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Ken Robinson on creativity and education

July 30, 2006 By Learning, Unschooling 6 Comments

Have a listen to Sir Ken Robinson, from the TED conference, on creativity and education.   It’s a great talk filled with humour and deep insight about how the public education system does not serve creativity, children or our collective future.   Some quotes:

All kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them.

Creativity is as important as literacy and we should teach it with the same status.

Kids will take a chance…if they don’t know, they’ll have a go.   They’re not frightened of being wrong…If you’re not prepared to be wrong you’ll never come up with anything original…We stigmatize mistakes.

We don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it, or more precisely we are educated out of it.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology…we have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we are educating our children.

We may not see this future but [our children] will, and our job is help them make something of it.

Go listen to the lecture and let me know what you think…

Stepping into flow

July 29, 2006 By Art of Hosting, Facilitation, Practice 2 Comments

I’m preparing to teach at an Art of Hosting gathering in Nova Scotia in a few weeks and as part of the conversations on design, we have been talking a little about what is required in order to confidently step into chaotic and unknown spaces.

This morning, my friend and other co-host Toke Paludan Moeller sent a short poem from an Aikido master that sums it up nicely:

When you step up,
claim the mat as your own.
Everybody you encounter
and everything that happens
is there by your invitation
and your invitation alone,
even the unexpected ones.

Your job is to respond with
grace and compassion.
You can’t hide and you can’t fake it;
we will all see.

Let the skills you have learned
and the wisdom of this art
flow through you
and all will be well.

[tags] aikido, art of hosting[/tags]

Follow the resonance

July 28, 2006 By Appreciative Inquiry, Learning 3 Comments

David, a friend of mine, and I were having a conversation the other day about religion, We were both trying to understand our present day connection to Christianity. For him, he was trying to reconcile faith with his humanist upbringing and I related how I was very interested for a time in becoming a Minister when I was a teenager, and since then drifted away from mainstream Christianity although I have had an enduring, although somewhat academic, interest in Christian spirituality. It only creeps into practice through music: I sing in a Christian Evensong chorale and that experience has brought me into closer contact with Christianity.   I still do not call myself a Christian, unable to accept the truth of belief as stated in the Nicene Creed.

Ironically however, singing has not brought me closer to Christian teaching per se, but rather has drawn me closer to the inspiration for the music, tapping some of the same spirit that Bach and Bruckner and Verdi sensed.
I have written a little over the years about Christianity, and I’m number one on Google for “beatitudes vs. ten commandments”, because of this post from a few years ago. There is much that resonates with me about Christianity, and especially from the example of Christ’s life. But there is much that I cannot abide, like the tales of genocide in the Old Testament in the name of the God that sent Christ to earth.

So in conversation with my friend I expressed a concern that so much of Christian sacred text seems to me to be pointless, and yet, if one takes this as necessarily complete, then it all must come with the territory. I can figure out how Leviticus or Daniel applies to my life today, and I cannot accept those prescritions on my life and family. So am I just to selcect and pick and choose?   How is it that Christians reconcile their belief in the Bible as the exclusive source of their religion with some of the strange things that are contained in there?
My friend David gave me the appreciative answer to this question: notice what resonates with you and honour that response. There must be something to it.   This is not the answer that serves to move one closer to becoming a practicing Christian, but it is a useful response for a non-Christian in understanding the value of these stories and the traditions that have supported them for thousands of years
And here, finally, is good advice.   If we work on tuning ourselves, we can become more and more sensitive to what might land on us and find ways to incorporate that into the evolving beings that we are.

Chaos and mindfulness in flow

July 27, 2006 By Organization, Practice 4 Comments

I am a very mindful driver.   For me driving is an exercise in flow and self-organization and I even see it as a bit of a giving practice.

So I was intensely interested when my friend Kathryn Thompson told me of an article entitled “Why don’t we do it in the road? recently published in Salon, which talks about how to make streets safer by removing controls.

“One of the characteristics of a shared environment is that it appears chaotic, it appears very complex, and it demands a strong level of having your wits about you,” says U.K. traffic and urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie, speaking from his home in Bristol. “The history of traffic engineering is the effort to rationalize what appeared to be chaos,” he says. “Today, we have a better understanding that chaos can be productive.”

In the past, in this space, I posted a video of traffic in India which demonstrates this point.

Chaos does make us more mindful.   We make better choices in more chaotic environments because we pay much closer attention to the subtleties of what is happening around us.   You cannot be on your cellphone, or talking to others or letting your mind wander when you are driving in unregulated traffic.   You have to use all of the capacities that every driving instructor tries to teach you when you are sixteen.   Pay attention, anticipate, leave space and be careful.   Good advice for a chaotic world.

Learning to fly

July 27, 2006 By Uncategorized

In a meeting yesterday we were discussing the fact that the human species is approaching a cliff, a massive precipice, and that we have so far been completely unable to figure out how to turn back from the edge.

I suggested that maybe it’s too late for that and we only have time to teach each other how to fly.