Being distracted from Edward de Bono by Ken Robinson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

Ken Robinson's talk on Changing Educational Paradigms

Jamie was giving feedback in tutorial about education.  He talked about how it was tending to branch into two directions.  There as the broad vocational based education and then the specialist.  If one wants to design an educational park then one needs to decide whether it's going to specialise or be broad reaching.

This got me to thinking about education as a whole.  I hated my schooling with a passion and it took a lot of courage to return to it in my 30's.

It helped me last year to go for an initial dyslexia screening and discover I'm borderline dyslexic with my word formation.  My memory and problem solving are really strong to compensate for my word formation which is weak.  This therefore means that if I read anything I don't take it in but if I hear it, it's remembered forever!  Very handy to know.

I therefore got to thinking about modern education. When I taught English, I used to do a study skills lesson with my students during the first week of the academic year. All the students I taught were adults and without exception none of them had never learnt how they learnt i.e. auditory, visual etc.  It fascinated me that they'd spent so many years in education without realising how their brains received information.

Once you've then worked out how you learn how do you decide what to include on a modern syllabus. Ken talks in his fascinating lecture about modern educational syllabus's being laid out based on an old fashioned Victorian model.  I find it interesting that children are leaving school as I did with no teaching on how to handle your own finances or a rough outline of politics. Jamie criticised his daughter's school for having a regular Skype chat with 2 schools around the world (I guess the modern equivalent of our pen friends). However I feel this is really important for children to learn that the UK isn't the epicentre of the world and others have very different lives than us.  When I left school at 15/16 I bundled myself off to India for 6 months to travel on my own.  It was a bit scary but I learnt more about life in that 6 months than I did in all my education.

I've decided to put Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono down for a while and replace it with The Element by Ken Robinson.  I'm quite keen to introduce Education and Creativity to my Calverley Ground design, so I need to make some decisions about how I'm going to do this effectively in a public space.  I'd also like it to be a place that inspires rather than preaches.