Education

I must confess that it was a pleasure to listen to this talk. Mr. Robinson was very funny in sharing experiences and examples of how education has cut down natural (and most of them artistic) capacities in human beings. In fact, his whole talk was related to, what I conclude, the effects on education that are indeed a direct consequence of our economy system. I would like to make a comment on 2 things I thought were interesting:
1. The learned intolerance of facing mistakes. It is well known that making mistakes is not a good feeling but it is a necessary part of the learning process. We, Chileans, avoid as much as possible speaking in public because we don’t want to make mistakes. Why, if is the only way to learn!?
2. The fact that studying arts is an illness. According to our new conception of human value, the more you produce the more valuable you become. Being a dancer, or a painter, or even a teacher, doesn’t produce as much as some expect. And those are the ones that have classified arts as a useless for our society, keeping us away from developing our artistic abilities.
These two things considered, plus a thousand more we can discuss are he ideas mentioned in the talk that I wanted to highlight today. They are also the stone in our shoe when it comes to our educational system.
The final question I would ask is how can we, language teachers, motivate our student in order to develop their talents and not only their language skills?