Imagine a school where the cool kids are the chess team:

The Power of Introverts

Changing Education Paradigms
“The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of The Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of The Industrial Revolution. Before the 19th century, there was no system of public education. … [P]ublic education, paid for from taxation, compulsory for everybody and free at the point of delivery, that was a revolutionary idea, and many people objected to it. They said it’s not possible for many street kids — working class children — to benefit from public education. “They’re incapable of learning to read and write, and why are we spending time on this?” There was also built into it a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity. It was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence, that real intelligence consists in a capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning — and a knowledge of the classics originally — what we’ve come to think of as academic ability. And this is deep in the gene pool of public education, that there are really two types of people, academic and non-academic, smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’re being judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars: economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people’s lives.” — Sir Ken Robinson, TEDTalk, June 2006

The British government knighted Robinson, who was born into a working class family, for his work as an educator and author on the impact of creativity on education and the economy. To see an amazing animated video of his talk at the TED Conference, click here:

“We’ve Got to Be That Light” — A Gift For America’s Parents & Teachers
This is Dr. Jeff Goldstein, Center Director of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education. If you’re interested in what you hear, check out “Dr. Jeff’s Blog on the Universe.”