Changing paradigms or changing caricatures?
The RSA animation team came up with the following caricature of a teacher to illustrate Sir Ken Robinson’s talk about the need for a change of paradigm in education.
In a different context such a depiction of a teacher would appear almost offensive to teachers who are committed to public education (unlike Sir Ken Robinson, who abandoned it), and it would seem completely inappropriate in a serious talk given by a professor of education. But in the context of Sir Ken’s talk it probably seems completely in place. Perhaps one of Sir Ken Robinson’s great strengths as a public speaker is in making caricature seem a perfectly acceptable part of the repertoire of an ex-professor dealing with a serious topic like the reform of public education.
He does this by employing a technique that might be called the cartoonification of thought. A world of nuance and complexity, historical variation and political difficulty is reduced to a simple opposition of bad and good, and the ideas used to solidify the dichotomy are packaged and handed to the audience as simple, self-contained notions, with no recognition that each only makes sense in the context of a long tradition of thought and practice. The audience leaves the auditorium confident that they have grasped the essence of the matter – an essence that can be summed up in a 17-minute talk sweetened by anecdotes and references to the family that establish the image that Ken is really just a regular guy, and not the member of a dusty and remote group of academics. On no account must the audience get the impression that the topic is one that might require further reading to be understood in depth.
This, it would seem, is what the audience comes away with: Public education is a factory. 98% of infants have a genius level of divergent thinking, but when they leave public education their stunted imaginations can’t get past the idea that a paper clip could be used for anything other than clipping paper. The world is changing so fast and so unpredictably. The only thing that will enable us to keep up is innovation, so we need that divergent thinking in abundance. We need a change of paradigm.
So much is glossed over here. So much is ignored. So much that is questionable is presented as self-evident. Sir Ken surely knows this, but he chooses not to mention any of it. He knows that public education in the UK alone has a long history with different currents and competing tendencies. He knows that there has been a violent struggle in the UK between teachers and the government over what public education should be about – a struggle in which the teachers were sorely defeated (so that if, henceforth, anything is to be caricatured, it should be the government, not teachers). No, none of this is mentioned. Even the UK is not mentioned. No context is given. Let’s keep it general and simple. Let’s talk as if all public education were the same, as if it could all be tarred with the same brush, so the same rousing caricatures can be peddled from the west coast of the USA to the democratic heartlands of Singapore.
Why get so worked up about Sir Ken?
If Sir Ken Robinson were like Sugata Mitra or Marc Prensky with a background in computing or business, we wouldn’t get so worked up, but Sir Ken is different. He has his roots in the arts (English literature, in particular) and he was originally a university professor – two things related to what we see as very pressing needs: the need for aesthetic considerations to have greater public significance, and the need for the minds and sensibilities nurtured at universities to somehow raise the level of public debate in the wider society.
Sir Ken was perfectly placed both to articulate a vision informed by the arts and to raise the level of public debate. But, from what we have seen, he has done neither of these things.
Sir Ken’s abuse of art
When we heard that Sir Ken was one of the authors of a report on the arts and education in the UK (“All Our Futures”, 1999), we hurriedly found a copy and looked for interesting things about the importance of the arts for education in particular, and public culture more generally. We found nothing.
Art at its best acquired a critical relationship to the dominant forces of industrial society – a machine-like world of work and business that demands all our most important public activities be dedicated to its infinite expansion. Art of this nature functioned as a sort of bad conscience of industrial society, holding onto, if not a vision of a better world, at least the conviction that a better world must be possible. In a sense, art of this sort sustained its own form of cognition – a knowledge of the untruth of industrial society in its current form.
What does art become in the public pronouncements of Sir Ken? It is nothing more than creative thinking, renamed: divergent thinking. And what is divergent thinking for Sir Ken? It’s coming up with new ideas that must justify themselves in terms of their utility. His example is children being able to think of lots of different uses for paperclips. Here, everything that is interesting and important in the world of art is abandoned.
Sir Ken mentioned Picasso in an interview. Now, did Picasso see his paintings as simply useful divergent ideas? And what would the use be of a cubist painting: its entertainment value; its ability to fetch a good price in the art market? Surely for a serious artist the work is above all an attempt to articulate something that has a truth content – that with this work something is happening in art that is true – something that deserves to be recognised as an important “statement” with a value over and above any utility or marketability it might have. And, perhaps the truth of a cubist painting was not simply different from its use value and exchange value, but critically opposed to the world in which those values are construed as the only values that count. Perhaps part of the truth of a cubist painting is its very refusal of both utility and exchange.
With Sir Ken’s reduction of the arts to the divergent thinking of infants, this concern with an aesthetic truth and with critique disappear. To call this a caricature of the arts would just not express how offensive it actually is.
Leaving the ivory tower
One of the weaknesses in countries like the UK is the level and quality of public debate. In the past, social critics complained about the division of labour, with the intellectuals marginalised in universities, having little or no input into wider public life. Now that university departments have had to justify their existence in economic terms there is a tighter integration of the university with the rest of society, but “integration” is more about providing services to a technocracy than linking with and raising the level of public debate.
Sir Ken could have tried to link with and raise the level of public debate. That would have involved helping people to see the misconceptions that abound and helping people to see how superficial a lot of the rhetoric about education has been; the point being, not to leave people confused, but to deepen their understanding and encourage people to think through the issues further, reading and discussing more among themselves.
Sir Ken does nothing of the sort. Rather than challenging superficial thinking, he reassures it. He creates the impression that there is no need to read anything (apart from his next book). All those serious people who spent years thinking about education in the past can be ignored. The world was different then, so what could they know, and why should we pay any attention to what they might have said? This is a new world (apparently), and we need fresh, new, inspiring ideas, like the idea of a post-industrial education that will borrow its metaphors from agriculture, organising schools that are not factories but farms cultivating creative thinking and the passions of the entrepreneur.
Sir Ken creates the impression that there is no need for social critique any longer – the world is basically on the right track, we just have to get old-fashioned things like schools to catch up; and because we are basically on the right track, there’s no urgency about thinking carefully or deeply about things. The world is, in effect, on auto-pilot, and all we need to do is make sure we don’t snuff out the divergent thinking of our children, so that in the future we will have lots of ideas for new things which we can get people abroad to make for us.
The message is an insult both to the intellect and to an aesthetically informed concern about the sort of world that we are bequeathing to our children.
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Note: The above is a sequel to our earlier critique of Sir Ken Robinson’s so-called learning revolution.
I found his talks revealing and they presented some interesting questions that you have in part identified, I would have been very disappointed if he tried to provide solutions this would have been wrong as it would close the thought process ie the talk would not have the generative potential they currently evoke.
Peter, the article did not criticise Sir Ken for failing to suggest solutions, but for dumbing down the debate.
You’re wrong to think that Robinson equates creativity and divergent thinking: he explicitly states that divergent thinking is a requirement for creativity, NOT a synonym. And he talks about creativity needing to have value, but this isn’t the same as utility, as you seem to think. I agree that he fails to look at socio-economic issues, but his solutions are similar to those offered by critics of the middle-classness of the education system: diversity, valuing more than just academia, helping children to find their own abilities to think creatively, solve problems etc.
Bethany, thanks for that comment. We try to explain in the post why we are so angry with Robinson. The most important reason is that he came from a background in the arts and found himself in a perfect position to argue for the public importance of values that find their expression in the arts. The latter – at their best – are at loggerheads with the market. The sort of art that has been recognised as cutting edge for a long time now is a form of social critique. We were hoping that Robinson might have at least acknowledged that there might be a slight tension here between the aesthetic and the commercial world he serves so well. But no. Nothing. What really matters is a kind of creativity that anyone can have, even someone whose job it is to design more efficient abattoirs. It is simply a matter of coming up with novel ideas that have value. Of course, value need not be limited solely to the exchange value that new products will have on the market, but unless more is said – unless the political bull is grasped by its horns – then, in practice, “value” will tend to mean “market value”. The creative people are those with ideas that sell. A reformed approach to education will be one that ensures children are better adapted to the demands of the market (anti-academic, vaguely philistine, team-playing, keen to work hard as long as they can play hard, fond of solving problems, historically ill-informed, unconcerned with philosophical issues, etc., etc.,).
The second reason for our anger concerns the intellectual poverty of Robinson’s talks. He belongs to a very rich and conflictual cluster of traditions, of which almost nothing is said. Again, he was given an enviable opportunity to bring some of the intellectual riches of the university to public debate. He chose not to. Instead, he chose to sell himself in a market where intellectual simplicity (i.e. superficiality) is a great selling point. The corrections you make may be right, but they don’t contradict our judgment that a one-time university professor previously entrusted by the UK government to provide a detailed report on the relevance of the arts to education provides us with little more than caricatures – and conservative caricatures at that, accompanied, as they are, by talk of a revolution which really amounts to a clearing of the ground for the dominant trend.
I both agree and disagree with you, yes maybe his talk can be seen as a dumbing down of some crucial issues, but then, let’s be honest here, how else can you tackle such an essential topic in 17 min?
The format is what it is and it is a powerful tool in attracting large audiences of people who may start thinking about stuff.
TED talks are not the end-all of intellectual thought, they are a showcase for some ideas and concerns that are otherwise often unreachable or the exclusive turf of a few intellectuals who remain largely among themselves.
Yes some people will reduce the idea to mere “creative thinking”, but there’s nothing wrong in the creative process that leads a person to create a new more efficient abattoir. Even this type of creativity which you seem to regard as second rate might prove very interesting in understanding creative processes and how to foster them in children and adults. Maybe even involving Arts.
I mean, how many people read (and understood, and took heed of) the report on the relevance of the arts to education you mention? How has it advanced the cause of Arts in Education? in society? in everything?
At least he got people talking, thinking, and a lot of us will go beyond this “caricature” and think further about it. As for the rest, well at least it may have made them think and question their assumptions for a bit. It can’t be so bad.
Our first interest is in the truth (not necessarily in the scientific sense of the word). Does what Ken say shed the light of truth on the matter in hand?
We are not experts. Ken must know far, far more than we do. But we did some reading about post-war educational policy and practice in the UK (summarised in the post about the history of the personalisation of education in the UK), and were very interested to see the radical elements that were accepted by all parties up until Thatcher took a battering ram to the consensus in the mid 70s. One of the principles was the autonomy of the teaching profession regarding the curriculum and the methods of teaching/learning. Another was the principle of comprehensive education with its egalitarianism.
The potential may never have been realised and the reality was probably everywhere more or less unpleasant for the kids (it didn’t strike me as being a bowl of cherries), but there was something there – a tradition – to be built on. Instead of letting teachers build on it, the government smashed it.
If there was a model of public education, it was a model of a highly egalitarian, comprehensive education organised to a large extent by teachers. To ignore that and project back the idea of a factory school is simply criminal. And what struck me was that people let him get away with it. And he didn’t seem phased by doing such an injustice to his ex-colleagues and to history.
Ken Robinson belongs up there with the really dangerous characters in society. He cunningly taps into pools of discontent, but then even more cunningly channels that desire for change so that the deepest drives of the individual (now in her Element, thanks to Ken’s self-help books) will be even more closely aligned with the demands of an essentially anti-individual system.
Resistance is the only way forward. Ken’s way – the way of increasing adjustment and increasing thoughtlessness and increasing contentment with a job well done and a bargain found and a hobby in the evenings to take your mind off things – leads off the edge of a cliff.
This article pretty much contradicts itself, you wish that Sir Ken’s message raises the level of public debate yet you critize that he is “dumbing it down”. I don’t see how the former can happen without the latter.
Awareness is the first step toward change. A majority of the public, needs to be made aware before you batter them with socioeconomic obstacles to your vision of change. To say you have a vision and immediately say that it will be too difficult to execute for a variety of reasons has no point.
“He creates the impression that there is no need to read anything” ? This I fear is an impression only you have since he often states that he doesn’t discount the need for the existing importance to topics like mathematics and the sciences but wishes equal importance is given to the arts.
Finally, we all contribute to society, and should, in the method we are best at. To expect him to express his ideas or create reform in places you think he should or in the way he should is a personal opinion and not a critique.
“…you wish that Sir Ken’s message raises the level of public debate yet you critize that he is “dumbing it down”. I don’t see how the former can happen without the latter.”
No need to add much to that, I think.
I have just given, as a listening test for ESOL students in New Zealand, the second of Robinson’s TED talks. It was not my choice to do so; rather, I was required by my school as part of New Zealand’s teaching regime: Unit Standards. Ironically, this regime is the very reverse of Robinson’s professed views:utterly standardized – standardized to the point of absurdity; and ironically, my freedom – or that of of any colleagues or students – to question Robinson was effectively rendered impossible by the digital technology that Robinson sees as the guarantor of diversity and creative thinking. I had to set the test; it and the lesson plan of which it was part arrived as a micromanaged fiat. Moreover, the test had nothing to say – literally no space – to oppose what Robinson had to say.
Here, I suggest, is the reality of digitizing education: neither diversity, nor creativity, nor critical thinking but dutiful repetition and adherence to ‘inspirational’ pundits such as Robinson. This is not revolution but received opinion. Education along such lines fits people to be the drones of cybercapitalism and contented consumers of its products.
Thank you, Stephen, for that heart-warming comment.