sir ken robinson+education

It was fascinating listening to Sir Ken Robinson talking about education on yesterday’s Radio 4’s “Saturday Live” programme. I’d come across him for the first time last year (I blogged about him in July 2009). Really interesting, thought-provoking bloke and I think you should watch/listen to his two “Ted Talks” (they’re only 18 minutes long and very worthwhile!). I particularly love his reference to WB Yeates’s poem “Cloths of Heaven” at the very end of his second talk:
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
It’s not very often that I yearn to have followed a different “career” route but, if I had come across him when I was in my twenties or thirties, I think I might have been encouraged, in my own naive inadequate way, to make waves in the world of education!