An Expert’s View: Sir Ken Robinson
The New York Times’ new Learning sections will feature a question-and-answer segment with an education expert. For our first installment, we’ve chosen Sir Ken Robinson, a best-selling author and longtime advocate of transforming education. His latest book, “You, Your Child, and School,”was published in March by Viking. The following interview was edited and condensed.
Posted — UpdatedThe New York Times’ new Learning sections will feature a question-and-answer segment with an education expert. For our first installment, we’ve chosen Sir Ken Robinson, a best-selling author and longtime advocate of transforming education. His latest book, “You, Your Child, and School,”was published in March by Viking. The following interview was edited and condensed.
A: Parents have more power and more choices than they may realize in educating their children. Many parents are worried about how the world is changing and the uncertain futures their children face. Parents are especially anxious about education. They worry that there’s too much testing and competition, that the curriculum is too narrow, that their children are not treated as individuals and that schools are not cultivating their curiosity, confidence and creative talents.
They worry about how many young people are being medicated for “learning problems.” They worry about the rising costs of college and whether their children will eventually find a job, whether or not they go to college. Often parents feel powerless to do anything about all of this. The good news is that a great many educators share these concerns and are also campaigning for change.
A: The challenges parents face and the options they have are naturally affected by their circumstances. Parents living in poor neighborhoods with limited resources face different challenges from those in wealthy suburbs with paid help. Some parents can pay for the education they want; most cannot.
In general, they have three options: They can work for changes within the current system, particularly in their children’s own school; they can press for changes to the system; or they can educate their children outside the system. Whatever their circumstances, parents are not powerless and their voices must be heard.
A: Governments everywhere are trying to improve education. For decades, the main strategies have been standardization, competition and incessant testing, especially in literacy, mathematics and science. It’s been a partial success at best and in many ways a dismal failure. The story in Finland is different.
Finland is regularly at or near the top of international league tables in those disciplines but its success is much broader. Significantly, there is no mandated curriculum in Finland. Schools are encouraged to follow a broad curriculum that includes the arts, sciences, mathematics, languages, humanities and physical education. There is hardly any standardized testing. Finland invests heavily in the selection and training of teachers, and teaching is a high-status profession.
The Finnish system is not perfect and it’s still evolving, but it’s succeeding against a wide range of measures, where many other systems fall tragically short, and it’s doing that by following a different path.
A: In the United States, more than 8 out of 10 teenagers experience extreme or moderate stress during the school year, including headaches, loss of sleep, anger and irritability. The main causes include anxieties about academic performance, the pressures of testing, and parental pressures to excel at school and get into a good college.
Many young people feel overscheduled with nearly every waking hour being assigned, plotted and planned with little time for just “being a kid.” Parents can help in three ways: by learning to recognize the signs of “toxic” stress, by easing the pressures at home through encouraging more downtime and by working collectively with the school to reduce some of the avoidable causes of stress, including the often excessive levels of homework and testing.
A: There was a time when school students could expect to take a few tests each year. Now they face a seemingly endless steeplechase of tests, sometimes starting in kindergarten.
High-stakes testing was meant to raise standards in education. Instead, it’s generated a dreary culture of incessant competition, which has soaked up billions of taxpayer dollars with no significant improvement in standards, causing enormous stress for teachers, children and their families. Constructive assessment is an essential part of high-quality education, and some forms of diagnostic testing can be helpful. The usual forms of high stakes testing are neither constructive nor essential.
A: Charter schools are independently operated public schools, which have freer rein than regular public schools in what they teach and how they are run. In themselves, they are neither better nor worse than ordinary public schools. Some are very successful, others less so.
One argument for charter schools is that they can invigorate the public sector by spreading new practices. Some do and some don’t. Another is that they give parents more choice in education. The choice can be more apparent than real. All schools have limited spaces, and popular ones soon become oversubscribed. Either way, for most families, public schools are still their best opportunity in education.
A: What is education for? In my view, it is to enable all students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens. The proper role of government is to create the best conditions for that to happen.
If I were secretary, I would encourage all schools to adopt a broad and balanced curriculum including languages, math, the arts, sciences, humanities and physical education, and develop nonstatutory guidelines and resources to support them. I would roll back the current testing requirements in favor of more informative approaches to assessment. I would support the comprehensive development of early-years education. I would institute a “soup to nuts” review of the selection, training and support of teachers. I would introduce incentives for creative partnerships between schools, families, cultural organizations and the private sector.
In these and other ways, education can and must change — for all our sakes.
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