To have a Quantum Revolution occur – essentially a revolution in consciousness, in thinking capabilities – what is required is more enlightened thinking by as many people as many. Yet, our education system, which is where the great majority of all of us develop our thinking and learning capabilities, is not creating or cultivating enlightened thinking.
Instead the education system is developing a nation of people with the skills to work at Wal-Mart.
The education system is failing because it is not teaching students two essential tools: critical thinking and creative thinking. And because of that, the products of the education system – you and me – learn how to parrot the rote information they learn, or they become totally turned off from the learning experience.
And if you become turned off from the learning experience, it impedes the possibility for growth at various points in your life, because you equate learning with a very negative experience.
And when the possibility for growth is stunted in your life, you start to either say or believe things that don’t make a lot of sense. Witness the amazing amount of less than rational information being passed off as facts these days:
***Creationism
***The guns don’t kill people, people kill people mantra
***The denial of climate change
***The president of the U.S. is a communist, socialist, Muslim foreigner with a secret and radical agenda to destroy the U.S.
***The inconsistency of being pro-life/anti-abortion, yet pro-war (you would think if you’re pro-life, then you would be a total pacifist)
***The excessive amounts of pharmaceutical drugs people take for illness, even though drugs will never create better health and usually make you sicker
***And countless other belief systems that defy logic.
And so, what we need is an education system that breeds creative thinking, because this is how you then breed geniuses and maverick thinkers. We don’t need a nation and world of Wal-Mart workers, we need a nation and world of brilliant and enlightened minds.
If you watch the above video, which is a TED talk given by Sir Ken Robinson, you will understand what I am saying. In the above video, Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
Sir Ken Robinson is a creativity expert who challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance: Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006.
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.
Here are some of Sir Ken’s quotes from the above video:
Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.
All kids have tremendous talents — and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.
I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.
It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp.
Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not — because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.
There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
Typically [professors] live in their heads. … They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
We are educating people out of their creative capacities.
You don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? He was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be?
You were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid — things you liked — on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that: ‘Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician. Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.’ Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken.
Human resources are like natural resources; they’re often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they’re not just lying around on the surface.
And below is the music video for Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall, a song that tells us:
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey teacher leave them kids alone
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall