Food for Thought: Disobedience or Compliance?

This is a deliberately provocative Food for Thought. Simply, if we continue with traditional education systems we will produce students who are not creative, inquisitive, curious, inventive or free because they just end up playing the game of school, feeling successful and becoming compliant. This documentary about what is happening in China will be quite likely be similar to their future. Again, as with so much of AI, it has already started and not just in China as this quote suggests, "More than 200 car manufacturers, including Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, Daimler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mitsubishi and US-listed electric vehicle start-up NIO, transmit position information and dozens of other data points to government-backed monitoring centres, The Associated Press has found."

This video focuses on China but don't be mislead.

Or perhaps it is time to encourage more and more disobedient thinking ie creativity by changing the systems and hidden curriculum that still dominates education today. This passionate and emotional TED talk again emphasizes how we so often shut creative thinkers down because they are different and reward and support those who don't ask difficult questions. This talk ends with a very powerful Oscar Wilde quote:

"For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” 

Shortly after returning from the Barcelona Heads Conference I woke up one morning feeling the way the dreamer feels in this quote. I felt for us as a school, feeling isolated following a path which to others appears unnatural. There are others who want to hold us back, punish us for being on a different track, this is because it is easier for them to reject those who refuse to follow the norm and keep doing what they have always done. Although I know we are seeing the  dawn, ie truth, earlier than others, it suddenly felt tiring to keep trying to justify our vision. My feelings of discouragement came from looking around and realizing how few people are really seeing the truth in the world of education, and for a moment I felt like a voice crying in the wilderness, and started to question our vision. But having stopped, reflected and researched more I have moved beyond this frustration and come to terms with others not seeing, and being glad that we are able to dream together on our moonlight path.