Holistic education

Reviewed this amazing Ted talk by Sir Ken Robinson today.

Some key takeaways are as follows:

1. Education goes deep within people like religion and money.
2. We all have a huge vested interest in education partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp, that is unpredicatable.
3. Children have extraordinary capacity for innovation. Their creativity and talent is squandered.
4. Children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. Children don't grow into creativity but they grow out of it. Or rather, they are educated out of it.
5. Education systems should nurture creativity. It is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status. 
6. Children are not frightened of being wrong. If one is not prepared to be wrong, one will never come up with anything original. And by the time children grow up and become adults, most kids have not only lost that capacity (being prepared to be wrong) but also have become frightened of being wrong. Society and education systems stigmatize mistakes. As a result they are educating people out of their creative capacities. 
7. Lop sided growth: As children grow up, parents, education system begins educating them progressively from the waist up. Gradually focusing more on their heads, slightly to one side (~analysis/left sided). As a result, most individuals end up living within their heads, disconnected from their bodies.
8. World over education systems are predicated on the idea of academic ability. They came into existence to meet the needs of industrialism. They have the same hierarchy of subjects (Math, Science etc) which is rooted in two ideas: a. Focus on most useful subjects essential to get a job and b. Academic ability (dominates society's view of intelligence) (Subjects in decreasing order of importance for industrial society - Mathematics, Languages, Humanities, Arts). Children are benignly steered away from what they like and what they are good at. Their natural talent and brilliance is not valued rather it suppressed and stigmatized. They are made to believe that they can't afford to pursue their passion.
9. "Only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children."
10. We need to be careful while using the gift of imagination so that we avert some potentially worse global scenarios. We should acknowledge and appreciate our rich creative capacities and see our children for the hope that they are. Our task is to educate their whole being (holistic), so they can face this future.