At Kloodle, we dont just have an interest in employability. We dont just have an interest in the Education system and look at how it stands currently. We want to invest our time into giving more freedom to young people on their journeys through Schools, Colleges, Universities, and indeed their lives. Too many young people are strangled, funnelled through systems which create identical candidates at the end of their journey, all ticking identical boxes and too many discarded if they cannot conform to their predefined and strict regime set out for them, irrespective of their unique talents and selling points. Frighteningly it can become an impossible task to remind students what they are even good at! Children and young people are so indoctrinated into believing in a hierarchical academic system which only values the traditional subject areas.
Our Education system has always been a reflection of the society in exists in. As it should be. What, after all is the purpose of educating these young people???To give these students the best possible chance of making their way in a society it represents. During the industrial revolution and well into the 19th century, schools needed to impose a value system on subject areas. Manufacturing and Engineering was of course seen the Holy Grail and so Mathematics and the Sciences took prevalence. It would appear that over 200 years later Educational bodies in large, still value this pecking order but does it still serve the society it is intended to represent?
In an age where employers receive 200/300 applications all seemingly similar with excellent scores at Degree level, how best can Schools, Colleges, Universities encourage students to come out of the system with VALUE? The revelation is that they already have great value to offer. We just need to Educate the Educators better. We watched a TED talk recently (from 2006) whereby Sir Ken Robinson brilliantly alluded to the way in which true inventiveness and creativity originated through the different parts of the brain interacting and working as intended, together. No one element more important than the other.
We know three things about intelligence: One, its diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isnt divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
This is the way Educators should be geared to educate, whereby departments work together and subject areas merge to create vibrant, intelligent students who feel valued no matter their area of talent. The important aspect of this concept is that it doesnt need to be a tough and laborious revolution. Employers and companies already think in this way believe it or not, they cannot judge the identical graduates that come out of this production line on their traditional academic results alone. The system has rendered their grades worthless on mass, so employers are looking for their other talents now.??Their creativity, their design ability, their team working skills, their communication skills,??Indeed what makes them, who they are. At Kloodle, our mission is to educate students that these less traditional exploits when competing for jobs in todays economy are in fact equally as significant. Indeed it is the creatives that are leading the way in this new era. Design students have already begun to ditch the traditional CV and networking, applying for positions using their Pinterest and Tumblr accounts to showcase their work. They are now waiting for the rest of society and the education system to catch them up and compete for jobs using their online, more holistic vices Try www.kloodle.com and Tell Your Story.
Andrew Donnelly
