Same comments as the ones you have on missed opportunities at school. I would have spent more time studying fields like arts & humanities…

Regarding how education should look like in the future, well, I agree with Thomas Friedman in “The world is flat” ( http://wikisummaries.org/The_World_Is_Flat ) when he says that somehow education must make people become “synthesizers”. Synthesizers are the opposite of rigid mindsets. They mix various influences (cultures, arts…) and skills (math, IT…) to enable them to create new products/ideas/concepts and to be better responsive to the unknown…

Being French and having been educated in the French educational system, I fully understand how being trained early on as an “expert” in a specific field narrows down your visions and reduces opportunities… It requires much more efforts to counterbalance your unbalanced education. It becomes a personal investment and quest, a sort of continuous improvement (“kaizen”, right?) to learn new skills and explore new areas. To me, the goal of education should be to give you the taste for learning and exploring new areas, always…

I recently came across this video TED that also illustrates how education sometimes hinders our thinking process: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jonathan_drori_on_what_we_think_we_know.html

Thanks for the blog, for the book… PZ is a great source of inspiration!

As a professional educator, I echo Sir Ken's and your own comments.

To answer your question, the best clue I have today (tomorrow will be different of course) is CCK08 - http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism

For something that humans do so well, we still know very little about learning...

This is where I went to K-12 (boarding) school, in Oxford from 1974 to 1978 : the Dragon School (http://www.dragonschool.org).

With great music, art, sport and academic results, they still watered the playground during freezing nights to organise sliding and skating the next day; they organised snow fights on the sports' grounds, and put off classes to warmer days.

Excellent teachers with great personalities, principles and a long termine strategy, defended by a strong and respected headmaster : simply one of the best schools in the world.

Rup

There are some interesting points here, but at least in the US it's not true that math and science are at the top and things like art and dance are at the bottom. In most states high school curricula, only 2 years of science and 3 of math are required (4 years total). The math you can take to pass is often pretty weak. California and New York are the strictest at requiring algebra.

Meanwhile, many states require 4 years of physical ed, and nearly every kid does extracurricular sports, dance, etc.

The US will be importing tens of thousands of foreign students to grad school, and to industrial jobs in science and engineering for a long time to come, I think.

The problem with the 19th century mentality around education is that all assessment is quantitative. Unfortunately, creativity cannot be measured so easily in quantitative terms. Nor can the interdisciplinary, authentic, inquiry-based learning activities which are gaining popularity. I think as more teachers make it the responsibility of the learners to learn, students will begin to learn in ways that make sense for them individually. It is more important today to learn how to learn than to learn facts that will be outdated with two or three years.

The biggest irony of all is the fact that, given today's technology, it is incredibly easy to be creative. Long ago, I wanted to work in a recording studio with access to a $250,000 Ampex 16 track tape recorder. I now have software on my laptop that is more powerful and cost next to nothing.

I am a teacher and I agree Ken Robinson's point of view but I think that we can boost creativity not only adding subjectes like dance or music but changing the students role from passive to active on every field.

Let's teach them to think, analyze, create contents, solve problems, criticize, make questions, share with others, do real team working...

Educational changes take time but there are some new ways to teach and learn. For example "Problem Based Learning" (PBL, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning) a student centered strategy instead of the typical teacher centered one.

I try to add methods that increase my students participation and creativity although it is not always so easy to do :)

As an example, I taught last year a subject about using Microsoft Office. We obviously did Word, Excel and Powerpoint. Instead of just explaining how to use the Powerpoint tool I talked them about how to create visual presentations and I presented them "Death by Powerpoint" and "Taking your slide deck to the next level".

They did some presentations and they were still with the old way, putting a lot of text, many bullets and awful Powerpoint templates. Some sessions later almost everyone grabbed the idea and then they had to make an oral presentation on a particular subject (and I assessed them and put them marks).

I uploaded the best ones to slideshare.net and they are very visual. Actually, if you don't see the student speaking you won't get most of the presentation (unless you read the notes). Well, that was the idea, the student IS the presentation and the slides helps him or her to make it funnier, more visual, etc.

These presentations are in Spanish or Catalan but you can see at least that they are simple and quite visual. Don't expect to find awsome presentations but I'm really proud of my students work ;)

You can reach them at my SlideShare account:

http://www.slideshare.net/carlescv/slideshows

I think it is less an issue of what is taught than how it is taught. Creativity and intellectual curiosity in any subject can be killed by limiting the material students are given (have you read a high school textbook recently?), and any subject, even the more left-brain ones, can be exciting and creativity-inspiring under the right circumstances.

I just hope that educators are able to embrace new technologies and post-industrial ways of learning effectively. So many ideas get reduced to the education-institution version of bumper sticker wisdom, meaningless catchphrases that don't actually change the way anyone does things.