Before Kansas deals with another school funding lawsuit and another legislative session to determine funding for K-12 education, there are some important questions to ask and answer.

What is the purpose of K-12 education and how does society know whether our current education system best serves the needs of the child and the community?

Sir Ken Robinson explains that our current production-line education industry, founded on ideals of the Enlightenment and workplace realities of the Industrial Revolution, is grossly out of step with the need to prepare children for a future we can’t anticipate. Schools, Robinson argues, alienate, bore and anaesthetise many highly intelligent children, stifling their natural ability for divergent thought and creativity.

Robinson, is a world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the Benjamin Franklin award from London’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). The Benjamin Franklin Medal is awarded to a global ‘big thinker’, an individual who has shifted public debate in an innovative way contributed to furthering public discourse about human progress deemed by the RSA to be significant to our core enlightenment values of developing human progress.

More from Ken Robinson

Schools kill creativity: 2006

Bring on the learning revolution: 2010