I've just got back from a talk given by Sir Ken Robinson today at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD) in Glasgow. Like many people, I'm sympathetic to Robinson's ideas, but like some, I'm also sceptical about his vision for the future and his suggestions based upon it. He's certainly a showman with a very impressive bag of scripts that he deftly collages together to entertain and enthrall his spectators, though at times I felt as though I could easily have edited a few of his YouTube videos together to the same effect. Yes creativity is a uniquely human capacity, yes it's undervalued in education and yes it tends to be relegated to “Art” classes when in fact creativity is fundamental to all forms of human endeavour that involve thought.
Robinson speaks of revolution, but he frequently mixes his reference points. On the one hand, he tells us, we are already witnessing a revolution and on the other hand education needs a revolution to face up to the challenges of the future. So that's a revolution within a revolution then Sir Ken? I might have got my facts mixed up, but the last time I checked, a revolution was something that involves the overthrow of the previous order. In fact, Robinson's idea of revolution is simply a rhetorical trick that plays on people's deep seated suspicions about how terrible education has become and how their children's potential is being squandered. But then again "reform" isn't such an inspiring term is it?
It seems to me that there is one very simple conflict which underlies much of Robinson's work but which is so overburdened with proselytizing and accretions of anecdote that he seems to have missed it. People learn best when they're guided. However, such instruction comes at a cost: when you instruct someone too completely there is a tendency for the effectiveness of this instruction to inhibit creative improvisation on the part of the learner. In a sense then, creativity and effective learning are to some degree mutually exclusive: you can learn something effectively but if you want to innovate you need to have time and space to take risks and to learn through both failure and discovery, in which case effectiveness goes out of the window. This doesn't require a revolution, it requires addressing, and no amount of wholesale overthrowing of old orders is likely to solve it. It's all well and good talking of revolutions and transformation as long as these are achievable and as long as we have a good idea exactly what we're overthrowing and what we're replacing it with. But when the vision soars into the stratosphere, one wonders who is being elevated by the rhetoric.
