Today’s classrooms are structured to fit into a rigid system that leaves essentially no room for one to be creative. Creativity simply does not comply with the rules of standardized education and are generally seen as a practice saved for your own free time. Throughout the documentary Most Likely to Succeed Greg Whitely discusses education and curriculum reform in the 21st century. Whiteley’s interpretation of the educational system exposed the ways in which our entire society is based around a factory line model that has shifted to even greater levels of inflexibility. Similarly, throughout Jeff Hopkins TEDxTalk “Education as if People Mattered,” he argues that we are raising our children in an outdated curriculum, that “learning is not something that comes to us from the outside, rather something that comes from inside us… needs to be sparked and then turned into a flame.” Why has our education systems remained stagnant while our economy has so profoundly transformed due to changes in technology? The current education system was developed during the rise of the Industrial Age, and while the world’s economy has shifted drastically since then, the education system has stayed the same. Hopkins suggests that we need to move toward a learning system that focuses on competencies; focused on knowing rather than knowing about. Instead of dragging students through the same curriculum (based on age cohorts), as if they are some sort of assembly line, education should reintegrate abstract and non-concrete thinking. School communities should be encouraged to redesign a new curriculum that demonstrates what students and teachers are capable of doing. Society is always changing: we need an evolving education system to change with it.
