Ken Robinson concludes Creative Schools with a very brief Afterword that attempts to summarize the key features of his work and speak to its grand significance. “The stakes have never been higher, and the outcomes could hardly matter more.” It’s a heavy exclamation point at the end of a work the author clearly considers to be of resounding significance. Yet that Afterword is not primarily the subject here. Instead, the time has come to wrap up this review of Robinson’s book and to draw some more general conclusions about the success or failure, merits and demerits of the work as a whole. Having begun this task so many months ago, I returned to my introductory thoughts to consider to what extent my expectations were met or subverted as I worked through the book. In reading my mixed but generally optimistic attitude about Robinson’s message, I cannot help but feel I have been disappointed by an argument that feels mostly sound but lacks the structure, depth, and rigor to be ascribed to as an ushakeable faith.
In his subtitle, Robison’s most general promise appears to be a window into a transformative, grassroots revolution in education. What he has presented instead is a Chicken Soup for the Postmodern Teacher’s Soul, full of inspiring anecdotes but little practical advice, data-driven analysis, or theoretical coherence. Certainly there is little that is truly revolutionary, and Robinson must constantly admit that much of what he advocates is already happening–evidence that the revolution is real, from his perspective, and justification for an overreliance on description in the absence of a prescriptive model. The truth about these trends seeps through the cracks in Robinson’s rhetorical armor often enough, including in the Afterword when he drops the language of revolution in favor of telling teachers what to do “as the pendulum moves back, as it invariably does” toward greater creativity and flexibility in the classroom. (Because nothing says revolution like the mechanical oscillation of machine parts.)
Teachers in line with the latest educational models and trends may find a pat on the back from Robinson for being ahead of the revolutionary curve, but there is little there that will challenge them. Those who need challenging are no more likely to listen to Robinson than they are the hundreds of other college classes, staff meetings, or professional developments that are already pressing many of the general principles that Robinson espouses. Who then is this revolution for?
Beyond this revolutionary promise, Robinson sets himself three more specific tasks at the start of the book: to critique the current system, to theorize a different system, and to explain how to get from one to the other, from present to future. None of these really describe the content of the majority of the book with any great accuracy. He spends less time critiquing, theorizing, and explaining than he does illustrating, encouraging, and complaining. To the extent that he has consciously approached his stated task, however, he has been met with mixed results.
In my pre-reading exercise, I expected the Robinson and I would find the most agreement when it came to critiquing the current system. Yet I found Robinson’s critiques far from convincing, in part because they lacked surgical focus and in part because they often circled back on his own theories. The lack of focus was most evident when Robinson over-relied on his own metaphors as a target for his criticism. Setting up parallels between industry and education, for example, bled into critiques of education-as-industry as if the analogy had been spoken into reality by Robison’s clever parallelism. When he did make more pointed assaults on the present system, he often ignored (or waffled about) how these same critiques applied to his own system as well. In his final chapter on policy, I noted that for all his complaints about standards for students and accountability for teachers, these were both a key feature in his advice to policy makers. Standards cannot be both the problem and the solution.
But then, the solution offered left a lot to be desired. I was concerned in my initial remarks that the utopian dreams I had for education would not match Robison’s utopian dreams. In the end, however, it seems that Robinson had no such dreams. That sounds more complimentary than I intend. Certainly, I agree with Robinson’s final conclusion that “there is no permanent utopia for education, just a constant striving to create the best conditions for real people in real communities in a constantly changing world.” Even so, he promised in the introduction that he would answer the question he gets asked most often: “If you could reinvent education, what would it look like?” The answer is an unsatisfying, “like the best of what we have, but more of it; and different in every place, but united by some ideas; more a striving than a condition, a common spirit rather than a common approach.” That doesn’t make for a compelling e-mail to your congressman.
It doesn’t make for a compelling philosophy either. Though Robinson’s thoughts never really rise to the level of “theorizing,” by my definition, his advice does smack eerily of the utopian anarchisms of the twenty-first century. The idea that common principles can and should replace common rules and goals, that atomization in service of individualism and difference is a laudable aim, and that natural goodness, potential, and inclination will win out if unimpeded by industrial forces sounds like a platform more suited to an Occupy collective than a serious educational theorist. On behalf of anarchists, let me just say, what a load of malarkey.
This just leaves Robinson’s practical advice for how to achieve this goals, what I suggested originally would be the real test of the book’s merits. Unfortunately, Robinson is as light on practical advice as he is on theory and critique. What he offers is often sound, and I found his description of the potential changes teachers, parents, and administrators could make in their very limited sphere of influence reasonably helpful. (The advice for policymakers seemed less realistic.) But the scope of those spheres of influence made clear that what each group could hope for was not total, system-wide revolution but marginal gains in their local communities. That’s probably enough for most people, who don’t really care about the everyone quite like they care about their own children, their own students, their own teachers. It does, however, fall well short of Robinson’s promise to his readers. In his own words, Robinson insists that “revolutions are defined not only by the ideas that drive them but by the scale of their impact.” The realistic scale of his impact lays bare the flaws in his revolution.
Packaged differently, Creative Schools could have been a useful and enjoyable read. A different subtitle (reflecting a different authorial stance) might more accurately read: Uplifting Stories from Educational Innovators. He could lose the claims to serious critique or policy reform advice and focus instead on helping teachers find inspiration in the link between local innovation and local vitality in education. That’s a legitimate purpose for a book, one that would serve readers much better than false promises of revolution.
The Itinerant Mind 