This video is an animated version of Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on creativity and the role of schools. The gist of his talk: “We are educating people out of their creativity”. He claims that this is because of standardisation in education. Education has become like a factory production line, where students are “manufactured” like batches of products. As a result, creativity has suffered. Therefore, he says that education should focus on “divergent thinking”, thinking about many solutions, not just one solution. Robinson also says that there should be focus on “collaboration”. Because the best ideas come from the exchange of ideas from small, focused groups. Finally, he also says that we should open the “hearts” of our children, especially the arts. We need to engage them.
His speech makes a lot of sense and he makes valid criticisms. This is also what other educators have been talking about. Just like Tony Wagner and his seven survival skills.
Creativity: RGC’s Solution
But what about us at RGC Future School? We have thought long and hard at this problem. And we believe that we can offer a solution. First of all, what better way of engaging them by using of one the “distractions” that Robinson cited. Why do students find school boring? Because of the traditional methods of presentation. Children are fed multi-media since they were young – television, the internet, PSP etc. So why not use these media to engage them?
How about collaboration? In RGC, we use technology to aid communication between students, whether they are in the classrooms or at home. Our youths use these tools to communicate any – What’sApp, Instagram, Snap Chat etc. We teach them how to work meaningfully and constructively together. But not only that, we believe that collaboration should go beyond just student – teacher. The parents are equally important and we will use our technology to communicate and collaborate with parents to help improve their children’s learning.
Finally, how do we get our children to have divergent thinking? We have processes and guidelines to get them to think creatively and critically: how to infer, check for reliability and generate ideas. Then we rip all these guidelines apart. How can there be critical and creative thinking if we bind our children with rules?
At RGC, we embrace the new paradigm by teaching skills required for the 21st Century.
RGC Future School has been offering English, Math and Science tuition and enrichment classes since 1988. We pride ourselves as subject specialists, creating exploratory, educational and inspirational programmes for each subject taught in the centre.
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At RGC, your children are not just our students. They are our extended family. We love mentoring them, following their development and seeing them turn into young adults.
If you have any questions about our programme, please fill free to call us at 6344-3398 or WhatsApp us at 8793-7133.