What Women Know . . . About Education

What Women Know… about Education

Most educators in the western world are women. But as the systems have developed, creativity is seldom encouraged or helped to blossom. Children are told to remember facts and figures that they could just as easily discover with a laptop connected to the internet. But the way we learn and what we should be learning is changing all the time. The economic system is failing. We need to have new ideas about what to educate future generations for. We need to become problem solvers and creative thinkers, instead of swallowing up facts to regurgitate them back in an exam.
What we are learning is also an area for concern. There is a hierarchy of subjects that generally puts mathematics and English at the top of the pyramid followed closely by the sciences and further down the scale are modern languages and technologies – with sport and the arts at the back of the pack. Even within the arts there is another hierarchy, with music and visual arts at the top, followed by dance and at the very bottom there is drama.
This is interesting as most young children enjoy dancing, singing, acting and painting as much as playing with a ball and other sporting activities. And yet, society approves of dramatists, rewards actors, venerates film stars. We tend to start to teach our young people to use their heads more than their bodies from a very young age and in turn knock the creativity out of them. Despite the increase in college degrees and post-graduate degrees, the vocational school system is diminishing. Previously this catered for a huge section of society, without any need for masters degrees. It is now de rigueur to be academic to get a good job – to be super-specialized, to become an "expert." What is missing in the whole equation is the calculation of the cost of an education of the individual.
This is the story of a young girl who was having difficulty sitting still in class in 1930’s Britain. She was brought to a specialist who interviewed the girl and her mother. The specialist examined her, to see what was wrong with her behaviour. He then asked her mother to accompany him outside his rooms and put the radio on as they left. He asked her mother to join him as they then watched her daughter dance around his office to the music on the radio. What the doctor told her mother was that there was nothing wrong with her daughter but that she was merely a dancer. She thought and spoke through the movements in dance and he advised her to take her to dance school at once.
The little girl went to dance school, and discovered that it was full of other children just like her. Children who couldn't sit still.
That little girl is today in her eighties, her name is Gillian Lynne and has had a hugely successful career as one of Britain's greatest dancers. She went on to dance with the Saddlers Wells ballet school and was a dancer in major productions throughout her career – she teamed up with Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and choreographed the hit musicals Cats and Phantom of the Opera. She is a multi millionaire who has given thousands of hours of enjoyment to millions of people – all because her brilliance was recognised and she wasn’t put on a dose of Ritalin and told to sit in the corner and learn her algebra.
Michelle, 40, Art-teacher.


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