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Dean Ashenden takes on the sixties, GERM, and the world’s best-known educational revolutionary.
Ken Robinson is perhaps the most celebrated of schooling’s growing band of global gurus, presenter of the most-watched talk in the history of TED, commander of seven-figure speaking fees, profiled in Vanity Fair, and knight of the British realm. He is a prominent advocate of a “revolution” to “transform” schooling, a critic of the present “industrial” system of teaching, and an opponent of what he calls GERM (the global education reform movement) and its goal of “improving” a fundamentally outdated and dysfunctional educational form. He is by no means alone in holding these views. His new book, Creative Schools: Revolutionizing Education from the Ground Up, is a frontal assault in a gathering battle over what schooling is for and what it should look like.
Robinson makes two great contributions to this struggle. He grasps that something big is going on in and around schools, and he insists that the received way of conducting schooling is, at last, vulnerable. His account of what a “transformed” school does and can look like is incomplete but nonetheless inspiriting. There are, however, serious shortcomings in his understanding of present realities and future possibilities, and in his “theory of change.” It is possible to share his sense of urgency and possibility without subscribing to his understanding of how history works or his confidence that “time and tide are on the side of transformation”…
