10 Things (I Think) I Think About the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)

Untested Hypothesis #7: Almost no one is a scholar.

Factoid: School kind of sucks. Or it can and often does.

Speaking of Sir Ken Robinson, the noted creativity expert,³⁷ he, too, is a TED-talk phenom.³⁸ His three popular TED-talks have amassed over 100 million plays — and nearly 80% of those plays are associated with a talk called “Do schools kill creativity?” His point is that, well, almost no one is a scholar and yet traditional schooling still pretends like everybody is. In Howard Gardner’s terms (who has similarly bemoaned the state of contemporary education on these grounds), school tends to focus on a narrow set of intelligences and it de-emphasizes (or utterly excludes) others. It must be noted that the narrow set of intelligences school tends to focus on are the same ones AI is pretty good at approximating.

My experience here is pertinent. I have spent the majority of my life in schools. Because my mother was a working, single mother, I went to daycare and pre-school as early as possible.  I went to three different elementary schools, two middle schools, and one high school. I went to a community college and two large state universities. The universities granted me three degrees, and I’m working on a fourth. I taught at both universities as a graduate student, and I’ve taught full-time at the aforementioned arts high school for the past twenty-three years. In that time — basically fifty years — I have spent a grand total of just three intermittent years “in the real world” (i.e., not as a teacher and/or student).

Still: I mostly hated school until I got to college, and only when I switched my major from Communications to English did I experience that inflection point in my learning. What’s interesting is that I actually enjoy scholarship, and I’m pretty good at the stuff school wants you to be good at. I’ve been in and around schools for so long, I know how to navigate the environment. There’s value in that, to be sure. But the returns are diminishing.

Robinson’s argument is trenchant (and enduring) because traditional schooling is positivist in nature. It not only problematizes divergent thinking, it often pathologizes it. And way too often, it’s boring and transactional.

No wonder (almost) no one is a scholar, and even so-called “scholars” like me are ambivalent (at best) about traditional schooling.

NEXT: Untested Hypothesis #8: But everybody hurts [searches].