SAA-Student´s Awesome Assignment

Hey everyone!

Every once in a while now I will post some amazing assignment a student of mine has done and I think is worth showing.

This brilliant assingment was done by my student Leonardo, who has just concluded his advanced course here at havad (congrats, congrats!!!)
It´s an essay about a video he has found on the website www.ted.com.br about Creativity. The speaker is a Creativity Expert called Ken Robinson.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

Schools kill creativity

We don't have any idea what's going to happen in the future. And, whereas we don't know the future, we don't know how we can prepare a child who will retire in 2065. All kids have tremendous talents. They were born with creativity but schools kill these talents.

Ken Robinson told a story to show the creativity of kids: a little girl who was in a drawing lesson and the teacher asked her, "What are you drawing?” And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God". And the teacher said "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl answer, "They will in a minute".

Robinson defends that if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. Adults have become frightened of being wrong. We stigmatize mistakes. And now, we have an education system that mistakes are the worst thing you can make. Picasso once said “all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up”.

Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and as the bottom are the arts. And there is a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.

The objective of public universities is to produce university professors. The whole system was invented before the 19th century to industrialism. The most important subjects for work are at the top. If you aren't good at these subjects, you aren't worth its. But intelligence is dynamic and interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments.

Robinson interviewed Gillian Lynne who did "Cats", "Phantom of the Opera" and she is a very good dancer. Lynne said that, when she was child, the school wrote her parents saying that she had a learning disorder. When the professional analyzed her, he said to her mother "Gilliam isn't sick, she is a dancer. Take her to a dancer school.” Her mother did and Gilliam became a soloist and she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet School.

To conclude, Ken believes that our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of the richness of human capacity. And say “ if all the insects were to disappear from the earth within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all the human were to disappear from the earth within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”

Leonardo Zeferino