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I have just read a really interesting post from a Blog that I follow “Broken Airplane” called “The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction”
This post made me think of the many challenges that we face in order to survive as a species on this planet. There is the threat of climate change, of deforestation, of hunger, famine, disease.
At times such as these, where our planet is under threat and the future of our children is so uncertain it seems strange that the one thing that may give us solutions, innovation, thinking outside the box…is the thing that is suffering by the test orientated, nineteenth century obsession with the passing on of a fixed body of information.
So many commentators such as Professor Yong Zhao have stated their conviction that the strength of western education lay in the promotion of innovation and the ability of students to create new solutions to our problems. This is exactly the sort of thing that we are now restricting more and more in our schools.
Will our species survive? We need solutions that we cannot even think of now and in order to get them we need to think of the importance of creativity and innovation in our schools, colleges and universities. It will be too late to say that we should have reacted sooner when we face the end of our fascinating yet very brief time on this planet.
Related articles
- Climate change : Could kill one in 10 species by end of the century! (environmentaleducationuk.wordpress.com)
- Helping the polar bear survive a warming world (theglobeandmail.com)
- Thinking Global with TGS and Yong Zhai (123elearning.blogspot.com)
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