We spent the end of the day yesterday watching all of Sir Ken’s TED talks. I’m slightly embarrassed to be the 46 millionth human to see his first one from 2006, but there you go.
He speaks about how fostering creativity in kids has been squashed by education systems that are oriented towards testing and standards and entry into university, and not respectful of diverse types of intelligence and different human capacities.
Here are the three talks in case you’d like to watch them:
I was taking notes as we watched them, and here are some highlights that stood out for me:
- “Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.”
- “Kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go.”
- “We don’t grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Or rather, we’re educated out of it.”
- “Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything.”
- Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct.
- “Education dislocates people from their natural talents.
- “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talents, not a singular conception of ability.” How can we reconstitute our sense of ability and intelligence?
- Lots of education doesn’t feed passion. “Teaching properly conceived is not a delivery mechanism.”
- “If you sit kids down hour after hour doing low grade clerical work it’s not surprising they’ll fidget.”
Feedback from Teachers
Boxes we’ve made to date have been about creating complete sets of objects around a theme like Ancient Egypt: Daily Lives, or Frogs of North America, and, while we definitely think there’s a lot of utility in being able to create a replete set to deliver (perhaps to younger kids), we’ve been exploring ideas around more serialised delivery of box contents, so object-based enquiry builds themes and knowledge over time, prompting students to do independent research as the collection builds.
We’ve also heard over and again from teachers that they see great potential for a type of Museum in a Box that kids could construct themselves. We’d deliver the core elements (Brain/Stickers/Software), and the kids would invent their own sets of objects and content, and make a museum they’re into.
We love this idea — and I think it plays into Robinson’s thread of “learning that’s customised to local circumstances” — so we’d like to let you know we have started R&D on a product line called Make Your Own box as a result.
We’ll need some time, but, we’ve heard clearly that this sort of exploratory, self-directed, cross-curricular exercise would be great for teachers and their students, so we plan to try to meet that demand.
Stay tuned as we pilot this idea – we’ll let you know how we’re getting along! And if you’re a teacher who’s interested to help us during the pilot, please get in touch.