Comment

Comment by Dr. Timothy Mundell on September 8, 2012 at 2:55pm

Ken Robinson speaks so many truths about teaching and learning.  The agricultural paradigm has tremendous merit as we try to insure every student makes progress according to a State prescribed plan. Of course, organic beings are not inanimate items on an assembly line, and the convergence of State expectations confounds the innate understandings we have as educators about how we handle the humanity of education, leaving us hoping that the bureaucrats will see this and other Ken Robinson videos and grasp a sense of what the practitioners on the ground understand.  In the end, there is a place for a "growth model" to measure student development, even while we have affective measures in place to address the very complex circumstances which each student brings to school each day that require school resources.  Often, the affective work must remain invivisble to protect confidentiality because it is often individual work and not a "program."  In the end, centralized management of this very local work inhibits the progress we can make in raising good citizens because we are forced to treat our "crops" as items on an assembly line, losing the personal touch.