Sometimes Sir Ken Robinson’s passionate, funny, brilliant keynote speeches (there are many) move me to tears. Here’s an extended quote from one he gave a few years ago at the California Teachers Summit. [The quote begins just before 9:00 in] In it, he differentiates three related terms: learning, education, and school.
Kids learn because they want to and they can.
Education is a more formal approach to learning. Learning is the acquisition of new skills and understanding.
Education is a deliberate process of learning – a more organized approach to it. You can organize it yourself; plenty of people do. The most sustained experience most people have of organized education is K-12 education and that happens for a couple of reasons. One of them is, that we have come to the view over time that there are some things we want our kids to learn that we don’t want to leave to chance: we think it’s too important, so we build them into a curriculum. And there are some other things that we think that they should learn including those which would be consistently too difficult to learn, left to their own devices. [He gives the example of calculus.] So there are some things where it is, frankly, quicker to help people learn. And that’s what the role of a teacher is. The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. Now, I say that, because that’s not how the roles of teachers have come to be seen. […]
The third term is school. Now, a school, properly conceived, is a community of learners. Any group of people who come together, as you do today, to learn with and from each other, is a school. The trouble is, we’ve come to do school for young children in a particular way, and the result is that all kids love to learn, they don’t all enjoy education, and some of them have a hard time with school. Teachers love to teach, but some of them have a hard time with school. And the problem isn’t school, and it’s not learning, it’s how we’ve come to do school. And this movement over the past 25 years to standardize and raise achievement in education through competition and compliance has made schools often inimical places for learning.
I am moved by the clarity of his analysis, the poignancy of the problem for young learners, and especially by the fact that he spoke about this for years, including in one of the most viewed TED Talks, and the problem has only gotten more stark.
The good news is that we can work together to rebuild post-pandemic in a more learning-centered way. We can do it if we work together.
The other good news is that most of the choir classrooms I know reject competition and compliance, build a true community of learners, and create a space where students rediscover their innate desire to learn.