(Flickr picture: Jean-François Chénier, Creative Commons License)
(update: adding TED-video)
The best thing what can happen to a genius in school, is dropping out. That is what creativity guru Ken Robinson says about our school systems, and unfortunately, what he has to tell does not only apply to geniuses.
In my newspaper De Tijd (Dutch language, subscription only) he brings the distressing tale of schools where far too many youngsters fail. Those young people are being considered as problem cases, often to be treated medically (ADHD).
Robinson told the story of Gillian Lynne. In the thirties she was a pupil who had a constant urge to move around. Her doctor suggested she could try to become a ballerina. In fact she became a dancer, actor, theatre director, television director and choreographer noted for her popular theatre choreography associated with the iconic musicals Cats and the current longest running show in history, The Phantom of the Opera.
In this day and age, so Robinson tells us, the urge to move around and to dance would have been drugged out of her.
The fundamental problem seems to be that schools are products of the Industrial Revolution. They are about discipline and preparing unruly bodies to enter the machine-like universe of the factories.
Just think about it: people of about the same birth year (production date) are being gathered and put on the same conveyor belt, destined to pass along various stations where specialized workers (distribution of labor) fill them up with knowledge such as math, language, physics, biology, etc.
The process ends with a certificate which means the product is good for consumption by the industrial system, or the products are discarded.
The problem: we no longer live in this factory universe. We need now people who have amazing ideas, who dare to experiment, who are passionate, who start their own venture (maybe a one person enterprise), enter into shifting collaborations with other such enterprises and go where their passion and creativity tells them to go.
Ken Robinson tells how we are all born as extraordinary creative beings. Somehow this creativity diminishes. After each round of schooling people become more predictable, more boring, more afraid to experiment, more eager to conform to the rest of the factory society.
Somehow the Beatles, Albert Einstein, Richard Branson, Matt Groening (the Simpsons) survived or escaped this madness, proving at the same time how ineffective the system is (the Beatles abhorred the music lessons in their high school).
Ken Robinson is far from being the only one to protest against the factory schools. Fred Wilson formulates very similar objections against the school system and, being a venture capitalist, looks for the opportunities which arise when people start developing their own educational strategies.
How can virtual worlds help us to foster creativity instead of immersing young people in the grind of the factory model? In my humble opinion, worlds based on user generated content such as Second Life (but there are other options of course, such as OpenSim, Metaplace etc) are such environments were people can develop strategies to enhance creativity. The reasons:
- The basic lesson of Second Life is that the user should create and control her environment. Even though there is this learning curve and practical hurdles, it is essentially possible to create from nothing a whole universe. Maybe business people don’t have the time to script and build, but scripting and building are great activities in an educational context.
- Because there is a virtual economy, everyone who is “born” in Second Life has the strong incentive to become also a one-person enterprise. If we want to stimulate young people to run their own businesses, Second Life is a good environment to try this out at low cost and low risk – and who knows, the project could very well develop into something big!
- The social tools allow the user to collaborate with others to succeed there where she or he would never succeed alone.
Of course, virtual worlds exist in a context, more precisely in a society which is still dominated by factory thinking. Many creations are not that creative at all. They are reproductions of clichés: the tropical islands, the mansions, the castles, the pubs and dancings etc
This means that there is a future for educators. Not as the specialized workers filling the minds of the pupils/products, but as gentle facilitators, indicating ways to be more daring, more creative, more collaborative and enabling their students to make good use of networks and connections.
In doing so, educators are almost forced to work together and to organize their work as a project. The biology teacher who wants her students to build a 3D cell structure can use help from the IT-expert, and the possibilities to work together with pupils from another part of the planet can be a nice opportunity for language teachers to join the project, to give but a few examples.
I don’t believe virtual worlds are the only way to make our educational system more adapted to the new world, but they sure offer tremendous opportunities.
This is in a nutshell what I would like to tell some educators I’ll meet tomorrow. Do not hesitate giving your own take on these matters!
Here is a TED-video featuring Ken Robinson:
Roland Legrand
