Our system of education is slipping because it’s an industry that has not evolved.
This RSA Animate of Sir Ken Robinson’s speech on education and creativity reveals the root-causes of our public school system’s problems.
Education’s attempts to evolve are degenerative because the way we try to solve education problems is by piling on more of what we are already doing:
- Learn more stuff
- Take more tests
- Make the tests harder
- Cut out the soft artsy stuff
Education won’t improve until the system truly evolves to meet the needs of both modern students and the modern world.
Those needs are:
- Solid writing skills
- Competent public speaking skills
- A functional knowledge of computer safety and core functionality
- An understanding of civil rights
- Adaptability to uncertainty
- Teamwork & collaboration
- Ability to think beyond the textbook and lecture
- A willingness to combine different disciplines and search for new ways of solving old problems
- Comfort in some form of artistic expression
- A strong understanding of the basics of science, math, language, and history (specialization should be selected based on the student’s interests and abilities)
Making kids endlessly memorize content and process isn’t working. Cut back the memorization, and focus on developing real skills.
The Geek Whisperer 
Memorization will always be a vital part of good education. What I think we need to improvise on is what students need to memorize. Think of ‘padding’ in writing. We don’t need to read the padding. So it is with memorization. What most teachers require us to memorize is unnecessarily ‘padded’.
I hear you Poch.
An example of what I’m talking about is way we teach math. We teach students to memorize endless processes, but we don’t teach them how they work, or why you’d want to know them.
What does algebra work? Why would you want to know it.
My suggestion is that students would benefit more from truly understanding fewer ideas, than they do from learning a tiny bit about a ton of things, and not really understanding any of it.