How to escape education’s death valley

This video is a great ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson, which is about the role of education, and where the modern school system appears to have gone wrong.

Best quotes

3:14 “There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education.”

3:28 “The first is this that human beings are naturally different and diverse.”

6:20 “The second principle that drives human life and flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance.”

7:21 “What great teachers also do is mentor, provoke, stimulate, engage.”

9:31 “So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms, rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity.”

9:45 “The third principle is that human life is inherently creative. It’s why we all have different resumes; we create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them.”

10:39 “We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and what one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity.”

16:16 “We have to recognise that it’s a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don’t.”

17:03 “In the spring of 2005 there was a phenomenon; the whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: Death Valley isn’t dead—it’s dormant.”

17:23 “Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility, waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable.”

18:10 “The real role of leadership is climate control; creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn’t have expected.”