photo by extranoise
“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.”
“We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.”
B. F. Skinner, 1904-1990, psychologist
Tag Archive for 'Education'
Every year, innovators and progressive thinkers get together to talk about BIG ideas that can change the world at a conference called TED (stands for Technology Education and Design). At some point soon, I hope to be able to afford the $6000 sticker price of membership, as well as a career trajectory that makes me an a worthy applicant. In the interim, I’m just the glad the’ net allows leaks of inspiration from that annual event.
Sir Ken Robinson gave a great presentation in 2006 regarding creativity, or the lack thereof, in education and the way we define intelligence. It’s a 20 minute talk worth listening to. If you don’t want to listen–he’s got great delivery– you can read his talk here.
To encourage you to stick around, here is one of my favorite quotes from his talk:
Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
His talk is inspirational and full of salient anecdotes that make you think.
I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.
I completely credit Craig Rubens over at NewTeeVee for my discover of slam poet and educator advocate Taylor Mali. On Friday, Craig posted a YouTube clip of Mali performing, and I was hooked. So I dug up 2 more videos on YouTube. In the event I didn’t e-mail them to you directly, all 3 are posted below.
What Do Teachers Really Make
The The Impotence of Proofreading (typos intended)
Totally, Like Whatever
Research firm Catalyst follows the trail of executive level female business leaders and the effects they have in the workplace. Recent studies have found women to be to be a vital component to executive management, so much so that there appears to be a link to a company’s fiscal success.
On average, companies with the highest percentages of women board directors outperformed those with the lowest; by 66% return on invested capital (ROI), 53% in return on equity (ROE) and 42% return on sales (ROS).
Companies with boards including at least three women evidently dominate in all three business measures of seven different sectors with the exception of “financial” and “materials.” (October 1, 2007, Forbes)
These findings should come of no surprise to anyone. In college the required reading for a health care management class I took included Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not?: The Determinants of Health of Populations (Social Institutions and Social Change) (Social Institutions and Social Change).
Covering a number of studies, the authors concluded that the health of a society is directly correlated with the relative freedoms granted to women of that society.
It does beg the question, why did Catalyst find that only 14.7% of Fortune 500 boards make room for women as of 2006 (albeit, a decent increase over the 9.6% in 2005)? Perhaps the shortage of female senior management will see improvement as well in the near and distant future. Hopefully, we’ll see women reach parity at the executive and Board levels in the next few decades.
Women are now earning 58% of bachelor’s degrees and a matching share of graduate degrees
Today, women earn 67 percent of education doctorates, 26 percent of physical science degrees and 18 percent of engineering degrees, according to a federal survey. Women are also the majority of doctoral candidates in the social sciences, humanities, and, for the first time ever, in life sciences. (Grad Schools.com)
The pursuit of higher by women is outpacing that of men, which will increasingly bring women to the market who can track in the towards executive level careers.
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