There are times in my life (most of the time really,) when I feel like the public school system is ripping me off. Sir Ken Robinson brings up a fascinating point in his talk “Changing Paradigms”. He says that the public school system is still based on models “…Conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution.”

What does this tell us about how we educate the most technologically and culturally diverse generation the world has ever seen? Personally, I feel that if something doesn’t change soon, we’ll be screwed. Which led to this poem, if you’d be so generous as to call it that.

 

My mind only works in a room with four walls
Bricked in, boxed in, tricked into mental activity
I’m a six-digit number, and nothing more,
802784, that’s what they call me
Now, you could argue that education
Is the future of our glorious nation
But what we’re taught is what we know,
And shouldn’t that cause agitation
Among the older generation,
Because what ARE we taught?
How to count off consecutive primes,
Useless information, filling our minds

And at the end we may say “two and two is five”
But at least we’ll know that we’re alive
With nobody to say what we can’t do
And not even the sky is the limit now
Just an inconvenience between us and space
We can teach each other why and how
And expand the limits of the human race
We’ll march on and show no fear,
We can say “Turn, hellhound, turn!”
That’s right, I just quoted Shakespear,
Bet you didn’t see that coming

When you can change the world
With a blog, and a link
From boingboing, or slashdot, think
Of your potential
For monumental achievement
Experimental education is not the devil’s work
But idle hands are his workshop,
And we’ve all but stopped caring,
Not daring to think,
Not stopping to blink, then wake up, get down
Make up for the wasted years,
All that’s in the way is your own fears
Of the unknown, let’s change the tone
Throw the stone of change
And then ignore my crappy metaphor
What else is in store
For humanity, in reality, I can’t say
A tragic tragedy, maybe,
But not today, this is our day,
Our sunset, our sunrise,
That I’ll analyze with my own two eyes,
And draw my own conclusion
About where that ball of light goes at night.

Now you could smack me into my senses,
But I’d much rather you didn’t,
I’d leap every hurdle, and jack all the fences
To get away from what you want me to be,
What about what I want me to be?
Floating, free, a sea of tranquility at my fingertips,
A loving kiss upon my lips to you,
And only you, before you flew away, into the blue or grey,
Hey, hey, You can defy gravity, look at us, you and me
Being what we’re meant to be, how ’bout that?
They’d attack our lack of faith in physics,
But it’s what gets us off the ground,
An inverse, backwards, crazy skydive,
Screaming “Two and two is five!” as nature is rewound.

 

I like to think that I wouldn’t need to be smacked to my senses. I like to think that I’ve already come to them.

 

Sir Ken Robinson’s talk can be found here: Sir Ken Robinson – Changing Paradigms