Articles about education, skills and the creative and cultural industries.
by Shelagh Wright, John Kieffer, John Holden, John Newbigin, November 2011
The revolution is being televised: every day in the news we see radical changes being enacted around the world. It is also being digitised, and people are finding new ways of doing things for themselves. Two areas where change is happening at a frenetic pace are in the education system...
by Paul Jackson, November 2011
Excellence and enjoyment, skills based curricular, knowledge based curricular, enquiry based learning ...everyone has their opinion as to what we should be teaching today's children. But many forget that today's children will not be adults in today's world, they will be adults in 'tomorrow's world', a different place, with a...
by Malcolm Gillies, November 2011
What are you? “You are what you eat”. So I learnt in biology. But the world is getting fat. And running out of food. What are you? “You are what you think”, the philosopher smugly opines. Can I ever know what you really think? In fact, do you know...
by Anra Kennedy, November 2011
Museum worksheets have a lot to answer for. ‘Can you spot the cat on the far wall? How many places are set at the table?’ When I was a child worksheets in museums were relatively new, a valiant effort to reach out to younger visitors. Trouble is, they turned visits...
by Phil Sheperd, November 2011
The seeds of hope can best be seen at a local level, in the countless examples of grass roots initiatives, where people come together – not just to compensate for the failings of government – but to affect real change.
by Uffe Elbæk, November 2011
What did you and your colleagues want to achieve with this education? We have often considered the KaosPilots as a positive answer to youth unemployment but, to many, it has meant more than that: influenced human potential, moved boundaries etc. The KaosPilots was our vision of a fantasy education, one...
by Trevor Phillips, November 2011
There are only two things that matter in the 21st century world: one is whether we can live with our planet; the other is whether we can live with each other. On a planet that could one day be home to up to nine billion people, there’s plenty of space...
by Sir John Tusa, November 2011
Over the course of successive governments, education in the UK has been debated in terms which, deliberately or not, have reduced it to the realm of the economic and functional. Why should you do well at school? To win a place at a good university. And why should you go...
by Shonagh Manson, November 2011
This argument is by no means one you haven’t heard before, but I’m going to make it again. It is one that is vital not only to ensure the thriving nature and fitness of our creative and cultural industries, but for our broader culture and society to develop and to...
by Shelagh Wright, John Kieffer, John Holden, John Newbigin, November 2011
In his recent MacTaggart lecture the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, spoke of the energy and inventiveness of Victorian Britain as ‘… a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges’. Most of us want that kind of richness and diversity to run through our communities. We all...
by Sally Bacon, November 2011
W. B. Yeats’s quote about education is well known: ‘Education is not the filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.’ Richard Layard, in his landmark 2009 report for The Children’s Society, A Good Childhood, turns to Yeats when he writes that schools ‘should expand the powers of...
by Puneeta Roy, November 2011
Article 26.2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states the role of educators in achieving the social order called for by the declaration: ‘Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall...
by Paul Latham, November 2011
How do you see the education and skills sector in relation to the creative industries as a whole but also your business? One of the problems with the music business is that we’re seen as a ‘sexy’ business and we’ve never been short of people wanting to work with us....
by Paul Durrant, November 2011
When Eric Schmidt delivered the MacTaggart lecture at this year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, his views regarding UK education were widely publicised. Whilst most of the 560 comments on the BBC Technology pages subsequently focused on his surprise about computer science not being part of the UK schools curriculum, he...
by Niel Maclean, November 2011
Some time back in the 1980s when I worked in a local education authority, I remember visiting a struggling boys’ school. I was shepherded down a dingy corridor to the room where the meeting was to take place. The paint on the ceiling peeled, the blinds hung off the wall,...
by Miles Bullough, November 2011
From the point of view of our education system, creativity is a problem because it is chaotic. And systems abhor chaos. When we look around schools for our kids and see clean and tidy art departments adorned with carefully presented studies (or copies) of the works of ‘great artists’, we...
by Michael Wimmer, November 2011
At present, almost half of the younger generation of Spain has no hope of finding an appropriate professional occupation. The situation is developing along similar lines in other European countries. It is no longer just the usual dropouts who lack any prospect of economic prosperity, but also an increasing number...
by Martin Melarkey, November 2011
As the UK’s first City of Culture in 2013, Derry-Londonderry’s vision for 2013 is inspired by the fusion between art and learning pioneered by Derry’s sixth-century founder, St Columba, whose monastic order created the Book of Kells. Derry’s year-long cultural programme will explore the role of creativity within education in...
by Mark Emmerson, November 2011
Having worked with the creative industries in school through creative partnerships what I was struck by that the creative industries are outcome drive, the successful people in those industries are able to combine the self motivation, and discipline to work to a brief with a set outcome in mind and...
by Mark Compton, November 2011
‘Plays bass alone!’ This three- word description of a young person’s creative endeavours was once sent to me in my capacity as manager of the New Deal for Musicians (NDfM) programme. At first, I was miffed, to say the least, at the brevity of the statement; yet when taken in...
by Lynn Foon Chi Yau, November 2011
Arts organizations can advance knowledge because they are alternative sites of learning that can overcome some of the shortfalls inherent in school systems. The arts are non-linear, abstract and qualitative, in contrast to education systems which are linear, literal and quantitative. Society needs to be built upon alternative knowledges, not...