Education Revolution

The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art. The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such…Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with science—perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into computers for some reason or other. Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.

In the end, education has to do with fashioning certain kinds of individuals - the kinds of persons I (and others) desire the young of the world to become. I crave human beings who understand the world, who gain sustenance from such understanding, and who want - ardently, perennially - to alter it for the better. Such citizens can only come into existence if students learn to understand the world as it has been portrayed by those who have studied it most carefully and lived in it most thoughtfully; if they become familiar with the range - the summits, the valleys, the straight and meandering paths - of what other humans have achieved; and if they learn always to monitor their own lives in terms of human possibilities, including ones that have not been anticipated before.

It's excellent to have a well-rounded education, but notice how all of the areas are equal. In order to be intellectual human beings, we need to take every part of the intelligence pie into consideration. I believe this also goes hand in hand with the Ways of Knowing and the Areas of Knowledge in the TOK (Theory of Knowledge) curriculum.

“Kids will take a chance- if they don’t know, they’ll have a go. They’re not frightened of being wrong… and if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. By the time kids are adults they’ve lost that capacity, they’ve become scared of being wrong. This is how we run companies, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where a mistake is the worst thing you can make- educating children out of their creativity. That’s the problem: we get educated out of our creativity”

Imagination is the source of every form of human achievement. And it’s the one thing that I believe we are systematically jeopardizing in the way we educate our children and ourselves.

Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition, they are suffering from childhood.