SOURCE: TED and Reddit asked Sir Ken Robinson

It’s not that I am against standardized testing. What I’ve personally got a rant about is the extent to which standardized testing, firstly, has become a massive commercial industry which is detached, in most cases, from the real purpose of education. And secondly, the extent to which we’ve come to associate standardizing with raising standards. Now, everybody agrees we should raise standards in schools. Of course you should. But, the primary instrument that’s being used is standardized testing. And the problem with it is that it fails to do the one thing we know works if we want to improve standards in schools, which is to address personal development.

The larger argument about this is that when I say public education arose in response to industrialism, it also developed in the image of industrialism. If you look at public education systems in their general shape, they are manufacturing processes. And a lot of it happens — we separate people by age, it’s a very linear process, very focused on certain types of outcome. And standardized testing is, in a way, the grand example of the industrial method of education. It’s not there to identify what individuals can do. It’s there to look at things to which they conform.

You’ve almost got to get the balance right here, but we’ve had now years and years and billions of dollars worth of investment in the expansion of standardized testing, in American schools for example (but this isn’t just America, it’s around the world), and for the most part they’ve not been successful in doing what they’re expected to, which is to raise standards. If anything, they seem to have contributed to a lowering of morale in schools. They seem to have contributed to an erosion of commitment. In America, for example, there’s something like a minimum of 30 percent dropout rates from high schools — it’s much higher among certain ethnic communities. Kids are being turned off from school, in part because of the whole culture, not just the tests themselves, but the educational culture they promote.

So, my argument is that instead of standardizing everything in schools we should be going in the opposite direction. I don’t think there’s a kid in America, or anywhere in the world, who gets out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise their state’s reading standards. They get out of bed, if they’re motivated, by their own interests and their own development. So I think we should be doing the opposite. I think we should be personalizing everything in schools. We should be looking at ways of making education relevant to each individual child. And there’s no other way of improving standards. Actually, there’s no other way of doing it on the grand scale.

I am in complete agreement. Testing is so much a source of pain for kids. Every year 2-3 children in Delhi commit suicide for fear of exams. This is SICKENING and should never happen. Especially since the results of testing do not have any co-relation with eventual success in life.

Some profound excerpts:

There are things we’re enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who’s spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story, that life is not linear, it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.

And elsewhere…

The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they’re customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it’s impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.

So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

Even in schools in the cities, the students are not better off since the curriculum is outdated. Ask yourself, how much of the content you were forced to read as a child in school, is actually relevant to you in day to day life. I read about the body parts of cockroaches, the dates of the battles of Panipat and the fact that people eat Alfafa in South America – all of which is completely useless in my daily life.

A child who comes out of school is practically nowhere because he/she has negligible life skills. The entire focus in schools is to get the child to regurgitate meaningless facts on the exam papers. Very little of actual value is taught in schools.

Almost similar is the case with colleges. Barring a few exceptions, most colleges also teach nothing of practical value. Almost all training happens on the first job.

When I passed out from school I loved physics. I dreamt that I will become an engineer and then an inventor. I had a nasty surprise waiting for me when I got to college. I discovered that the method of teaching was really bad and focused on dissemination of information rather than understanding of concepts. The studies in the engineering college were all about passing exams, getting jobs and wasting away. There was hardly anybody who was interested in engineering itself.

To generate this surplus it is necessary that the student indulge in some activity of production or providing some service which results in income for the school. Getting the students to do this has many benfits:

• they learn vocational skills
• they realize the value of money
• they learn life-skills like negotiation, organization, prioritizing etc.
• they develop better well-rounded personalities

What could be a surplus generating activity?

Some of the potential activities are:

• making handmade paper and greeting cards
• running non-hazardous, simple services like typing, photocopying etc. for corporates
• making recycled paper products
• making and selling handicrafts
• maintaining public gardens (or even golf courses) by cleaning them, watering the plants etc.

If the students do these, they not only earn but also gain valuable work experience that can come in handy later in life.

We seriously need some ideas here. Please share your ideas in the comments.

Therefore poor people have realised that it is actually counter-productive to send their children to these schools. Because when the children go to schools they do not earn for the family by doing labour, but rather cost the family a fair bit of money for books and stationery. These schools also do not ensure a job or income in later life. As a result poor people encourage their kids to drop out.

Therefore what is needed are good schools that are not only free, but also provide some earnings to their students so that they can buy books etc. and have something extra left over to contribute to the family’s needs.

Since nobody would indefinitely fund such schools to distribute money amongst students, the school should themselves generate surpluses.

It is important that the surplus of the school is earned by the school rather than received through charity. This is so because charity can stop anytime while earning can continue indefinitely.

This appears an impossible task for an individual or a small group of individuals to attempt. And I completely agree.

We have not set out to educate the entire nation ourselves. We have set out to create a replicable example of the kind of education we believe in. It is like the open-source movement in software. Everybody is invited to contribute and everybody is invited to copy and implement their own instances.

There is a small minority, however, which is interested in improving the state of affairs and is optimistic about the long term development of the nation. It is to this minority that this text is addressed.

When I was a child, I used to naively believe that I could end all hunger and misery in the world. As I grew older I realised that it may not be possible to eliminate these problems. Therefore I settled on the less ambitious goal of reducing them – but in a way that could be replicated by other interested/motivated people so that a multiplier effect could be generated.

I realized that you cannot hand-over happiness by giving money to poor people – because the money does not last. It is soon spent. Therefore for removal of poverty it is important to ensure that everybody starts earning a decent sum.

The problem, therefore becomes, where can a decent income come from? Everybody cannot do farming or other production activities. And production of everything requires initial capital – which is not available.

The answer comes from looking at developed countries like USA and European nations, where only 10-15% of the population is engaged in production. The rest of the population is providing services.

Typically the only service that uneducated people can provide is their manual labour. Therefore it is obvious that for the upliftment of the majority it is essential to educate them.

• have fun;
• learn practical skills that help them live life;
• do not have to undergo rote learning;
• learn to care about their country and society and emerge as good citizens;

Years have passed and the dream has remained as a dream. I now realize that it would not be possible to do this alone. Therefore I am starting this blog to share my ideas and hopefully gather enough support from like-minded people to implement and execute them.