AES109 Educational Conformity

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects, 

Every single one. Doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t.

At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.

Everywhere on Earth.

And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and Music are normally given a higher status in schools than Drama and Dance.

There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.

Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance.

Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. 

We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? 

Truthfully, what happens is as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up, and then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.

Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there’s a reason.

The whole system was invented to meet the needs of industrialism.

So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid.

Things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.

“Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician.”

“Don’t do art, you won’t be an artist.”

Benign advice. Now, profoundly mistaken.

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the Earth for a particular commodity.

And for the future, it won’t serve us.

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children.

-Sir Ken Robinson-

“If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatised.”