A better model of quality assurance, he suggests, is the Michelin guide: You know every restaurant that earns the coveted three-star rating will be spectacular, but Michelin doesn’t set rules on how these restaurants should meet its criteria. Robinson likens the current system to the kind of systematic standardization that makes every Big Mac taste the same - impressive in its far-reaching control, but it doesn’t exactly set much of a bar.

The results, he says, are extraordinarily high dropout rates and increasing dissatisfaction among children. Most reform movements focus on the curriculum and the assessment.”įocusing on just those two areas logically leads to standardized testing, which Robinson argues leads to a situation where educators end up merely teaching children how to pass tests. “The curriculum, which is what schools expect students to learn pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. “There are three major processes in education,” Robinson explains. But politicians’ efforts to fix the system only exacerbate the problem. The irony is that policymakers know the education system is broken: That’s where No Child Left Behind came from. The element, in Robinson’s terms, is “the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.” At schools, though, “Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests.” It takes a difficult sell - the achievability of the fully realized You - and relentlessly counters skeptical readers’ objections with a barrage of rags-to-riches stories until they have nothing left but the fuzzy desire to immediately unlock their true potential.īut a more interesting sub-theme in the book - particularly for parents and teachers - is how the traditional education system stifles many children’s opportunities to harness their natural creative talents and, ultimately, to be happy. To be sure, The Element is in many ways a standard self-help book. What if you found out the top performing school you worked so hard to get your children into was crushing their dreams? Ken Robinson’s book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Penguin, $15.00) claims that’s exactly what’s happening.

The element finding your passion