Ken Robinson on Educating the Whole Person

I have watched video footage of several interesting talks from the 2006 TED Conference (Technology, Education, and Design), and while Hans Rosling's visualization project stole the show with his multicolored analytical fizz-fest, Ken Robinson's unassisted and straightforward talk on the state of education today is still on my mind. Robinson stated many things that have been said in other contexts, but framed them elegantly, concisely, and passionately. His basic premise is that our shared educational model needs a sharp correction in favor of the right brain and the whole body if public education is to serve the public.

If you have forty minutes to spare, watch both of these. If you only have twenty, watch Robinson's, and surf to Gapminder.org sometime to see what Rosling's team is up to, which is nothing less than harvesting and combining the world's publicly available population data, mapping it for anyone to query, and presenting results in a beautifully concise visual display.