Are we defined by what we do?

Sir Ken Robinson raises some very interesting prospects in this excerpt. He claims that people often define themselves based on their abilities. Are we really defined by what we do? In our communities, our families, our various social circles, it is true that a lot of our identities is defined by our actions. Not only do we define people by their jobs, for example our professors, but by the roles they play in a communal sense. Mothers are a prime example of this. Women who are mothers themselves even define a lot of who they are and their identities around the fact that they are mothers. It doesn’t matter if these women completely differ in their political views, their attitudes towards motherhood, whether they are mean or nice, haughty or humble, they are all mothers and that defines their personality and who they are to a lot of people. Their children identify them as mom, and by extension their children’s schools, the parents of their children’s friends, and people who know them to have kids may assume certain aspects of their personality because of the fact that they are mothers.

Robinson goes on to talk about human talents as a resource. Each of our unique abilities as people is something we can mine and put to use within our social and economic systems. Because no two humans are the same (no, not even identical twins!) each person’s ability is wholly unique and their own. Two people may be able to do the same thing, for example two good carpenters can probably build a bookshelf with equal ability, but how they approach the process from beginning to end will be fundamentally different because they are two different people, and their experience and education leading up to this point has lead them on different paths to get there. Robinson also states that people’s true talents are often hidden, or buried, just like other resources, and that it takes a bit of searching to really find them and hone them into refined skills. That is the purpose of an education like Bard is offering, to give young adults the time and resources they need in order to discover and shape their true talents. If everyone had the opportunity and the will to really look for and work on unleashing their full ability, the world would be a very different place. Many people settle for being able to do mediocre job that they can do well enough, and it pays the bills. But think of what we could do if we all really put our whole selves into what we did, using our talents and passion to make the best of it?

Rousseau claims that one of man’s natural attributes is compassion. We all have the ability for compassion, and in fact it has helped us advance as a human race. However, over time we have become more and more mechanized and less organic. This makes no sense, as we are organic beings. After seeing the efficiency of machines, we have strived to emulate them and have thus mechanized many aspects of our lives, like the public education system. Schools are running students through an “assembly line” of information and then spitting them out with a supposedly “well rounded” education of all the “essentials”. But the we are not teaching kids how to think for themselves, how to problem solve and really develop their own unique perspective on the world. We are only teaching them how to absorb information, but not how to use it.