Thursday, October 2, 2008

A new obsession

I have decided that I should try to watch a TED talk every night until I have seen them all, and then I will officially be "really damn smart". It has come to my attention that perhaps the TED talks are an obscurity to some, please peruse their website: www.ted.com
TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, and their annual conference is a place for the leading thinkers of our time to come together and give brilliant presentations, aka "TED talks". I am pretty sure that getting invited to the TED talks would be the one thing I could do in life that would make my mother the proudest, so I am working on becoming one of the leading thinkers of the world, but it is surprising how much competition there is! This is a good thing. Anyway, if you would like to join me on my "one TED a day" mission, I will try to post links. Here is tonight's:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
Sir Ken Robinson on why creativity is as important as literacy in education. So far this is one of my favorites. If you haven't checked out last night's recommendation, I am still deep in thought on that Jonathan Haidt talk.
Okay, I suppose I should say a thing or two in my own words. I have been thinking a lot about the development of the human being, a topic I am constantly inspired about with the work we do in my MFA program--in developmental movement we learn about the various movement stages that fetuses go through in the womb and babies go through upon being birthed, which have an uncanny similarity to the stages of evolution. We spend a lot of time rolling around on the floor and re-learning how to crawl. My parents will be happy to know that I have very little neurosis--I can move homologously, homo-laterally and contra-laterally with relative ease, which means I wasn't deprived of any essential stages as a baby (or else it means that I have already done my re-patterning work through 10 years of yoga practice). We also work with our voices, another sort of re-patterning, getting past all of the times in our lives we were told not to make certain noises. In this work, we begin with the premise that all sounds are equal. It inspires me to think what a child could achieve if every sound they explored was encouraged, rather than discouraged. I have already talked to Joel about the sound-proof room we will need to build in our home for when guests with sensitive eardrums come over.
So in last night's post, I put a link to "This American Life", which goes into how and why we must educate children in the developmental stages of baby-hood, knowledge that is commonplace now amongst many middle class parents but has not made it to more poverty-stricken subcultures of our country. The episode reports on a program that was developed to address ending the cycle of poverty by focusing on the babies, rather than the parents. So far it appears that this may incite the sweeping change that is so badly needed to end the cycle of poverty. I am not doing it justice here, so please listen to the episode!
I think tonight's featured TED talk is also addressing a sweeping change that is badly needed in order for humans to develop to their fullest potential and for us to evolve as a species. I love this metaphor he uses--"human ecology". He says that education has mined our minds in the same way that we have mined the Earth, and in our search for the more profitable qualities of the Earth and mind we may have destroyed the diversity of our biosphere, and thus our capability to survive in the long-term. I see it all the time, how creativity is smashed, destroyed and neglected in the same way that nature is--relegated to being a luxury that we all enjoy but certainly not a necessity. The day that our culture learns to value nature and creativity over commodity will be the turning point for human existence.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Kate,
I can't squeeze out an ode on a whim, but I saw that you might like one. I can offer a haiku:

Talks that mean something
I'm glad she wrote about this
Kate is watching Ted

Chris