KENNETH ROBINSON 1917-2006

KENNETH ROBINSON
---English writer ---
Born 1917 - Died 2006

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Kenneth led a life of great variety.
His student days at Oxford ended in 1939 when he joined the British Expeditionary Force in France as a gunner officer.
In one of his less-active periods during the war, he collaborated with the great H. G. Wells in translating The Time Machine.

Selected by the War Office to learn Japanese, he made his first acquaintance with the East when serving in India, Burma, Singapore and Malaya -- where he also learned spoken Chinese.
After the war, Kenneth returned to Oxford to study Classical Chinese, and developed a special interest in the role of music in ancient China -- contributing to Joseph Needham's definitive text, "Science and Civilisation in China".

In 1952, he joined the Overseas Education Service and served in Singapore, where he initiated the first teacher training in the Chinese language, and in Sarawak, which he left in 1967 as Director of Education.

He then joined UNESCO, for whom he worked in Cameroon.
The profound challenges of education in developing countries occupied Kenneth for some years -- for example, he had an opportunity to discuss paper-making in schools with officials at China's Ministry of Education in Beijing.

It was the stark contrast between the West's science-based approach to education and the far more basic problems of rural schools in developing countries that prompted Kenneth to write "The Way and the Wilderness" (The Pentland Press, 1993), a Taoist framework for education that aims to reconcile the complexities of modern life with a world of diverse cultures and beliefs.

In "Beyond the Wilderness", which is his first work for On Line Originals, Kenneth extrapolates that positive line of thinking into an inspiring social ethics for the new millennium.

Kenneth joined later his old friend Joseph Needham in Cambridge, where they both
continued to work. Joseph Needham died some years after their reunion.



Kenneth Robinson sadly died in June 2006.






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Titles by this author:

"The Way and the Wilderness"
"Beyond the Wilderness"










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