Changing Educational Paradigms

Ken Robinson: Changing Educational Paradigms
Animation by RSA Animate

This is one of those videos / lectures that you need to listen to more than once. You need to listen to it twice, three times, four times, maybe even five times before you really comprehend what the speaker is trying to get across to you. This is the kind of talk that goes much further than "a good idea" and reaches much deeper than "oh, that's just what I would say." At least for me, watching Ken Robinson's TED talk on Changing Educational Paradigms - for the fifth time, now - shook something inside me so hard, that something I hadn't really noticed for a long time came out.

This talk is about changing educational paradigms, which means changing our ideas about why and how we learn, and, therefore, why and how we teach. It traces the origins of our current educational system to intellectual and economic eras that are long-gone and, while a significant part of our history, in great need of updating to today's realities.

What is so significant about this talk for me is that it reminds me there is still a piece of that old paradigm inside me. Watching RSAnimate's superb illustration of the ideas Ken Robinson presents, I remember instances of that paradigm in action from my own schooling experience. I remember how academic knowledge was what made me smart, and how learning was divided into separate disciplines with separate departments of teachers. I remember the expectation that I would get good grades, so that I could go to a good college, so that I could ... what, exactly?

This is not to say that I regret my education - I was extremely lucky to have insightful teachers and supportive parents. I enjoyed my classes, because I enjoyed learning, just by itself, so it was no great struggle for me to get the good grades I wanted. And I went to a good college because I wanted to explore the academic community further, to meet scholars, and, perhaps, become one, myself. But it has taken this long - 10 years after graduating from my schooling - to realize that the journey of my education was never for the sake of my "achievement" - that is, an external evaluation of my learning - but for the sake of my learning as I would evaluate it.

Even in the midst of my internship at the Charter, I can feel a heartbeat of that old paradigm, asking me what I'm going to have to show for myself at the end of this, and whether I'm really doing what's expected. The biggest gift the Charter community has offered me is a kind of Get Out of Jail Free card, which allows me not to think as much about those questions, and more about the deeper questions that drive my learning forward. By staying true to myself as a learner, I will naturally come to whatever it is I'll have to show for myself at the end, because it will have come from me, and it will mean something to me.

It is no easy task to battle this old paradigm within me. It's actually pretty painful to think that I might very well have to kill it at some point: kill it, bury it, mourn it, and then - and only then - truly and completely embark into a new paradigm. But how do I kill something that is a part of who I am, and that is a part of my story? That is what is so painful for me, so painful about any paradigm shift. No wonder such shifts have rarely passed without bloodshed. And don't think there aren't real and formidable tensions in the world of education between paradigms.

I just never thought there could be such violence inside myself at the same time.