In a recent Time article, “Rhee Tackles Classroom Challenge,” author Amanda Ridley profiles Washington, DC Education Chancellor, Michelle Rhee, and her unconventional and some would say ruthless efforts to fix the educational problems in the district.

At the 2006 TED conference, Sir Ken Robinson, gave a (hilarious) speech titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”

And on YouTube, you can watch “Shift Happens” about education and the exponentially changing future.

And if you read the article and watch these short films, what will you come away with? What will you learn about how and what to teach? About the structural and system-based problems in education and about the content challenges?

From Ken Robinson, you will learn that the most important thing we can nurture in children is their creativity. From Rhee, you will learn that the most important goal is verbal and mathematical literacy and the most effective means to achieve this is great teachers. From “Shift Happens,” you will have to deeply assess what enables humans to keep up with a rapidly changing world, and you may conclude that critical thinking, flexibility, ability to innovate and learn quickly, and core character traits will be essential for confronting rapidly evolving technologies. And you might think that these different approaches are, at least in part, mutually exclusive.

I don’t think they are. From each of these educational critiques I have learned something that inspires my top five list of things to do to make education as effective and positive as it can and must be:

1. Hire only great teachers and pay them what we pay doctors and lawyers. By great teachers, I mean those who: are passionate about teaching; are great communicators; demand excellence from their students and have the results to demonstrate that excellence; are creative; inspire love of learning; elicit critical thinking and innovation; love and support their students. Fire teachers who fail at achieving these goals, the same way we would take away a doctor’s license for malpractice or disbar a lawyer for ethics violations.
2. Revise curricula for the 21st century. Make what we teach children relevant to a rapidly changing world. In history, make the world of yesterday relevant to today. In literature, make the protagonists of classics relevant to today’s youth. In math, make equations relevant to solving today’s problems. Then, use the curriculum as a guide, not as a bible. Keep classes small, flexible, and conducive to both creativity and the understanding of current events.
3. Make living sustainably, peaceably, and as contributing global citizens and problem-solvers the overarching goal of education.
4. Make school buildings places of innovation themselves. Every school should be green, built or retrofitted to be as sustainable as possible, to be a lab for problem-solving, conducive to learning, and healthy and life-enhancing.
5. Have humane education infuse all courses and teach humane issues and problem-solving for a humane world through required courses at all levels of schooling.

That’s my top five. What are yours?

~ Zoe

Filed under: education, humane education Tagged: | creativity, critical thinking, education, educational policy, humane education, problem solving, students, teachers