Giving Compass' Take:
• Changing education means changing the way you think about collaboration, parental involvement, and the value of students.

• How can education become an agile structure, where it evolves away from traditional structures and incorporates more tailored learning?

• Change is already happening and education is becoming more open.

Sir Ken Robinson’s views on creativity are abundantly well documented. In his 2006 TED Talk he charged the current education system with being too rigid in adhering to traditional academic subjects. Kids, he argued, need time to dance, draw, create and find what they’re good at.

In a wide-ranging interview, Robinson recently spoke with EdSurge about a number of education topics:

EdSurge: Your new book, “You, Your Child and School,” seems like it’s intended as a playbook for parents. But I wanted to ask you about the other side of the coin, about educators. How can they deal with parents to create productive and healthy relationships?

I wrote a book a few years ago called “Creative Schools,” which was directed primarily to educators, and there was a chapter in there for parents.  It is an attempt to engage parents more positively in the conversation. They do, after all, have an enormous vested interest in how their kids are educated, and they bear a lot of the brunt of the shifts in policy that seem to come along on an almost monthly basis in education.

An individual teacher can’t really fix structural inequality, and parents cannot fix equity issues or problems with testing. So what can they do to help move education forward that doesn’t seem so scary and daunting?

I come back to the idea of “Think globally, act locally.” We can talk about international league tables and we can talk about strategies to improve math scores across the country. But we're also talking about the sort of day they’re going to have and how they’re going to seize that day, and what’s going to happen to them when they grow up. Education is not an abstraction. It’s something that sits at the very heart of our family lives, our communities, and our relationships.

Read the full interview about changing education by Stephen Noonoo at EdSurge.