Educating for the future

Today, a child of 5, entering our education system will be working until 2070, at least; but we cannot predict the future in 5 years, let alone 65, so how do we know how we should be educating our children? Ken Robinson believes we need to focus on nurturing creativity in our children, instead of educating them out of creativity, as we are doing at the moment. We've decided what the World of Work needs at the moment, and this is what we are preparing our children for -but the World of Work maybe be incredibly different in the future.

If there is on1 think I am sure about, it is we need more creativity to solve the mess we have put this planet, and this society, in. There are many problems that need to be solved -and that can be solved, but only through creativity.

We should focus on developing our children, and helping them be the best they can be -without defining what the 'best' is (i.e. academically intelligent). Apparently Picasso said every child is born in artist, but only a few are allowed to keep the skill into adulthood. Why should sport, art, music, theatre and other non-academic subjects take up so little of our childhood (especially at school), and even at High School, University and beyond, our we still undertaking enough of these activities to develop ourselves -or are we too focused on developing the tiny per cent of our brain that deals with marketing, finance etc?

In fact, we need to not just nurture creativity in our children, we need to nurture it in everyone, and in the World of work, this means nurturing it in our employees. When I heard google allow all employees 10-20% of their time to do whatever they want to to, whilst at work, i became inspired (i hope this is still true, at google!). Of course nurturing creativity in employees will help them be better at their jobs, but it will also, more importantly, help them be better for the whole of society. This is something responsible leaders need to think about.