Creativity & Compassion

This is Part III of the series Kindergarten Considerations. In Part I, Independent Thinker, I begin with a discussion of how my son’s personality might fit within the regular school system. In Part II, Factory Model Learning, I look back at my own experience in the public school system.

I’m not an educational expert or a child development expert. But I am an expert on my own children.

I know what my school experience was like and I know a little bit about the options available to my son. I haven’t read as many books as I would like to on the subject. I wish I did know more about education and I certainly don’t want to pass off my opinions in this series as anything other than my thoughts on the subject.

Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I started to come across experts who are speaking my language and can back up what they are saying with PhDs and research.

Today I want to share with you two such experts. Both of the speeches below address the idea that public schools need to be re-thought and re-structured to meet 21st Century demands. The first is Sir Ken Robinson. His speech, delivered at the TED conference in 2006, discusses how today’s public schools kill creativity. (This is a 20 minute speech but he’s a great speaker and quite funny so it is well worth your time).

What struck me the most was the idea that the world is changing at a pace so great that we can’t even envision what it will look like in 60 years let alone know what education our kids will need to be prepared for that world. This makes me think back to grade 7 when they taught us how to draw pictures in computer class using coordinates and DOS. Yes, they were right that we would need to know how to use computers to get jobs in the future, but they were way off the mark in preparing us for that eventuality. They were doing their best to prepare us for an unknown future. What I get from Robinson’s TED talk is that our best hope of preparing our kids for this kind of uncertainty is to teach them not just academic subjects but also to teach them to meet challenges with creativity and ingenuity.

Robinson goes on to explain that the present school system was devised as a response to the needs of the Industrial Age. Hasn’t our society changed completely since the Industrial Age? Isn’t it time to revise our school system to meet the challenges of the present day? Not only is the current model inadequate for tomorrow; it is inadequate for today. Our school system is as outmoded today as the horse and buggy or the telegram.

It’s time to try something new. Personally, I’m not willing to wait around for the folks in charge to realize that change is needed. I’m going to go looking for alternatives. Just like I did when I looked at the way our culture births and the way we grow our food. It’s not good enough for me anymore to do it the same old way just because that’s how it’s been done for generations. I’ve had enough of the industrial model.

The next speech I want to share with you is from Dr. Daniel Siegel. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially his speech discusses the idea that the school system needs to focus not just on academics (the 3Rs) but also on empathy and compassion and interpersonal skills.

(I have seen Dr. Siegel speak before and he was fabulous. This particular video could be better; I found the speech a little disjointed. I do encourage you to have a listen nevertheless).

Dr. Siegel is an expert in Interpersonal Neurobiology. Basically this is the study of how our interpersonal relationships actually shape our brain. Neuroimaging has advanced in the last few decades to the point where it is possible for the processing of information by centers in the brain to be visualized directly. Among the things we now know about the brain is that we continue to grow new brain cells and create new and stronger connections over the course of our lives. It is not like we reach a certain age and our brain stops developing. It’s an on-going process.

What Dr. Siegel talks about in the above video is that the type of schooling we give our kids, with the heavy emphasis on academics, actually shapes our kids brains and influences who they become. His argument is that we need to put equal emphasis on interpersonal relationships as we do on academics if we want our world to be a better place. In his book, The Mindful Brain, Dr. Siegel explains that attuned interpersonal relationships (like those of an attached parent-child pair) activate the same centers of the brain as does mindful meditation practices and that both are related to improvement in functioning in a host of areas including: healing, immune response, stress reactivity and so on. With respect to schooling, given what we know now about the way the brain works, we can’t afford to only focus on one type of learning.

The point that really hit home for me as I watched him speak the other night was when he said that we spend all this time with our babies, our preschoolers teaching them empathy and sharing and developing an attached, attuned relationship and then we send them off to school where the focus is purely on academics and essentially all of our hard work is undone by school. That thought sends shivers up my spine.

I’m not an educational expert. But I know my kids. And I know the kinds of things that I want them to learn. Frankly, they won’t get those kinds of experiences at the public schools available to us. These talks by Sir Ken Robinson and Dr. Daniel Siegel just reinforce what I already know about school, about our family, about our kids. There is more to learn than just the 3 Rs. There are schools out there, like Waldorf and Montessori, that are at least trying to look at some of the other important aspects of childhood education and I’m looking forward to exploring those over the next few weeks.

What are your thoughts? Do you think it’s even possible that our school systems might one day incorporate the ideas of Robinson and Siegel? Do you think it’s important that the school system be changed to incorporate more creativity and compassion?