Sir Ken & The Element - beginning the blog journey

Quite some time ago, I promised to blog my thoughts as I read through Sir Ken Robinson's book, The Element.  Now that the holiday season is upon us, I thought it would be a perfect time to discover how finding my passion changes everything (as promised on the book cover).  Rather than share everything over the course of a week or so, I'll be blogging on Thursday and Fridays from now until... Well, until I'm done!

If these words inspire you and you want to see Sir Ken in person, we'll be bringing him to Halifax in April for our new conference - Emergent Learning: Turning Tides in 21st Century Education.  Hope to see you there!

Rhonda

Sir Ken starts the book with this premise - kids are naturally creative, but they lose that capacity over time.  He believes one of the main reasons for this is because of education, and "too many people never connect with their true talents and therefore don't know what they're really capable of achieving."  The idea of The Element, as I understand it so far, is reconnecting with this passion will bring us to our full potential - "the place where things we love to do and things we are good at come together."  He argues that to do this, we need to think differently about ourselves.  We also need to think differently about how we educate our kids and run organizations, creating places where people are inspired to think creatively and can find The Element in themselves.

The first example of a person living in their Element is Gillian Lynne, now a world-famous dancer and choreographer.  When she was eight, she was struggling in school, couldn't sit still, and was constantly disrupting the school.  The school wrote to her parents, suggesting Gillian had a learning disorder and should be placed in a school for children with special needs.  Her mother took her to a psychologist to try to figure out what was going on. 

The psychologist spoke to her mom for a time, then they left the room, leaving the radio on.  Gillian began to dance.  The wise psychologist looked at Mom and told her the young girl wasn't sick, but was a dancer.  She took her to a dance school, as the doctor suggested, and a remarkable life path began. 

Sir Ken also shares the story of Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, who was so bored in school he turned to drawing in his classes.  He did fine in school, but knew he'd never be happy at a traditional job.  He decided to live by his wits, eventually finding success after placing his comic strip in a weekly newspaper in LA.  There's also the story of Paul Samuelson, who discovered his life as an economist after walking into a University of Chicago lecture hall while still in high school.  He was so fascinated by the information he heard he felt he was "born again" and started on a journey he describes as "pure fun".

All three of the examples provided are individuals living in their Element.  Why aren't we all?  Sir Ken says it's because we don't understand our natural capacities - our powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality and physical and sensory awareness.  We also don't understand how our capacities relate to each other holistically.  Finally, we don't really understand our potential for growth and change.  Can that change?  I guess we'll see as we read along.

Tomorrow, more of Sir Ken's thoughts on education and the impact it has on finding our Element.