Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson brings up a lot of great points. I strongly agree with most everything that he says. I feel that our education system has been focused on drilling information into the heads of children and young adults in a primitive way. It's completely forgotten that we're in a changing period of time. We have new technology and we also have a lot more distractions. ADHD has been used to not help children focus, but to quell differences. Not every person learns the same way, which is apparent in SKR's story of the dancer.  There needs to be diversity in the classroom. I also think that there needs to be new methods of teaching. Possibly, schools will consider combing some subjects in order to build from one another. I know that I'm taking Anatomy and Psychology, both of which deal with one another. While I was studying for my Psych test on tuesday, I was reading about parts of the brain and what their functions are. I will (hopefully) retain that information to use in Anatomy. The point of that is, the subjects are helping me learn one another. Schools should consider doing this to not only make things more interesting, but to show the connection subjects have with each other.

 I'm not entirely educated enough about other education systems in different countries, but I do know that when SKR says that there is a hierarchy of subjects, he is right. I was never really into singing, dancing, acting, or any of that. However, some of my close friends were and I did watch them struggle in regular classes. It turns out that one of my friends is actually going to school for music therapy. Her classes tend to avoid a lot of classes I'm taking. She has yoga and meditation as classes. I must say, I'm a little jealous.

To bring this to a close, I really appreciate being in college. It's kind of a more advanced high school right now, but I'm able to study subjects which interest me. I'm getting more science than anything, which I love. I think that public schools should consider offering more options and not trying to force students down one path. There should be workshops, internships, job shadows.. stuff like that! I was valedictorian of my class; Not because I was the smartest kid in my grade, but because I knew how to work the system. I knew how they wanted me to act. I'm not saying I didn't work really hard to get where I was because I did work really, really hard, but I forced myself to because I knew it was what I was supposed to do. I didn't like every subject I took in high school, but I made myself excel in each. I love learning and gaining more insight through knowledge, but if I had the chance to, I would have focused my education on what I want to spend my life doing and what interested me.

P.S. I was looking at more videos of SKR on youtube and I saw one of the comments had an interesting quote from Einstein: "Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it's going to spend its whole life believing it's an idiot."