Asalam alaikum,
So, are you in your elements?
Yeah, you ! the one reading this :p
First, he gave a tedster talk back in 06' that led to his writing 'The Element'.
Ken Robinson’s catch phrase pretty much is;
"Don’t standardize education, personalize it."
Here are a couple quotes from his book concerning standardized education..
The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed — it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.
Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals — not in the databases of multiple-choice tests. I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state. Learning is a personal process …
Seems like this rising concept of home_schooling among western Muslims - is for the better i suppose.. a return of middle age research boom in Muslim lands.
Though i don't agree with all the dance rants in there :p, yet tis' true that the research ability has rather been brutally blistered by modern school-education hierarchy creating an essential research myopia in masses or worse; a complete research blackout en' masse.
First off, its the quality & not the quantity that should be strived for;
And as a fellow blogllegue T.Peters puts it:
The whole public school evaluation system needs an urgent revision too
The three ways to evaluate a person’s performance are;
~ How good are they at their worst?
~ How good are they on average?
~ How good are they at their best?
Schools use the first two criteria, but the world out there uses the third.
Schools evaluate people at their worst, as in teachers average grades to come up with semester grades, and semester grades feed into a grade point average. So in some sense schools evaluate average performance.
But in more subtle ways; schools evaluate students by how good they are at their worst.
To graduate, your lowest course grade in all your required courses must be passing. No amount of brilliance in one area can compensate for a failing grade in another area. Your creative writing grades are excellent, Mr. Shakespeare, but we cannot let you graduate until you pass physics.
How do you get on the honor roll? Your lowest grade has to be above a certain level. Again, what matters is how good you are at your worst.
How do you get to be valedictorian? Be good enough at every class to get an A. You have to be pretty good at virtually everything, but you don’t have to be truly exceptional at anything.
Thus, schools encourage perfectionism, not excellence. They encourage people to avoid mistakes, not to be creative.
Otoh, the world at large (markets for instance) evaluate people at their best, as in if you write 100 obscure novels and one best-seller, you’re a best-selling author !
If you consistently write moderately popular novels, you’re not.
If you write one really good novel, you might get a Nobel prize.
Imagine the Nobel committee evaluating a writer saying “Yeah, these two novels were brilliant, world-changing. But he also wrote this one novel that was mediocre. Let’s give the prize to someone whose books are consistently pretty good.”
The Ford F150 did poorly in focus groups. The average rating wasn’t good. But the people who liked it really liked it. And the F150 went on to be the most popular truck in history. All that matters in business is people who like your product enough to buy it. You don’t make any money by being everyone’s second choice.
If a company has one product that is a runaway success, the company is a success.
If it has two or three runaway successes, even better.
But a company can produce a few dismal failures (think Microsoft Bob or the Apple Newton) and still do quite well if their flagship products succeed.The same is true of the people behind these products. Someone can make a successful career with one big win even if they have a number of failures.
We all want others to see the best in us.
There are ethical (and economic) reasons to look for the best in others..
But years of public school education can incline us to look for the worst in others.
oh & Speaking of autodidactism, the author of 'Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar', gives out an interesting message;
“Education is important. School is optional.”
Though i don't agree with all the dance rants in there :p, yet tis' true that the research ability has rather been brutally blistered by modern school-education hierarchy creating an essential research myopia in masses or worse; a complete research blackout en' masse.
First off, its the quality & not the quantity that should be strived for;
And as a fellow blogllegue T.Peters puts it:
You will be remembered in the long haul for the quality of your work, not the quantity of your work—the quantity part is just your defective ego talking—no one evaluates Picasso based on the number of paintings he churned out.
The whole public school evaluation system needs an urgent revision too
The three ways to evaluate a person’s performance are;
~ How good are they at their worst?
~ How good are they on average?
~ How good are they at their best?
Schools use the first two criteria, but the world out there uses the third.
Schools evaluate people at their worst, as in teachers average grades to come up with semester grades, and semester grades feed into a grade point average. So in some sense schools evaluate average performance.
But in more subtle ways; schools evaluate students by how good they are at their worst.
To graduate, your lowest course grade in all your required courses must be passing. No amount of brilliance in one area can compensate for a failing grade in another area. Your creative writing grades are excellent, Mr. Shakespeare, but we cannot let you graduate until you pass physics.
How do you get on the honor roll? Your lowest grade has to be above a certain level. Again, what matters is how good you are at your worst.
How do you get to be valedictorian? Be good enough at every class to get an A. You have to be pretty good at virtually everything, but you don’t have to be truly exceptional at anything.
Thus, schools encourage perfectionism, not excellence. They encourage people to avoid mistakes, not to be creative.
Otoh, the world at large (markets for instance) evaluate people at their best, as in if you write 100 obscure novels and one best-seller, you’re a best-selling author !
If you consistently write moderately popular novels, you’re not.
If you write one really good novel, you might get a Nobel prize.
Imagine the Nobel committee evaluating a writer saying “Yeah, these two novels were brilliant, world-changing. But he also wrote this one novel that was mediocre. Let’s give the prize to someone whose books are consistently pretty good.”
The Ford F150 did poorly in focus groups. The average rating wasn’t good. But the people who liked it really liked it. And the F150 went on to be the most popular truck in history. All that matters in business is people who like your product enough to buy it. You don’t make any money by being everyone’s second choice.
If a company has one product that is a runaway success, the company is a success.
If it has two or three runaway successes, even better.
But a company can produce a few dismal failures (think Microsoft Bob or the Apple Newton) and still do quite well if their flagship products succeed.The same is true of the people behind these products. Someone can make a successful career with one big win even if they have a number of failures.
We all want others to see the best in us.
There are ethical (and economic) reasons to look for the best in others..
But years of public school education can incline us to look for the worst in others.
oh & Speaking of autodidactism, the author of 'Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar', gives out an interesting message;
“Education is important. School is optional.”
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