Sir Ken Robinson-Blog1

My take-aways from this video is that part of being original is being wrong. In society today we emphasize that being wrong is terrible; being wrong is bad. But part of growing and being original is being wrong. We cannot learn from our mistakes if we don't make mistakes. Another take away is that no matter where you go, their is a similar educational hierarchy of math and science on the top and the arts on the bottom. We put an emphasis on being right all the time and have no time for the subjects where being right is not the primary goal. A final thing I took away was that there is an academic inflation. A degree is not a valuable as it used to be. It now requires a Masters or a PHd to get a job that at one point in time would have taken a Bachelors.

Some of the effective speaking techniques employed by the speaker are humor and effective story telling. He uses humor to lighten the mood a little bit and to keep the audience engaged. He uses story telling to give real life examples to support what he is saying but, to also keep the audience engaged and listening. His or her presentation style is that he is very casual in his voice yet, very serious in his topic. He is very happy in his speech so, he doesn't put the audience to sleep with a boring tone of voice. He wants the audience to connect and feel for what he is saying; this cannot be achieved with a monotone voice.

What matters to me in this video is that what he says is true about academic inflation and the emphasis we put on being right all the time. It connects to me personally in that I am trying to take classes and do activities (ie. yoga, drama, running) that are not all about winning. This is because the presssure in thses "right" classes is immense and I need a realease so I stay loose and don't take myself too seriously. The educational connection is that schools do kind of cut out the creativity in our brains and replace it with equations and the goal that being right is what matters. On a world-wide scale this connects in that the value of a degree has gone down. It is the people witth the Masters and PHd's that are taking the jobs. A degree isn't worth what it used to be.