TED Video: Andrew Mwenda Takes a New Look at Africa

 

Mr. Garrioch's directions

     So this time, when I visited TED, I decided to click on "Resize by .....persuasive" on the left column. After skimming through the titles of the appearing images, I chose a speech with the title "Andrew Mwenda takes a new look at Africa."

     Before I began watching the 17-minute-speech, I skimmed through the comments that were written on the post. Surprisingly, there were some disdainful writers asserting the speech to be dogmatic and provocative.

     After listening to the speech, though, I found myself in dissent with such criticisms. The overall speech was lucid, his discernment being acute. Though his argument that financial aid of supercilious developed countries to African countries actually results in aggravating the infamous corruption in Africa and makes the continent more dependent was rather eccentric and ironical, the speech was elaborate in overall, supported by credulous evidences.
     His saying that many African countries are in fact not in the state of anarchy was also interesting. He contributes the formation of such stereotypes to the media's solicitation  for impressive, but many times biased, stories. 
     After seeing the speech, I did some scrutiny about the speech giver, Andrew Mwenda. Mwenda is a founder and owner of The Independent, an Ugandan newspaper that is renown for its caustic criticisms on the authoritarian bureaucratic government. And even during his writing career in The Monitor and in his quotations for diverse media such as the BBC or CNN, he was well known for his astute visions that financial aids on African countries do nothing but aggravating the stagnation of the continents' countries economy.
(The 20 word burden is off finally. I will write with my voice, my vocab use from here.)
      However, while I was watching this speech, one question came to my mind: The methods that Mwenda proposed, do they really work? He talked about promoting growth in high level scientific technology. Well, how exactly are the "developed" nations supposed to help the countries out? By providing some advanced technology out of a mist for free? Or build a high-tech scientific facility in the center of a desert, when the security of the country is so vulnerable so that the expensive scientific facility is nothing but a piece of ice that would be destroyed if let alone? Are these measures really supposed to stimulate African entrepreneurs and improve independence? Is spoon-feeding of high level technology rather than "letting them grow" after building primary education really something that other countries should do? What does high-level technology supposed to do to entrepreneurs? Aren't other matters such as the vulnerability of politics in the nations or the security issues more urgent? Such questions couldn't be answered by the seventeen-minute-speech by Mwenda.
     I liked the speech. I myself do not believe in spoon-feeding African nations, and it was really nice to see a real Ugandan scholar explaining to me why the nations shouldn't be just given away financial aids. But, unfortunately, there were some holes in the logic of Mwenda that couldn't be answered sufficiently.
    

Schools Kill Creativity?

One of the first video clips that I watched after getting to know the existence of the TED site (www.ted.com) was "Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity." (It was not hard to find the Ken Robinson speech, actually, as all I had to do was click the "Most Viewed" category in the left column.)

As a person who have great interest in education and is actually experiencing the current South Korean education, there were many parts throughout the presentation that impressed me.

One of the phrases that literally “spoke to the heart” was "If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance." Strangely, this idea seemed to perfectly fit the condition of South Korea. Every type of education that I receive seems to be a series of procedures which ultimately aims for college (or university) entrance. Especially for private education centers, (so-called “hagwon” here in Korea) even for those subjected towards elementary school students, their sole and ultimate objective and reason for existence seems to be a university entrance.

Also, his saying that “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original” really struck to me. The thing in South Korea is that almost nobody in the class is “prepared to be wrong.” Sometimes, the atmosphere even seems to be hindering a certainbeing from being “prepared to be wrong.” Almost every class is simply “dead” and severely lacks voluntary participation of students. And it seems barely possible to expect a single piece of “creativity” being drawn from such a depressed class.

However, one question came to my mind: Are art and music classes that Sir Ken Robinson is considering to be "problematic to be neglected" really helpful in nurturing students' creativity? Throughout the lecture, Sir Ken Robinson seemed to believe that solving math and science problems is not a good way to attain creativity compared to art classes and music classes. Here, I thought it was worthwhile to cast questions on this ruling premise, as there are many ways in which math or science could be used to develop creativity of a person. Also, there could be individual differences on the means that would be the best in nurturing creativity, and simply asking for increase in the art classes without considering the difference in students might not be the best idea.

Nevertheless, I strongly agreed with the idea that there is a great imbalance on the importance of subjects dealt in the school, and this could severely damage the development of students' creativity. To be honest, I didn’t know who Ken Robinson before seeing this video clip. However, he now is one of my best public speakers, and I’m planning to search for his other public speeches given to the public in the boundary of education.