Tag: 21st century citizens

I mentioned Sir Ken Robinson and his talk about “Schools kill Creativity” in my webinar. I just watched this animation where he explains why the current education system is failing our kids.

Some questions he brings up:

• why do we need to group students by age anymore?
• why do we need to separate kids into separate subjects?
• why are degrees not a guarantee for jobs?
• why are we not waking up children to what they have inside themselves?

I saw divergent thinking in preschool using the Reggio Emilia approach that I shared in my webinar. Divergent thinking is the process of having original ideas that have value. I mentioned this as Flow. Schools are starting earlier squashing creativity and divergent thinking. Now are kindergarteners are told there is only one answer or not to share. To prepare our children for their future they need an aesthetic experience and to collaborate so they are not isolated and all doing the same thing at the same time.

Care2′s article Are American children growing less creative? shared Tests since 1990 show a steady decline in the creativity levels of American children, despite the fact that IQ tests indicate they are getting smarter.

The focus for the last 9 years has been on increasing student achievement based on standardized tests. Maybe our children are learning how to memorize facts and increasingly doing better on spelling tests and Jeopardy games. Even the TV show “Are you smarter than a 5th grader?” encourages students to recall facts. There is no problem-solving, critical thinking or creativity involved in these activities. The 5th graders on this show are stoked when they get the answer right but there is only one right answer.

Life doesn’t always work that way. What we need are students who come up with the questions and are able to take some risks, find multiple ways to answer any of the questions or solve problems. They need to be able to think on their feet and jump in with new innovative ideas. Who knew even five years ago that people would be listening to mp3 files with an iPod or that cell phones could access the Internet. Email is old school. Now people text, use Facebook and Twitter to communicate. Traditional schools are closing because of so many reasons and, in my opinion, we need to rethink what a school is and redesign our learning environments if we want our students to be productive 21st century citizens.