Resenhas - Out of our minds

Moitta 21/05/2015

"The political impetus to develop national systems of education was not purely philanthropic or humanitarian: it was also economic. It arose out of the surging demands of the Industrial Revolution. The education systems that emerged were not only designed in the interests of industrialism, they were created in its image in terms of both structure and culture."

"Embedded in this principle of linearity is the idea that education is essentially a preparation for something that happens later on. It is for this reason that education is still mainly focused on children and young people."

"The difference of course is that motorcars and other products have no interest in how they are produced. People on the other hand are keenly interested on their own experiences in education.
They have feelings and opinions, values and motivations, hopes and aspirations. Ignoring the human factor is at the root of many of the problems that industrial systems of education have created."

"Thinking of education as a preparation for something that happens later can overlook the fact that the first sixteen or eighteen years of a person's life are not a rehearsal. Young people are living their lives now."

"Education has tree mais roles: personal, cultural and economic."

"Individual: to develop individual talents and sensibilities. Cultural: to deepen understanding of the world. Economic: to provide the skills required to earn a living and be economically productive."

"Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident. They complain that many graduates have few of these qualities. It's hardly surprising. Conventional academic programs are not designed to develop them and often value the opposite approach."

"There can be high price to pay in containing the anger and frustrations of those who feel marginalised and hopeless."

"A paradigm is an accepted framework of rules and assumptions that define established ways of doing things."

"Rationalism and empiricism were the driving forces of the Enlightenment and they ran with irresistible force through science, philosophy and politics, bowling over traditional methods of thought and opening up vast new fields of adventure in science, technology and philosophy."

"To educate people for the future, we must see through the academic illusion to their real abilities, and to how these different elements of human capacity enhance rather than detract from each other."

"There may be no agreed definition of intelligence, but we might agree that intelligence includes the ability to formulate and express our thoughts in coherent ways."

"It's about giving those young people the opportunity to do something practical and the skills to be able to choose. Most of the young people that we work with don't make clear choices. They react. Dance training gives them the opportunity to actually think and than make an action. You have to be able to sit still before you make a choice, before you make an action."

"Imagination is the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses."

"At the right time and in the right way, critical appraisal is essential. At the wrong point, it can kill an emerging idea."

"The values of sensitivity training and group encounter are honesty and presentation of the authentic self."

"that is to say over 35, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not one of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook."

"The relationships and feelings are at the heart of the creative process in all fields, including the arts and the sciences."

"the world of objective knowledge is man-made."

"The process of the arts is to give shape, coherence and meaning to the life of feeling. It is not what interests the artists or scientists that distinguishes them from each other, but how it interests them."

"It is through feelings as well as through reason that we find our real creative power. It is through both that we connect with each other and create the complex, shifting worlds of human culture."

"We can talk separately about technology, the economy, legal systems, ethics and work, but the lived experience of a culture can only really be understood in terms of how all of these elements interrelate and influence each other."

"Being creative is not only a matter of inspiration. It requires skill, craft in the control of materials and a reciprocating process of critical evaluation."

"Great creative teams model the mind: they are diverse, dynamic and distinct. This leadership role includes forming creative teams, deciding which people to bring together for which project; focusing teams, setting constrains, boundaries and expectations within which the team will work; and resourcing the team so that it is able to tackle the brief without avoidable frustrations of time and materials."

"In all cases, innovation involves calculating risks and the organization's tolerance for them."

"Creativity is not about a lack of constraints; often it is about working within them and overcoming them. The dynamics of culture are such that change travels in all directions."

"we classify at our peril. Experiments have shown that even the lightest touch of the classifier's hand is likely to induce us to see members of a class as more alike than they actually are and items from different classes as less alike than they actually are. And when our business is to do more than merely look, these errors may develop during the course of our dealings into something quite substantial."