What is the Goal of Teaching and Learning?

As a sidetrack to Lisa’s attack on the classical exam, I would like to bring up another potential problem.

In school we have a tendency to over-focus on skills relating to “rationality”. These are indeed very useful skills that everyone should learn. However, it seems that we do tend to forget other skills inherent in all of us. For example, many forms of skills relating to creativity and “irrationality” are often pushed down the educational hierarchy. This extreme focus on “rationality” is something that has been annoying me for quite some time as one may notice looking at my own blog (which I hope others will take a look at as well 🙂 ). However, in my blog I have a more general discussion about the problem, designed to raise thought, while here I want to have a more focused post relating to education on a more reasonable level.

Lately I came across a (fantastic) presentation on Youtube from TED that made me feel right at home. In the presentation Ken Robinson talks about education and how public education educate us out of creativity. Now, since the logic behind education (unless I missed something) is that it should prepare us for the future, shouldn’t creativity be quite high up on the list of important subjects?

I completely agree with that we need to seriously think about what we do when we educate people in our society and take a close look at the ramifications of raising certain subjects to the skies. This naturally relates back to Lisa’s topic of exams and how they might not be the optimal way of testing/support learning efforts. However, in contrast to how SSE may handle exams, I feel that in this aspect the courses we are taking are very good indeed. They actually focus on both the rational planning side as well as the “crazy” creative side. However, it is sad that one needs to reach a master level to experience perfect blend of both sides of ones brain. Shouldn’t this be a strong part of education already from the start? What are we actually educating ourselves for?