This presentation talks about how our current education system fails to address the needs of today in the realm of economy, social, cultural, and personal. This presentation is based on idea presented by Sir Ken Robinson and a compilation of a few surveys mentioned in the Credits.

1. Manufacturing the Educated
A need for Educational Revolution

2. Are kids allowed to daydream at school?
• In 2008, IBM published a survey that asked organization leaders about the qualities that they need most in
their staff. They spoke with 1500 leaders in eighty countries. The leaders listed creativity and adaptability as
the top two priorities. They found these qualities lacking in many otherwise highly-qualified graduates.
• Adobe commissioned a survey of 1,068 hiring managers, “Seeking Creative Candidates: Hiring for the
Future,” which underscores the importance of creativity in the workplace. The survey indicates that both the
marketplace and technology are changing the evaluation criteria for candidates and increasing the need for
creativity in problem-solving. 70 percent of the hiring managers said that students are unprepared and lack
these necessary tools for success.
• On the surface, daydreaming seems like the antithesis of "work," yet it is truly at the core of our most
important type of productivity--creative problem-solving. That's why some of the most innovative
companies in the world feature programs that give key employees the time and space to think creatively, i.e.
daydream--Google offers a 20% free-thinking program, 3M has a 15% program, and Gore & Associates
features "dabble time”. All three companies credit these programs as the source of their most successful
products.
• Our current standardized education system can crush creativity and innovation, the very qualities on which
today’s economies depend.

3. Unlearning our natural ability to think divergently
• In 1968, scientist George Land conducted a study to test the creativity of 1,600 children ranging in ages from
three-to-five years old who were enrolled in a Head Start program. This was the same creativity test he
devised for NASA to help select innovative engineers and scientists. He re-tested the same children at 10
years of age, and again at 15 years of age. The results were astounding.
Test results amongst 5 year olds: 98%
Test results amongst 10 year olds: 30%
Test results amongst 15 year olds: 12%
Same test given to 280,000 adults: 2%
• Our current standardized education system teaches us non-creative behaviour and makes us lose our ability
for divergent thinking.

4. The purpose of education
• Economic - Education contributes to long term economic health, vitality, and sustainability. Education has
huge implications for economic prosperity. In the last twenty-five years, business has been transformed by
the rapid developments in digital technology and massive population growth. In the process, economic
competition has intensified in trade, manufacturing, and services. Governments know that a well-educated
workforce is crucial to national economic prosperity, and their policies are peppered with rhetoric about
innovation, entrepreneurship, and “twenty-first-century skills.”
• Cultural - Education is one of the main ways that communities pass on their values and traditions from one
generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences; for
others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance.
• Social - One of the declared aims of public education is to provide all students, whatever their backgrounds
and circumstances, with opportunities to prosper and succeed and to become active and engaged citizens.
In practice, education should promote attitudes and behaviours necessary for social stability.
• Personal - The need for all students to realize their potential and to live fulfilled and productive lives.

5. The perils of our current education system – The
industrial model
• The current education system was based on the economic model during the industrialization era. Schools
are modelled on industries
• The ringing bells
• The time table
• Education in batches based on age group
• Assessment based on standardized test
• The idea was: Work hard -> Do well -> Go to college -> Get a job.
• But getting a degree now may not be sufficient to get a job due to the economic turmoil, the competition,
and the corporatization.
• Standardization creates:
• Academically successful -> Contributing to GDP and higher social habitats
• Academically not successful -> Useless and lower social habitats
• Raising Standardization will just increase the problem

6. The perils of our current education system – Addressing
only conformity
• Our schools address the idea of conformity and not diversity.
• However, by nature, humans are different and come with different abilities.
• Kids of the same age can do better than others
• in some subjects
• in different parts of the day
• in small groups
• in large groups
• alone

7. Education vs Divergent thinking
• Divergent thinking can be simply defined as
• Ability to interpret a question in multiple ways
• Ability to think of multiple answers but not one
to a single question
• Divergent thinking is an essential capacity for
creativity.
• The naturally talented, brilliant people think they are
not good as the school did not value them as they are
stigmatized for who they are.

8. Policy makers and schools need to wake up to the
revolution
• To meet the new challenges, we need an education system that is not modelled on the factory lines but on
an organic, agricultural model. A farmer cannot stick a stem to its root or leaves to a stem. He can only sow
the seeds and create an environment where the plant will flourish.
• The heart of education is teaching and learning and not curriculum and standardization.
• The children are born with a voracious appetite to learn and teaching often not necessary. It is like speaking,
we can nudge them, correct them, but they learn it.
• Teaching is an art-form. Teachers need to be able to excite them, engage them, peak their imagination, need
to know enough to fuel them and need not know necessarily everything. Drive the passion, Get them to
learn what is necessary. Find points of entry.
• It is done in a classroom by actively involving the kids to learn and teach each other - by collaboration.
• In Harvard, now, there is an idea of a flipped class, where the entire physics dept. professors have stopped
lecturing and are participants in the class. If this works well, the idea is to push it from higher education to
elementary levels.
• The movement has started in the higher education with some premier educational institutions. It is time for
the policy makers to wake up to the fact. If not, they will be taken over by the revolution like the rock-and-
roll or the internet revolution.

9. References and Sources
Articles and surveys
• “The Enterprise of the Future.” IBM 2008 Global CEO Study.
• Seeking Creative Candidates: Hiring for the future
• Sparking creativity at the workplace
• Can creativity be taught?
TEd talks
• Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
• Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley
• Ken Robinson: Changing education paradigms
• Ken Robinson: How schools kill creativity