You’re not going to believe this ABC News video! It’s a couple of minutes long and packed with meaning and amazement! It’s about a micro-sculpture, Willard Wigan.
What Wigan said about how the teachers at school made him feel (made him feel small, like nothing) is so relevant in today’s education system. The drop-out rate in American high school is 1/3 of students. It’s an obvious failure of the world and our teachers and parents to value the gifts our children have instead of beating them up with their weaknesses. In real life, we work to our strengths and get help with our weaknesses. In school, we are forced to focus on our weaknesses until we improve or quit.
I’d rather my son find a passion out of something he likes instead of something in which he believes he has a deficit.
Still, selling such a unique art collection for $20 million? Not too shabby. I wonder what Wigan’s former teachers think of him now?
ABC News, artist, Charlie Gibson, education failure, micro-sculpture, Willard Wigan
January 6th, 2009 at 11:07 am
Hi,
I’d hate to spoil things, but this person is doing (great) craft, and school isn’t about craft. It shouldn’t be about acquiring a profession, either. Or about math, physics, literature..
School should teach a person on various aspects, level us up on miscellaneous parts of the world – the intellectual world.
You could say that school doesn’t teach you how to get a job, it teaches you how to vote for the right president.
An educated craftsman will know some history and science even if he specializes in his art/craft and doesn’t “need” that knowledge to get money. It advances him as a person – as an intellectual person.
So the talent for arts and crafts and school aren’t related..
Although, YES, teachers should pay attention to children’s problems and the reasons they get bad grades or misbehave, rather than just recite the books. I’ve been hurt by that myself during high school.
But that doesn’t have anything to do with crafts..
(I got here through the pronunciation discussion in another blog. Galia from Israel, nice to meet you
)
January 6th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
Galia: Thanks for the comment.
I’m not for people being uneducated. I am for the education system to be much less rigid and actually find successful ways to teach every student so it doesn’t harm his or her self-esteem to the point of not learning to read and write or understand basic knowledge.
The above video is actually quite sad that such a talented guy can’t read or write. He can obviously learn because he learned how to make such beautiful sculptures.
What his teachers, parents and schools failed to do is reach him on the level on which he can learn. He is quite intelligent or he wouldn’t be able to do what he does. He is also obviously a kinesthetic learner (he learns by doing).
My problem with the schools is you either learn it their way or it’s the high way for you. That’s wrong no matter how you slice it.
By looking at examples of the different failures and successes of the school system, I hope to come to some conclusions about how to better educate our kids. I tutor one-on-one in high school science and math. My degree is in chemistry and I was extremely successful at school, but I’m very aware of kids who aren’t because of the way they are being taught. Most of my students who have trouble are visual, kinesthetic or visual-kinesthetic learners. The third learning style is auditory. My students are having trouble learning because they are not being taught in a manner in which they learn.
When students perform poorly in school, it harms their self-esteem to the point that 1/3 quit before graduating from high school. It is not in the best interest of the world to let this continue, and the solution is clearly not a government mandate for kids to do better. When they mandate stuff like that, I always scream at the TV or radio HOW!