Ken Robinson Explains How to Escape the Death Valley of American Education

Right now, you can find 1,520 TED Talks com­piled into a neat online spread­sheet. That’s a lot of TED Talks. And the most pop­u­lar one (in case you’re won­der­ing) was deliv­ered by Sir Ken Robin­son in 2006. If you reg­u­lar­ly vis­it our site, then chances are you’re among the 20 mil­lion peo­ple who have viewed Robin­son’s talk on why Schools Kill Cre­ativ­i­ty. There’s also a good chance that you’ll want to watch his new­ly-released TED Talk, How to Escape Edu­ca­tion’s Death Val­ley. Filmed just last month, this talk takes aim at Amer­i­ca’s test-cen­tric edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem, a sys­tem that increas­ing­ly treats edu­ca­tion as an indus­tri­al process and bleeds cre­ativ­i­ty and curios­i­ty out of our class­rooms. You get that prob­lem when you put tech­nocrats and politi­cians, not teach­ers, in charge of things. And you’re only going to get more of it (sor­ry to say) as com­put­er sci­en­tists start putting their stamp on Amer­i­ca’s edu­ca­tion­al future.

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