Quotations and Considerations from Out of our Minds by Ken Robinson We wont survive the future simply by doing

g better what we have done in the past. Raising standards is no good if theyre the wrong standards (4). I love his focus on how vague standards are. What are they? How do you know if youve reached them? Have they changed in the past 20 years? The past 10? I dont think these sorts of questions are considered all that much and its refreshing to hear that maybe we need to rethink these. Not just re-phrase our standards, or review them, as we do every few years, but to actually rethink why these are the guidelines for teaching. People are not creative in general but in doing something concrete (10). This is something I come across a lot. People wonder how one can teach art since art is associated with talent. Its something you have or you dont. Creativity is seen in direct correlation with artistic talent and, again, its something you are born with innately and it cannot be grown. Robinsons phrasing is great creativity is not a mindset, is not an overarching characteristic, is not a talent. It is something that all people can find within their thinking in a given situation. You can think of a new way to sell a product or find a new way to explain a concept. You can find that new way of thinking or acting (even if its just new to you) in anything that you do. That is creativity. In western systems of education, and that now means much of the world, the underlying economic model is industrialism; and the intellectual model that supports it is academicism. The problem we now face is that this economic model is outmoded and the intellectual model is completely inadequate (23). This is so true. We no longer really do vocational education because so many of those jobs are being outsourced. What we need are people who can work with their minds in technology, in the arts, in management, and in education. Those are the growing sectors, and its silly that we are using the same basic system of education as began in the Industrial Revolution. . . . children are being examined more than ever before. This loses sight of exams being an indicator of how you are progressing and becomes rather like continually pulling up a plant to see how well it is growing (51). I love this quotation because it really shows how counter-productive our testing can be. It is stressful for students; it tells them right off the bat whether or not they are smart in our view of the word. It expects one right answer for every question and as most everyone should know by now, there is no one right answer. There can be several answers to any question and multiple solutions for every problem. If thats what we want kids to take away from their education, why in the world are we still telling them the exact opposite? They [employers] want people who can think intuitively, who are imaginative and innovative, who can communicate well, work in teams, and are flexible, adaptable, and self-confident (52). This is so far from what we usually teach our students. They are competitive and individualistic, they do not want to collaborate or work in groups. They ask constantly about restrictions and requirements for their work, wanting to know how and what they are supposed to do freedom and flexibility scare them away. They

doubt themselves constantly. Opening up our expectations, rather than creating more rigid standards and testing, could really help them to achieve these sorts of characteristics. Few injustices [are] deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive, or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without but falsely identified as lying within (Stephen Jay Gould, 58). This really stuck with me. I can find so many situations to which it applies, but I really appreciate it in the context of education. When students feel that they are not intelligent, that they are not doing things right or well, they cannot succeed. They cannot even try, because they believe that they are set up for failure. And our constant measuring of success in these students is devastating, because they are dictated by our ideas of what is success or what makes intelligence. Students do not realize that there might be other definitions out there. They believe what we tell them, and if we tell them they are not successful or smart, they think it is a problem within themselves, not a problem in our definitions. First, thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first 16 or 18 years of a persons life are not a rehearsal (86). I have always had a problem with people saying stuff like, this is what itll be like in the real world to students. They live in the real world. School is not some fantasy land that we have created. They have lives with all of their complications and achievements beyond the school, and the school itself is a big part of that life. School is not preparation for real life beyond it and our education should never be guided by that idea. When it is, students do not see their learning as their own. If its not real life, it must not be their life they do not feel in control of their education and they do not invest in it as if it is really their life. It sounds like make-believe when phrased as preparation, and students will treat it as such. This [ones mind] is the world of your private consciousness, sensations, and feelings. This world came into being when you were born and will end when you die. We share the first world with each other: we share the second world with no one (101). Thinking about the fact that to us other people seem to be mindless bodies and we seem to be mostly bodiless minds is incredibly interesting. Educationally speaking, I like this dilemma because we have to teach students to grow their own minds, and to have empathy for others, even though they have no idea what is going on in another mind and never fully will. We think visually, aurally, spatially, kinaesthetically, and in other ways too. These are not so much forms of intelligence as examples of the inherent complexity and variety of intelligence (103). This is a lovely sentiment for how to consider intelligence. Intelligence might, like creativity, not be thought of as a general characteristic, but as something that can be found in an individual act. One can have emotional intelligence, as displayed through empathy. One can have kinaesthetic intelligence, as expressed in an amazing football game. I think this goes along well with another point of Robinsons: The conventional question to ask of someones

intelligence is, How intelligent are they? A more accurate question may be, How are they intelligent? (106). Artists do aim to produce original work and at their best they are highly creative . . . [But] a good deal of what they do is not creative at all in any strict sense. It involves a huge amount of practical routine, including refining the control of materials and techniques (113). I think this is a great way to show how creativity can be mistakenly attributed to just one kind of person. Artists are not always in creative mode. Scientists, hairdressers, builders, teachers, lawyers are all creative some of the time. If we let students know that creativity belongs in ALL classrooms, not just art classrooms, it might open their minds to new ways of thinking. Problem solving is a feature of creative processes . . . Creativity can be as much a process of finding problems as solving them (114). Students are not often asked to find problems. Yet that critical nature is what makes things happen in the world people envision how the world could be better they find the problem that needs to be solved often something that has been taken for granted up until that point. Images of possibilities that are composed in the mind rather than recalled to it . . . are imaginative. . . . Private imaginings may have no impact in the public world at all. Creativity does. . . . In a sense, it is applied imagination (115). I love the idea of creativity as applied imagination. Ideally there is an outcome to a creative idea. People need to take action with their ideas and we need to be preparing students for that goal. Definition of creativity: Imaginative processes with outcomes that are original and of value (118). Creativity is not a separate faculty so much as an attitude: a willingness to reconsider what we take for granted (137). Students have such brilliant ideas when they dont think there is just one right answer. Imagine if we let them consider new ways of what we take for granted can they think of ways the world might be different if history had run a different course? Could they take something that we just assume will always be here and will always be a problem (inequality, pollution, etc.) and come up with some solution for it if they didnt put restrictions and barriers on those ideas? Emotional intelligence is recognized increasingly as an essential dimension of personal development and social ability . . . These so-called soft skills have been too long ignored or badly dealt with by education (139-140). The word emotional is so negative to some people (i.e. someone is being overly emotional) that they cant see how it fits with intelligence. We need to get rid of this idea of emotion as a bad thing so that people can get more in tune with their emotions. They need to treat it as a skill to be built on people will become more empathetic, understanding, and tolerable of others when they are aware of their own feelings. We need to stop using it as a way to treat boys and girls differently and as a way to belittle people. Arguments can be easily dismissed as only value judgments or merely subjective. Its hard to imagine any argument being dismissed as merely

objective (141). So true I have heard this many times and I even pride myself on being able to objectively rationalize thing. But when we hold this up to the heavens as the highest way of thinking is when we end up with arts and drama being cut from elementary schools and students being told that they are not intelligent if they dont understand science or math. We also tend to gloss over how factual and objective things contain some subjectivity what we choose to study in science has so many social implications. We give importance to certain things which is subjectivity at its finest. The main process of science is explanation . . . The main process of art is description. . . They are also trying to invoke the sense of feeling in others (148). Objectivity is no guarantee of truth. Scientific arguments may be objective. This doesnt mean they are true. Its perfectly possible to be objective and wrong. . . . The reason is that, the world of objective knowledge is man-made (149). We need to think about this more. We see this throughout the history of science (racist science, phrenology, even how mental and physical handicaps were treated). But we ignore the fact that facts are not necessarily forever. What we take as objective knowledge can be proven wrong, yet people place so much faith in studies and statistics and science. At the heart of all scientific undertakings there is an element of personal judgment, which cannot be eradicated. It would be hard to explain why it should be. The capacity for personal judgment is probably the most sensitive instrument a scientist has available (151). Again, the idea that science is not subjective is problematic. Even more problematic is how we take that to be a good thing. If we could not use our personal judgment, nothing would exist. Its a little silly when a person points out that what another says is personal judgment. Everything is in some way. Even what we collectively consider to be factual includes judgment whether or not we feel that there is enough evidence to believe it, whether or not we can change our previous beliefs to match new information. Specialization in education had been invented purely to conform with specialization in industry (161). Certainly people finding themselves removed from the products of their own labour, exposed to ever widening horizons through new media, and whose roots in community life are loosened by massive social upheaval, are more likely than their parents or grandparents to feel a loss of identity and personal significance (163). This is changing every day how do we teach for this? Personally, I like all of my lessons for students to concentrate around an area of personal significance they need to be able to relate to what they are learning. This is increasingly difficult as people feel more isolated than ever. But that just means its more necessary than ever to create a sense of community within our classrooms.