In his Element- Ken Robinson is back

Kennneth Robinson – Sir Ken – made quite the international splash when his TEDTalk on  How schools kill creativity went viral in educational circles.

He was  the keynote speaker at the NAIS national conference in March and he filled Radio City Music Hall to overflowing.

Here he is again in a podcast about his new book to be published in January: The Element – How finding your passion changes everything.

Robinson takes the reader on a journey of what can happen in our lives when passion and talent meet. He draws on the personal stories of people from  many fields, including Sir Paul McCartney, Arianna Huffington, Matt Groening, Meg Ryan and physicist Richard Feynman.

From the transcript:

Sir Ken Robinson:  … education has to do several things. One is, to enable people to lead a life that has meaning and purpose and has some economic independence and to contribute to economic development. The other is to help to build communities, and to help to promote cultural understanding. I think that’s all fairly clear for education.

The problem is that we have in most of our countries, a very narrow form of education, and it’s getting narrower. That’s my big concern, that education is meant among other things to develop people’s natural abilities, and I believe it really doesn’t do that. In many cases, it divorces people from their natural talents.

In addition to his book Sir Ken also has a new website – one that I found quite confusing and annoying to navigate.  Here’s hoping it’s a work in progress.