Schools stuck in 19th Century Industrial Age, Sir Ken Robinson tells teachers
Sir Ken Robinson with Mira Costa faculty member William Brown, Superintendent Mike Mathews and faculty member Cindy Shortt. Photo by Christine Stout Nineteenth Century composer Gustav Mahler was rehearsing a new composition when one of his students interrupted him to ask what the new music was about. “It’s about this,” Mahler answered, and then proceeded to play the music over again. Sir Ken Robinson told the Mahler story during a talk to Mira Costa High School teachers and administrators last Wednesday in the school cafeteria. The previous evening the knighted author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything addressed 1,300 Distinguished Speaker Series subscribers at the RedondoPerformingArtsCenter. Robinsonn earned international recognition as a progressive educator in 2006 when his TED Conference address was viewed on YouTube by an estimated 200 million people. “What that demonstrated,” he told his SouthBay audiences, “is a global anxiety about the direction of education.” In both talks, Robinson made heavy use of anecdotes and British humor to ease the sting of his critique of current education. In the United States, 30 percent of ninth graders don’t graduate…
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