Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, is one of the under the radar speakers who worked a lot of people into a tizzy at last week's TED Conference in Long Beach, California. The thrust of his talk: Our education systems are steering kids away from their passions by creating test-taking automatons who we think will become working stiffs rather than visionary thinkers, creators, or innovators.
CNN named him to its list of "10 fascinating people you've never heard of" who spoke at TED2010. (That's not totally true for all of you, as a discussion about Robinson and his ideas has appeared in the comments on this site before.) MediaPost name-dropped him as well, writing that he grimly concludes that most of us are being prepared to work jobs that will give us no satisfaction. Instead of catering to the talents of individual students who think differently, it forces everyone to live up to a cookie cutter standard.
I think he'd be pretty excited by the efforts of Austin, Texas-based designers who are trying to inject creativity back into the curriculum of local schools, which Rob Stokes wrote about last month.
I'm waiting with baited breath for the good folks at TED to post his talk from last week. Until then, this one from the 2006 conference, will fill the void.
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