Кен Робинсон - The Element

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast‐food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.

The examples I have just given point the way to the sorts of education we now need in the twenty‐first century. A number of them build on principles that educational visionaries have been promoting for generations—principles often seen as eccentric, even heretical. And they were, then. The views of these visionaries were ahead of their times (hence my describing them as visionary). But the right time has arrived. If we are serious about educational transformation, we must understand the times and catch the new tide. We can ride it into the future, or be overwhelmed and sink back into the past.

The stakes could hardly be higher for education and for all who pass through it.

Afterword

FINDING THE ELEMENT in yourself is essential to discovering what you can really do and who you really are. At one level, this is a very personal issue. It’s about you and people you know and care for. But there is a larger argument here as well. The Element has powerful implications for how to run our schools, businesses, communities, and institutions. The core principles of the Element are rooted in a wider, organic conception of human growth and development.

Earlier, I argued that we don’t see the world directly. We perceive it through frameworks of ideas and beliefs, which act as filters on what we see and how we see it. Some of these ideas enter our consciousness so deeply that we’re not even aware of them. They strike us as simple common sense. They often show up, though, in the metaphors and images we use to think about ourselves and about the world around us.

Sir Isaac Newton, the great physicist, composed his theories at the dawn of the mechanical age. To him the universe seemed like an enormous mechanical clock, with perfectly regular cycles and rhythms. Einstein and others have since shown that the universe is not like a clock at all; its mysteries are more complicated, subtle, and dynamic than even your favorite watch. Modern science has changed metaphors, and in doing so has shifted our understanding of how the universe works.

In our own time, though, we still routinely use mechanistic and technological metaphors to describe ourselves and our communities. I often hear people talk about the mind as a computer; about mental inputs and outputs, about “downloading” their feelings or being “hardwired” or “programmed” to behave in certain ways.

If you work in any kind of organization, you may have seen an organizational chart. Typically, these are comprised of boxes with people’s names or functions in them and patterns of straight lines showing the hierarchy between them. These charts tend to look like architectural drawings or diagrams of electrical circuitry, and they reinforce the idea that organizations are really like mechanisms, with parts and functions that only connect in certain sorts of ways.

The power of metaphors and analogies is that they point to similarities, and there are certainly some similarities in how lifeless computers and living minds actually work. Nonetheless, your mind clearly isn’t a solid‐state system in a metal box on your shoulders. And human organizations are not at all like mechanisms. They are made up of living people who are driven by feelings and motives and relationships. Organizational charts show you the hierarchy, but they don’t capture how the organization feels or how it really works. The fact is that human organizations and communities are not like mechanisms: they are much more like organisms.

The Climate Crisis

I was in a natural history museum a while ago. It’s a fascinating place. There are separate rooms devoted to different species of creatures. In one, there’s a display of butterflies, all arranged beautifully in glass cases, pinned through the body, scrupulously labeled, and dead. The museum grouped them by type and size, with the big ones at the top and smaller ones at the bottom. In another room, there are beetles similarly arranged by type and size, and in another, there are spiders. Organizing these creatures into categories and putting them in separate cabinets is one way of thinking about them, and it’s very instructive. But this is not how they are in the world. When you leave the museum, you do not see all the butterflies flying in formation, with the large ones in the front and the small ones at the back. You don’t see the spiders scuttling along in disciplined columns with the small ones bringing up the rear, while the beetles keep a respectful distance. In their natural state, these creatures are all over each other. They live in complicated, interdependent environments, and their fortunes relate to one another.

Human communities are exactly the same, and they are facing the same sorts of crises that are now confronting the ecosystems of the natural environment. The analogy here is strong.

The relationships of living systems and our widespread failure to understand them was the theme of Silent Spring , Rachel Carson’s hard‐hitting book published in September 1962. She argued that the chemicals and insecticides that farmers were using to improve crops and destroy pests were having unexpected and disastrous consequences. As they drained into the ground, these toxic chemicals were polluting water systems and destroying marine life. By indiscriminately killing insects, farmers were also upsetting the delicate ecosystems on which many other forms of life depended, including the plants the insects propagated and the countless birds who fed on the insects themselves. As the birds died, their songs were silenced.

Rachel Carson was one of a number of pioneers who helped to shift our thinking about the ecology of the natural world. From the beginning of the industrial age, human beings seemed to see nature as an infinite warehouse of useful resources for industrial production and material prosperity. We mined the earth for coal and ore, drilled through the bedrock for oil and gas, and cleared the forests for pasture. All of this seemed relatively straightforward. The downside is that, three hundred years on, we may have brought the natural world gasping to its knees, and we now face a major crisis in the use of the earth’s natural resources.

This evidence of this is so strong that some geologists say we are entering a new geological age. The last ice age ended ten thousand years ago. Geologists call the period since then the Holocene epoch. Some are calling the new geological period the Anthropocene age, from the Greek word for human, anthropos. They say the impact of human activity on the earth’s geology and natural systems has created this new geologic era. The effects include the acidification of the oceans, new patterns of sediments, the erosion and corrosion of Earth’s surface, and the extinction of many thousands of natural species of animals and plants. Scientists believe that this crisis is real, and that we have to do something profound within the next few generations if we’re to avoid a catastrophe.

One climate crisis is probably enough for you. But I believe there’s another one, which is just as urgent as and has implications just as far‐reaching as the crisis we’re seeing in the natural world. This isn’t a crisis of natural resources. It is a crisis of human resources. I think of this as the other climate crisis.

The Other Climate Crisis