes,” whether blue or white collar, return home and enjoy his family and leave work until the next day.
For many of us, this is no longer the case. I had the opportunity to visit the offices of VH-1 this year for a work-related trip. The employees there arrived when they wished. VH-1 stocked each floor’s kitchen with the favorites of the staff: energy drinks, Captain Crunch, popcorn, etc. Everyone dressed stylishly; you might think the whole staff were preparing for a night of clubbing. The employees spoke casually to one another, even their bosses. The interior looked like Tony Stark and Andy Warhol had designed it, and all the furniture was comfortable. Employees walked around on cell phones, listening to music and genuinely enjoying their day. They left when they finished their work.
We do not have the silos of “work” and “life” the way many of our parents and grandparents did. I’m writing this piece, largely about my work, on a Saturday afternoon. I plan to post it to Facebook so that my friends might think about it. When I’m at work on Monday, I’ll probably spend some time making personal calls, checking my seats for the concert next Thursday, and buying a pair of shoes online. Then I’ll take my laptop home and work some more on a guidance document from my job.
We no longer think of ourselves in these discreet ways anymore and our education systems must mirror this shift. Education must help us think about global issues so that we can make informed decisions. It must help us to find thoughtful ways to engage our time away from work. It must help us make choices that affect our health and wellness. It must help us express our thoughts and feelings about ourselves and the human condition.
Education systems must also begin to recognize that children are human beings now – not simply when they begin contributing to the economy. 18-plus years is a significant portion of one’s life. We must start considering the humanity of those we teach and recognize that each has unique gifts and abilities, each has thoughts and feelings, and each has the potential to help make this world a more humane, rich and meaningful place. While we want our students to be “college and career ready,” they have lives and are looking for purpose now.
If our education systems are to meet the demands of the 21st century, we need to stop thinking about educating children solely for work. We don’t know what their work will be; we cannot begin to imagine it. Not only that, but they are much more than workers. They are whole human beings and it is a moral imperative, in my opinion, that we educate as many of their capacities as we can, not only that they may be prepared for the workplace, but also so they will be prepared to make meaning of their lives in an increasingly complex world.
The arts must be included in any curriculum that will prepare students for the future. We all have the ability to dance, to act, to draw and to sing, if we are given the chance. These abilities foster creativity that will help us to solve problems we cannot begin to imagine will exist. They will also help us make meaning of our 21st century world, just as they have in every other century.
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