To conclude our series Passive Complicity links to a couple of TED talks by US resident  British born educator Sir Ken Robinson. (His biography is worth looking at, and, like Keith Johnstone (who featured in the first four posts on this subject) has a strong arts background) He talks of education’s growing ‘culture of compliance’, of its mechanistic structure, that it is bases on the wishes of the non student stakeholders – industry (as the future employers), and the voting public.  He argues that education should be about creating a ‘climate of possibilities’ for students, rather than having the current deterministic model.  While accepting that centralised testing (NAPLAN here in Australia) it should only be used to support education, not to drive it.

His talks are interspersed with little gems like this one: “If a man speaks his mind in the forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? from 6 January 2007

Ken Robinson: How to escape education’s death valley from 10 May 2013