The Element
We give special meaning to moments that transform our view of the past and shift our perspective of the future. A curious one occurred for me in the summer of 2006 when I watched a talk delivered by Sir Ken Robinson where he asks, are schools killing creativity?
He argues that our education systems mirror industrialism, whereby mass production of goods by the efficient execution of reproducible processes generates a payoff. In an industrial world, there’s a high demand for engineers to define and optimize these processes. To meet this demand, Robinson argues, our education systems began to mirror the industrial model: take children as inputs and produce rational adults, set to earn a paycheck in industry.
Robinson makes the case that such an approach “ruthlessly squanders” the creative talents of children as it collects the paint brushes of future artists and replaces them with protractors. Teachers force future dancers to sit still and slog through multiplication tables. Robinson worries that this approach educates children in the wrong way. The world is becoming increasingly fast paced and uncertain, where the ability to create in uncertain circumstances becomes more important than ever. Shouldn’t we be guiding students towards “their Element—the place where the things you love to do and the things that you are good at come together.”
The Element is Robinson’s attempt to elaborate on why it’s in our collective interest to foster creative talents rather than suppress them in favor of economic expediency. He challenges the commonsense view of intelligence that “we are all born with a fixed amount of intelligence,” and that “it’s possible to measure how much intelligence we have through pencil-and-paper tests, and to express this as a numerical grade.” He suggests that people that we consider successful, be it Matt Groening or Bill Gates, are where they are because “they found the things they were made to do, and they have invested considerably in mastering the permutations of their professions.” They are NOT where they are as a result of a rigorous adherence to the mandated educational standards of their schools’ curriculum.
Rather than mandate additional education requirements, Robinson firmly believes that the role of educators and the system they comprise should focus less on subjects but on mentoring students to find their passion. “When mentors serve this function—either turning a light on a new world or fanning the flames of interest into genuine passion—they do exalted work.” I recall a few key mentors in my life:
-the seventh grade science teacher that went beyond the syllabus and connected with me in a time of great need by believing in me.
-the fourth grade basketball coach that shaped my character by demanding perfection when I seemed content with doing just enough to get by.
I am grateful to these mentors because they understood it was only their secondary responsibility to teach children about plate tectonics or how to play man to man defense. Their primary role was to lift us from our bouts of self-doubt and to “remind us of the skills we already possess and what we can achieve if we continue to work hard.”
Ken Robinson’s twenty minute talk and 260 page book serve as evidence of the impact an individual can have not just on the people they know, but kids that stumble across their material on the internet. He gives them confidence to believe their intuition—that there’s more to human intelligence than standardized test scores, that there’s more to math than problem sets, and that our best work comes in the material we’re most interested in.
For this, I thank him.