RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms

Right now all countries in the world are reforming public

education

. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is economics. People are trying to figure out how we educate our children to take their place in 21st century economies. How do we do it? that, since we cannot anticipate what the economy will be like at the end of next week, since the recent turmoil is showing how we do it, the second thought is cultural, every country in the world is trying to figure out how we can Educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can transmit the cultural genes of our communities and at the same time be part of the globalization process.

How do you square that circle? The problem is that they are trying to face the future by doing what they did in the past and along the way they are alienating millions of children who see no purpose in going to school when we went to school they kept us there with a story that It's if you work hard and do it well. and you got a college degree, you would have a job. Our children don't believe that and they are right to not believe it. By the way, it is better to have a degree than not to have one, but it is no longer a guarantee, and especially if the path towards it. marginalize most of the things you think are important about yourself some people say we need to raise standards if this is a breakthrough you know we really should why would you lower them?

You know, I mean, I haven't found an argument that persuades. The problem is that the current

education

al system was designed, conceived and structured for a different time, it was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial era. revolution before the mid-19th century there were no public education systems, I don't really mean that the Jesuits could educate you, you know, if you had the money, but public education was paid for by mandatory taxes for everyone and three at the point of delivery . It was a revolutionary idea and many people opposed it, they said that it is not possible for many street children, working class children, to benefit from public education, they are incapable of learning to read and write and why do we spend time on this, so there are 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 it ran through it. There was an intellectual model of the mind that was essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence in which true intelligence consists. This capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and knowledge of the classics was originally what we came to think of as academic ability and this is deeply rooted in the gene pool of public education in both types of people, academic and non-academic, people intelligent. and not intelligent people and the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think that they are not intelligent because they have been judged according to this particular vision of the mind, so we have two pillars, the economic and the intellectual, and my opinion is that this model has caused chaos in many people's lives it has been fantastic for some there have been people who have benefited wonderfully from it but most people don't, instead they suffer this is the modern epidemic and it is misplaced and it's fictitious this is the plague of ADHD now this is a map of ADHD cases in the United States or prescriptions for ADHD don't confuse me, I don't want to say that attention deficit disorder does not exist.

I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing, I know. A large majority of child psychologists and pediatricians think there is such a thing, but it is still a topic of debate. What I do know for sure is that it is not an epidemic. These children are being medicated as routinely as having our tonsils removed. On the same capricious basis and for the same reason, the medical fad, our children live in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the Earth, they are being besieged with information and their attention is attracted from all platforms, computers, iPhones, backgrounds. advertisements from hundreds of televisions. channels and we are penalizing them now for getting distracted from what you know, boring stuff in school for the most part, it doesn't seem like a total coincidence to me that the incidence of ADHD has increased in parallel with the growth of standardized testing now that these kids are receiving ritalin and adderall and all kinds of things, often pretty dangerous drugs to focus and calm down, but in this order of attention deficit increases as you travel east across the country, people start to lose interest in Oklahoma , can barely think straight in Arkansas. and when they get to Washington they have completely lost it and there are different reasons for that.

I think it's a fictitious epidemic if you think about the arts and I'm not saying this exclusively in the arts. I think it's also true of the arts. the sciences and mathematics, but let me tell you about art particularly because they are victims of this mentality today, particularly the arts, they especially address the idea of ​​the aesthetic experience, an aesthetic experience is one in which your senses operate at their maximum when you are present in the current moment when you are resonating with the emotion of this that you are experiencing when you are fully alive an anesthetic is when you turn off your senses and become numb to what is happening and many of these drugs are that we use We are helping our children through education by anesthetizing them and I think we should do exactly the opposite: we should not put them to sleep, we should awaken them to what they have within themselves, but the model we have is this.

I believe that we have an education system that is modeled after the interests of industrialism and in its image I will give you a couple of examples. Schools are still organized in factory lines, ringing bells, separate facilities specializing in separate subjects. educate children in batches you know we subject them to the system by age group why do we do that? Do you know why there is this assumption that the most important thing that children have in common is their age? You know that the most important thing about them is their manufacturing date. What do you mean?

Well, I know children who are much better than other children of the same age in different disciplines, you know or at different times of the day or better in smaller groups than in large groups or sometimes they want to be alone if you are interested in the non-learning model you start with this production line mentality, it's essentially about conformity and it's increasingly about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula and it's As far as standardization goes, I think we have to go in exactly the opposite direction. That's what I mean about

changing

the paradigm.

There was a large study recently done on divergent thinking, published a couple of years ago. Divergent thinking is not the same as creativity. Define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking is not synonymous, but it is an essential capacity for creativity. It is the ability to see many possible answers to a question. Many possible ways to interpret a question. Think about what Edward de Boehner would probably call laterally to think not just linearly or convergently to see multiple answers, not one, so I mean the test for this, I mean a kind of cod example: you could asking people to say how many uses you can think of for a paper clip, all those routine questions that most people could ask with 10 or 15.

Foam rubber, you know, it has to be a paper clip as we know it, Jim, ya you know, now they tested this and gave it to 1500 people in a book called Breakpoint and Beyond and about the test protocol if you got a higher score. At some level, you would be considered a genius at divergent thinking. Well, then my question to you is what percentage of the people tested out of the 1500 scored a genius level in divergent thinking. Now you need to know one more thing about them. kindergartners, so what do you think, what percentage at genius level eight, eighteen, eighty, okay, 98?

Now, the thing about this is that it was a longitudinal study, so they retested the same kids five years later, between eight and ten years old, what do you think? 15. They retested this again five years later, between 13 and 15 years old, you can see a trend here, can't you? This tells an interesting story because you might have imagined it would be the other way around. Couldn't you? You start off not being very good, but you get better as you grow, but this shows two things, one is that we all have this ability and second, that for the most part it deteriorates.

Now a lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up a lot, but one of the most important things that I'm convinced that they've already been educated, they know that they spent ten years in school and they were told that there is an answer, is at the end and don't watch or copy because that's cheating, I mean, outside of schools, that's called collaboration. You know, but within schools now this is not because the teachers want it that way, it is simply because it happens that way, it is because it is in the gene pool of education that we have to think differently about human capacity. , that we have to overcome this old conception of academic non-academic abstract theoretical vocational and see it as what it is a myth, secondly, we have to recognize that most of the great learning happens in groups, collaboration is the basis of growth, If we atomize people, separate them and judge them separately, we form a species. of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment and, thirdly, it is crucially about the culture of our institutions, the habits of the institution and the habitats they occupy.