Changing Paradigms of Education Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education.

There are two reasons for it: The first one is economic. People are trying to work out how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century, given that we cant anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week, as the recent turmoil has pointed out. How do we do that? The second is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out how do we educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity, so we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities, while being part of the process of globalization. How do we square that circle? The problem is theyre trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and on the way, theyre alienating millions of kids who dont see any purpose in going to school. When parents went to school, they were kept there with a story: if you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you would have a job. Kids dont believe that, and theyre right. Youre better having a degree than not, but its not a guarantee anymore and particularly not when the route to it marginalizes most of the things that you think are important about yourself. When people say that we have to raise standards, they say it is a breakthrough. Really, we should. Why would you lower them? But raising them of course you should raise them. The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, there were no systems of public education bar Jesuits. But public education paid for from taxation, compulsory to everybody, and free at the point of delivery. And many people objected to it. They said its not possible for many working class children to benefit from public

education, theyre incapable of learning to read and write and why are we spending time on this. So theres also built into it a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity. It was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially an Enlightenment view of intelligence. Real intelligence consists in the capacity of a certain type of deductive reasoning, and the knowledge of the classics, originally. What we come to think of as academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of public education that there are really two types of people: academic and non academic, smart people and non smart people. And the consequences of that are many brilliant people think theyre not. Because theyve been judged by this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars: economic and intellectual. This model has caused chaos in many peoples lives. Its been great for some, there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it, but most people have not. Instead, they suffer a modern epidemic of ADHD. The existence of such a thing is still a matter of debate. A fact is that it isnt an epidemic. Children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth, being besieged by information and swayed their attention to every platform: computers, advertising hoardings, 100s of television channels. And theyre being penalized for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff, at school. Its not a coincidence that the incidence of ADHD has grown parallel with standardized testing. Attention Deficit Disorder increases as you go east. People start losing interest in Oklahoma. They can hardly think straight in Arkansas. And by the time they get to Washington, theyve lost it completely. And there are several reasons for that. It is a fictitious epidemic. If you think of it, the arts, and not exclusively of arts, they are the victims of this mentality. The arts, especially address the idea of aesthetic experience, and this is when

your senses are operating at their peak. When youre present in the current moment, when youre resonating with the excitement of this thing that youre experiencing, when youre fully alive. And anesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself to whats happening. Children are getting through education by anesthetizing. We should be doing the exact opposite, not putting them asleep but waking them up to what they have inside of themselves. But the model we have is this, a system of education modeled on the interest of industrialism and in the image of it. A couple of examples: schools are still organized on factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate children by batches, we put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? Its like the most important thing about them is the date of manufacture. There are kids who much better than other kids in different disciplines or different times of the day or large groups or on their own. If you are interested in the model of learning, you dont start from the production line mentality. Its essentially about conformity: standardized testing and standardized curricular. And its about standardization. We have to go in the exact opposite direction. There was a great study about divergent thinking. Divergent thinking isnt the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isnt a synonym, but it is an essential capacity for creativity. Its the ability to see a lot of possible answers to a question, lots of ways to interpret a question. To think laterally, not just in linear or convergent ways. To see multiple answers, not one. One example: How many uses can you think of for a paper clip? Most people might come up with 10 or 15. People who are good with this come up with 200. And they do that by saying, Could it be 200

feet tall and made of foam rubber? And theres a test and they gave it to 1500 people in a book called Break Point and Beyond and on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level, youd be considered a genius at divergent thinking. What percentage of people tested (1500) scored at genius level? These were Kindergarten children. 98%. This was a longitudinal study. This tells an interesting story, because it could go either way. We all have the capacity for divergent thinking. But it mostly deteriorates. These people have grown up, but the common thing is theyve all been educated. Theyve spent 10 years in school being told theres one answer, its in the back and dont look. And dont copy because thats cheating. Outside school, thats called collaboration. This isnt because teachers want it this way. Its because it happens that way. Its because its in the gene pool of education. We have to think differently about human capacity. We have to get over this old conception of academic, nonacademic, abstract, theoretical, vocational. And see it for what it is, a myth. Have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups and collaboration is the stuff of growth. If we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment. Its also crucially about the culture of our academic institutions. The habits of our institutions and the habits that they occupy (Academic: Money | Non-Academic: Trash).