Quincy Jones Makes Eloquent Plea for Arts Education

"Every great society from the Egyptians, to the Greek and Roman Empires, has been defined by its cultural contributions. The commercial benefits of the arts not withstanding -- our artistic endeavors are a consistent source of revenue in the United States and our nation's largest export -- can we really run the risk of becoming a culturally bankrupt nation because we have not inserted a curriculum into our educational institutions that will teach and nurture creativity in our children?"

In the Huffington Post (dated May 9), jazz icon Quincy Jones calls for a plan of action to "make music education an ongoing part of the lives of children in the United States."

Astronaut Mae Jemison on Reintegrating the Arts and Sciences

Mae Jemison, best known for being the first African American woman in space, presents a new vision of learning that combines arts and sciences, intuition and logic in a February TED Talk.

Making Learning Whole by David Perkins

In his latest book Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education, David Perkins presents an alternative to the superficiality and fragmentation inherent in so much of today's teaching and learning. Perkins, who is co-director of Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, diagnoses today's education as suffering from "elementitis" (learning all the elements of a subject without learning the whole) and "aboutitis" (learning about a subject without doing it). He presents his seven principles by connecting them to the way countless kids become skilled to some degree in the game of baseball.

Here is the complete list of principles is:

1. Play the whole game.
2. Make the game worth playing.
   
3. Work on the hard parts.
4. Play out of town.
5. Uncover the hidden game.
6. Learn from the team . . . and other teams.
7. Learn the game of learning.

"Play the whole game" is the first of the seven principles —and it's the overarching one. Perkins says playing a "junior version" of the whole game, often involving some type of inquiry or performance that crosses disciplines, is what promotes the kind of understanding that students will be able to apply in a range of contexts.

"Make the game worth playing" is ensuring "immediately meaningful active engagement.

"Work on the hard parts" is isolating and practicing skills and focusing on conceptually difficult knowledge (but integrating them as quickly as possible into the whole).

"Play out of town" is promoting transfer by encouraging reflective abstraction and simulating diverse applications of knowledge and skill, as well as making connections to prior knowledge.

"Uncover the hidden game" is paying attention to the processes of inquiry, thinking and problem-solving that are beneath the surface of student work.

"Learn from the team" is paying attention to the sociocultural context through various group learning strategies.

"Learn the game of learning" is promoting self-direction.

Playing for Change

Between deadlines, visitors, and traveling, I have been losing my steam, but I will persevere. Before I get back into my Save the World Academy series, I will do a couple of brief posts about randoms things. First, have you seen Playing for Change?

A mobile recording studio is capturing music from all over the world. We get to see videos reminding us that we are all in this together.

Save the World Academy #3: The Beginning

Education—preparing a child to fulfill his or her unknown but vitally important destiny—begins before birth. It begins before a child is born and plays a lifelong role. Some might say a quality education begins when parents commit with open eyes, focused minds, and loving, unselfish hearts to their relationship as a couple and their role as parents. I agree, but in this scenario, the babies are already on the way. Ready or not, their mothers will be bringing them into the world later this year.

So the best our new system can do is get to work immediately to ensure that the mothers of these infants receive excellent prenatal care. We need to provide families living in older homes with free inspections to identify environmental problems like mold or lead and immediate assistance with rectifying those types of problems. We need to make sure parents have access to courses in parenting, nutrition, and other aspects of raising babies and young children. For those infants who do not have two parents, we need to look for ways to make sure that the family and community provide a solid circle of loving people in each child's life.

With the stakes so high, our system must take responsibility help these infants' parents get whatever education or job training they need in order to ensure decent living conditions for their families. For those whose mothers need or want to work, we must create child care facilities that provide every child with attention, love, and stimulation. We must improve salary and working conditions for early childcare providers. Employers of the parents should be part of the system—beginning by creating facilities or policies that ensure adequate time for parents to be with their children, as well as fair wages.

Our system must find a way to provide all children with quality pediatric care and dental care. Along with preventive care, children must receive immediate treatment and follow-up care upon diagnosis of problems with hearing, vision, or other potential health problems.

As a system responsible for saving the world, we must look at the neighborhoods where these infants will be living. Here is a checklist of the conditions needed:

• Absence of safety hazards and environmental toxins
• Green places for children to play and explore
• Centers where families can come together to socialize and form community bonds, as well as obtain help with meeting their nutritional and medical needs if necessary
  
• Places where babies and children will have access to books and art and educational toys
• Programs where parents can work on their own literacy and job skills, talk about parenting issues, and learn about their children's early literacy needs

Expensive? Yes. But we just don't have any way to count the cost of not doing it.

Save the World Academy #2: Some Beginning Questions

My last post began a series that will explore a question posed by Rob Jacobs at the Education Innovation blog: "If we were inventing the educational organization today, what would we come up with?" I decided to try focusing on students by proposing a scenario called Save the World Academy. To summarize: We know that one or more of the infants to be born in some unnamed Ohio community later this year will save the world at some future time. Since somehow we have forgotten everything about the current education system, we must create a new education system to make sure that these babies are ready when that time comes. What's the plan? (See the last post for a more detailed explanation of this imaginary dilemma.)

In reinventing the education system, I propose that we first consider the question "What is education?" Then we must begin defining the term "education system."

Clearly, in a scenario that will either destroy or save the world, education is an enterprise with the mission of preparing each child to fulfill an unknown destiny of earth shattering importance.

Pretty vague, I know. But what if that were our definition? Maybe it should be. After all, we can't really predict what expertise or mode of thinking will be the most critical in a future scenario with consequences of the highest stakes. Although I suppose many people's imaginations would leap immediately to a scientific discovery or the invention of a new technology, the pivotal event could just as well be an ethical decision or a conflict resolved through social and emotional intelligence. It might be a journalist's article that calls attention to a preventable disaster or an artist's creation of a work that inspires a shift in thinking. Or the turning point in human history could be a course of events that requires all of those outcomes to unfold smoothly.

What qualities or habits of mind will be decisive? Self-control, empathy, flexibility, courage, team spirit, or countless others are possibilities.

Can we even assume that the world's fate will hinge on how we conceive of human greatness? A critical link in an apocalyptic chain of events could end up being the competence and diligence of an entry level worker (whatever that may be in the future), a middle manager's knack for counseling a frustrated employee, or a technician's ability to mentor an apprentice.

Then again, maybe it will be a respected expert who saves the world—but not in the way expected. The great rescue might occur not because of an expert's superior knowledge but because of his or her willingness to look for ideas in an unfamiliar realm, listen to an assistant's idea, or share data with a competitor.

In this scenario, we can't predict what event or conditions will save the world, so the education system will have to do the best job possible to educate the whole child. It must ensure a whole spectrum of opportunities while also finding ways to help each child blossom. (I know "blossom" is a word seldom used in policy discussions, but I think it's the only word that fits. And after all we are starting over here.)

That brings us to the task of developing a working definition of an education system? I propose that constructing our education system must be more than creating places called school and designating an agency to govern them. The whole world is an education system. Perhaps educating the child who will save the world will take the combined knowledge and skills and the concerted investment of every type of institution in our society—along with authentic and deep collaboration.

The next entry will look at the beginning of life and the question "When does education begin?" But I will revisit these working definitions of education and education system as the series unfolds.

"Save the World Academy"—Join Me in Exploring a Scenario

Exploring a concept Clayton Christensen calls "disruptive" innovation and bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas are signature elements of the Education Innovation blog by Rob Jacobs. In his March 23 entry, he introduces Larry Burns, a General Motors vice president who has been leading the firm's efforts in developing alternative ways to power cars.

Imagining the mode of questioning Burns must use at GM, Jacobs asks: "If we were inventing the educational organization today, what would we come up with?"

Let's see: How would I begin to answer that question?

I would begin where all the wise educators begin—with the student. In reflecting and talking to others about the challenges of reinventing the system, I might begin by considering this imaginary scenario:

Imagine. Somehow, we have erased all memory of the rules, roles, and routines of what we call the education system. Our state has suspended its accountability system, its system for teacher credentials, its method of funding schools. Everything is subject to change.

Now here's the twist: Somehow, we have learned that the future depends on one group of infants who will be born later this year in one Ohio community. Somehow we know that around the year 2040, the fate of the whole world will depend on what kind of adults this one particular group of kids turns out to be.

We don't know what the events will be. Maybe one of them will have the kind of scientific or technological potential needed to save the planet from a pandemic. Or maybe one of them will have the opportunity to avert a worldwide holocaust or influence a critical mass of people to stop polluting and wasting before it's too late. Maybe it will be the butterfly effect—one of them will press the right button at the right time or do a small, seemingly insignificant kindness that will snowball into a course of events with worldwide import.

Or maybe the world's future will be secured by their combined impact as citizens of the globe, members of their local communities, lifelong learners, producers, consumers, leaders, innovators, and caregivers of those yet to be born. Maybe each will contribute—some in more dramatic ways, others in small, barely perceptible ways—but all will be necessary to our common future.

We don't know who, and we don't know how—but we know that the consequences of educating this group will determine the future existence of humanity.

As soon as the news hits, each community is told to develop a plan for ensuring the best possible outcome. I and nine other people I select will be creating this plan.

Doing everything possible to help these children begin life with a good support system will be the first step in saving the world.

What will need to be in place? If you are an advocate for the care and early education of our youngest children, please add your comments to this blog or become a member of the Artful Innovation wiki. I will incorporate your ideas in next week's second installment of "The Save the World Academy."

Robinson's The Element Reminds Us to Tend to the Lifeworld

My state, Ohio, has been reeling for some time from the wave of job losses that is just beginning to affect some states. Many people—from blue-collar workers to skilled trades people to educated professionals with solid track records—are contemplating choices they never thought they would have to make. Choices like:

• Should I wait out this drop in the construction trades or start college at age 40?


• Should I go back to college at age 50 for a second degree that will improve my "marketability?"?


• Should I move to where the job market is better—which means uprooting my family and selling my house at little or no profit? Or should I stay here and settle for a job that realizes a fraction of my potential?


• At what point will I take whatever job I can get so we can keep our house?

With those kinds of dilemmas all over the news, the vision of Ken Robinson's book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything is truly a revolutionary one. The current job market and the jobs President Obama is trying to stimulate seem to be largely for those whose "Element" is science, technology, engineering, and health care. Those certainly are pressing needs that must be met. But I think many who have been hit hard by the economic downturn may not be able to have the dream of working in a job that epitomizes their aptitude and passion. I fear that today's jobseekers who want to avoid major disruptions in their lifestyles will need to find that outside of the job world. I hope today's children and young people won't be in that position down the road.

As we rebuild, I hope to see some new dimensions of economic development emerge—a real attempt to begin making full use of human potential.

Thomas Sergiovanni wrote about "lifeworld" and "systemsworld." (Based on the work of sociologist Jurgen Habermas). The lifeworld deals with goals and purposes and is concerned with culture, meaning, and significance. The systemsworld deals with methods and means and is concerned with efficiency, outcomes, and productivity. He said that the two are symbiotic and that the lifeworld should be “at the center as a driving force for what goes on” while the systemsworld should be "at the periphery." With our systems—infrastructure, health care, financial—in serious need of attention, I think Robinson's book is an important reminder of why we are fixing those systems and the vision to which we should aspire.

Ken Robinson's The Element Reveals a Higher Purpose for Schools

Back in February, I posted my thoughts on Ken Robinson's The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything after watching a video of his remarks on the book. Now that I have finished reading it, I recommend it to everyone thinks about the true purpose of education and wonders how to fulfill that purpose.

"The Element," says Robinson, "is the meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion." When people are in their element, he says, "they find that time passes differently and that they are more alive, more centered, and more vibrant than at other times."

Robinson reveals the Element by telling the stories of people who found it. Invariably, those people succeeded in their careers and made a difference in the lives of others. For most, someone early in life recognized their aptitude or passion and provided opportunities for them to enter and grow in the Element. Many of them had to overcome indifference or resistance. Some, including Robinson himself, found the Element after, or perhaps even because of, disabilities or other circumstances most would call adversity. Although Robinson is best known for sharing examples of students whose lives were changed by the arts, the stories in this book reflect the diversity inherent in true success. Some people profiled found the Element through the arts but for others it was through other academic areas, as well as through athletics, entrepreneurship, cooking, philanthropy, and other pursuits.

With his trademark humor, Robinson weaves in the themes that he has been writing and speaking about for years. He debunks myths about creativity, such as the common view that it's a quality possessed by an elite few. He opposes the industrial model of education that promotes teaching to the test. He suggests doing away with the hierarchy of "subjects" in favor of a more fluid interplay across disciplines. He proposes that the curriculum be personalized, which entails more freedom for good teachers to work in their own Element. This book reinforces those themes, and makes the case that finding and nurturing the aptitudes and passions of each individual is the path to transformation and growth not only for education systems but also for all other aspects of human endeavor.

Themes Instead of Subjects—Interesting to Consider

"Rethinking Education," an article by Julian Richardson in Sunday's Jamaica Observer, proposes that Jamaican high schools think about the humanities curriculum in terms of "life themes" that have "obsessed all cultures and all peoples in one way or another." Examples include 'The Origins of the Universe', 'Representations of God', 'Food and Nature', 'The Individual and the Common Good', 'Racial Differences and the Other', 'Gender Identity and Sexual Relations', 'Marriage and Family', 'Civil Life and Political Systems', 'Aging and Death', 'Art and Beauty', and 'Work, Tools and Technology'. (The article expands on each of these.)

Richardson proposes students would be more engaged in these themes than they are in things like "history" or "geography." Examples of arts integrated instruction in books such as Third Space: Where Learning Matters by Lauren Stevenson and Richard Deasy from the Arts Education Partnership, certainly could support that hypothesis.