Кен Робинсон - The Element

“The best teacher I had was our English teacher, Alan Dur‐band. He was great. I was good with him too because he understood our mentality as fifteen‐ and sixteen‐year‐old boys. I did Advanced Level English with him. We were studying Chaucer and it was impossible to follow it. Shakespeare was hard enough but Chaucer was worse. It was like a completely foreign language. You know, ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,’ all that type of thing. But Mr. Durband gave us a modern English translation by Neville Coghill, which had the original Chaucer on one page and the modern version on the facing page, so you could get the story and what it was really about.

“And he told us that Chaucer was a really popular writer in his time and quite bawdy. He knew that would get us interested, and it did. He told us to read The Miller’s Tale . We couldn’t believe how bawdy it was. The bit when she pokes her bum out of the window and he talks about kissing a beard… I was hooked. He really turned me on to literature. He understood that the key for us would be sex and it was. When he turned that key, I was hooked.”

There are inspiring models of education at work throughout the world. In the northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia, a breakthrough method of preschool education arose in the early 1960s. Known now internationally as the Reggio approach, this program sees young children as intellectually curious, resourceful, and full of potential. The curriculum is child‐directed; teachers take their lessons where student interests dictate. The setting of the school is vitally important and considered an essential teaching tool. Teachers fill the rooms with dramatic play areas, worktables, and multiple environments where the kids can interact, problem‐solve, and learn to communicate effectively.

Reggio schools spend a great deal of time on the arts, believing that children learn multiple “symbolic languages” through painting, music, puppetry, drama, and other art forms to explore their talents in all of the ways in which humans learn. A poem from founder Loris Malaguzzi underscores this:

The child

is made of one hundred.

The child has

a hundred languages

a hundred hands

a hundred thoughts

a hundred ways of thinking

of playing, of speaking.

A hundred always a hundred

ways of listening

of marveling of loving

a hundred joys

for singing and understanding

a hundred worlds

to discover

a hundred worlds

to invent

a hundred worlds

to dream.

The child has

a hundred languages

(and a hundred hundred more)

but they steal ninety‐nine.

The school and the culture

separate the head from the body.

They tell the child:

to think without hands

to do without head

to listen and not to speak

to understand without joy

to love and to marvel

only at Easter and Christmas.

They tell the child:

to discover the world already there

and of the hundred

they steal ninety‐nine.

They tell the child:

that work and play

reality and fantasy

science and imagination

sky and earth

reason and dream

are things

that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child

that the hundred is not there.

The child says:

No way. The hundred is there.

Reggio teachers build the school year around weeklong short‐term projects and yearlong long‐term projects in which students make discoveries from a variety of perspectives, learn to hypothesize, and discover how to collaborate with one another, all in the context of a curriculum that feels a great deal like play. The teachers consider themselves researchers for the children, helping them to explore more of what interests them, and they see themselves as continuing to learn alongside their pupils.

For the past two decades, Reggio schools have received considerable acclaim, winning the LEGO Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, and an award from the Kohl Foundation. There are currently schools all over the world (including thirty American states) using the Reggio approach.

The town of Grangeton is very different from the town of Reggio Emilia. In fact, it isn’t technically a town at all. It’s actually an environment run by elementary school students at Grange Primary, in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, in central England. The town has a mayor and a town council, a newspaper and a television studio, a food market and a museum, and children are in charge of every bit of it. Head teacher Richard Gerver believes that “learning has to mean something for young people.” So when the school board hired him to turn around the flagging school, he took the dramatic approach of creating Grangeton. The goal was to inspire kids to learn by connecting their lessons to their place in the real world. “My key words are experiential and contextual,” Gerver told me.

Gerver changed around the curriculum at the school entirely— and he did it while working within the guidelines created by national testing. The students at Grange are involved in rigorous classroom work, but all of it comes to them in a way that allows them to understand the practical applications. Math means more when put in the context of running a cash register and estimating profits. Literacy and writing skills gain additional meaning when employed in the service of an original film screenplay. Science comes alive when students use technology to make television shows. Music appreciation gains new purpose when children need to determine playlists for the radio station. Civics makes sense when the council has decisions to make. Gerver regularly brings industry professionals in to help the students with technical training. The BBC is actively involved here.

The children in the upper grades hold the positions with the greatest responsibility (and their curriculum is most heavily weighted toward the Grangeton model), but younger students take an active role nearly as soon as they get to the school. “At no stage are we giving them the message that we’re teaching them to pass an exam,” noted Gerver. “They are learning because they can see how it moves their community of Grangeton onwards— exams are a way of assessing their progress to that end. It’s giving the children a completely different perspective of why they are here.”

Attendance at Grange is well above national averages. Meanwhile, the students perform in exemplary fashion on the national tests. In 2004, 91 percent of them exhibited proficiency in English (a 30‐point increase from 2002, the year before the program started), 87 percent exhibited proficiency in math (a 14‐point increase), and 100 percent exhibited proficiency in science (a 20‐point increase). “The project has had a remarkable impact on attitudes,” said Gerver. “Where pupils were de‐motivated and lackluster, particularly the boys and the potential high achievers, there is now real excitement and commitment. That ethos has fed dramatically into the classroom, where teachers have adapted and developed their teaching and learning to become more experiential and contextual. Children are more confident and as a result more independent. Learning at Grange has a real purpose for the children, and they feel part of something very exciting. The effect has also fed into staff and parents, who have begun to contribute so much to the project’s further development.”

A recent report from Ofsted, the British school inspection agency, noted of Grange, “Pupils love coming to school and talk enthusiastically about the many exciting experiences on offer, tackling these with eagerness, excitement, and confidence.”

In the state of Oklahoma there is a groundbreaking program called A+ Schools that builds on a tremendously successful program that began in North Carolina. This program, now in use in more than forty schools across Oklahoma, emphasizes the arts as a way of teaching a wide variety of disciplines within the curriculum. Students might write rap songs to help them understand the salient themes in works of literature. They might use collages of different sizes to allow them to see the practical uses of math. Dramatic presentations might characterize key moments in history, while dance movements make essential points about science. Several of the schools hold monthly “informances” that combine live performance with academic detail.