Monday, 17 October 2011

ADHD & The need for educational change



It's always a good thing to be open to change, especially when it's possible that some major world problems are being caused by our inability to keep up with ourselves.

Could it be that the changes we're causing in some areas (e.g. economics, technology) are causing problems (e.g. ADHD) because the education system is largely failing to keep up (e.g. interactive education, taking into account decreasing attention spans etc)?

Something to ponder:

The current [education] system was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution...built into it are all sorts of assumptions about social structure and capacity.

It was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence: that real intelligence consists in the capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning, and a knowledge of the classics (originally)...what we come to think of as academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of Public Education, that there are really two types of people: academic and non-academic; smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people, think they're not, because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind.

So, we have twin pillars: economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused CHAOS in many people's lives. It's been great for some, there have been people who have benefitted wonderfully from it. But most people have not. Instead they suffer this: this is the modern epidemic and its as misplaced, and its as fictitious. This is the plague of ADHD.
 - Sir Ken Robinson

Check out the full speech, as an animated video, here:

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