The last Conference of my Presidential year is the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) in the US. It's taking place in Tampa, Florida, a State I've never been to. In order to keep expenditure down my relatively cheap flight meant travelling from Heathrow to O'Hare in Chicago, and then flying south east to Tampa.
As part of the Kenyan dispora one of Veronicah's best friends from her early working days Tina, lives in Tampa with Mario, and their seven-month old son, Malik. So again I paid for Veronicah and James to accompany me at the Conference. As it's the Easter break immediately afterwards we are then moving from the Conference hotel to stop with Tina and Mario, before going on a driving tour of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, and finally arriving in Washington DC to stop with Veronicah's cousin, Minneh who has just become engaged to Chris. A later stopover is taking us to Dallas to meet another cousin, Grace, who is married to Kelvin and have Leon and Kamau.
I'm particularly interested in the American Civil War and hope to see several key sites.
The Conference began with Sir Ken Robinson the UK's guru on creativity who now very creatively lives permanently in Los Angeles which he says is a short plane ride from America. His message is of vital importance however: that education systems should be encouraging creativity, passion, spirit, and energy with children in order to engage and prosper in the future.
Ken talks of Wayne Gretsky, the great Ice hockey player, who said that he never went to where the puck was, but where he thought it would be next! The backward-looking accountability loved by Governments and media is stifling children, and encourages teaching to tests which leads to meaningless grind. Of course children need to communicate and be numerate, but current 'if it moves measure it' systems are letting them down.
I refer again to Finland where, in one of the world's highest achieving education systems, there is no external assessments until the age of 18.
Ken may spend a considerable amount of time working with corporations now looking at creativity, but it is they amongst others who will employ our children. The CBI and others in the UK now rate very highly, for example, the ability to work in teams. Are we taking any notice?
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