An Interview with Sir Ken | Sir Ken Robinson | TEDxLiverpool

well first off welcome again it's it is awesome to have you here and I know I can only imagine I mean I can only imagine what your inbox looks like with regard to requests for your time for speaking and you know whatever right that you've made TEDx Liverpool your first TEDx event that you've appeared at live which is obviously an awesome honor for us but your if your connection because you you haven't been in live we moved to LA in about it was a 2001 yeah yeah but you remain very connected both you know I suppose in all kinds of ways to Liverpool and I guess really to start with I just you know what what what kind of keeps you coming back what you know what what connects you so deeply its Liverpool I'm from here I was born in Walton and not far from evidence football ground not far from where you are I thought the story you've told about home-baked that it's a tragedy what's happened in am field and there been a succession of tragedies I think in the way that was being planned and abused I think but I'm from here my parents were born here my family is all here or hereabouts a lot of me here today so don't make any sudden moves they're trained killers and so I come back as often as I can and I went to school in Liverpool for a while and once the collegiate and I used to come I used to come to the everyman all the time when I was at school we used to have trips here to watch the place this has been a fantastic crucible of creativity in British and European theatre so I have a great affection for it and I used to go to a folk club not far from here at the seamen's mission when I was doing my a-levels and we used to sit round as a group court of a pair called Jackie and Bridey remember them and we used to sing sea shanties and I was 18 I think 70 and Jew care how old I was her brilliant I was sitting there with all this gusto he says the Philharmonic then and we'd sing these sea shanties where I pledged to give up whiskey and wild women and and I would stop roving and I happened at the time be much further than witness I don't think but to me the Liverpool's home I come back you're right I do get asked to a lot of TEDx events I'm a tremendously popular person as a tensor but but you can't do all of them and I just felt it was a great conjunction of timing and energy and now she's thrilled to be here well thank you again of course okay so I guess actually one of them since we talked we we dropped LA into the questions but what I'm curious as to what what actually catalyzed that that that leap into the west coast of America have you been to California yes have you been to cocktail I'm just saying no actually one of the songs we used to sing at Jacqueline brightest was saving to Santiago around the home and the you know the leaving Liverpool in California a and anyway there am I was asked by the Getty Center in California to do some work with them in 2000 to help them plan their education strategy and I did that and a few months later they called and said we know we've got this strategy we think it's the right thing for us to do and I said good and and they asked me if I'd get more involved and said would you like to come and live in California I should explain I was a professor of education arts education at the University of Warwick at the time we were living just outside between strata and Coventry it was the 3rd of January they said what you'd like to come and live in California we left immediately said they froze I know the phone's still swinging on the hook we just we went and I think it took the kids about three weeks to track us down altogether but we know so they asked me to go and seriously what it's a matter very interesting to Peter Kinsella talk about their journey in his wife that you know sometimes people ask you on the right day you reach a point in your life something since inside your stairs and you think well you know I could carry on doing what I do do but I think I'm ready for something else and we both were my wife Terry knives from Liverpool - and we thought this is that is the right move to make and some people said to us you know aren't you taking a big risk I was you know a tenured professor at Warwick and we didn't think it was a risk we thought it was an adventure that's what's got Graham to the Philippines you know that you you do have to take a chance on these things and often say you don't you know your life is not pre-planned you create your own life and you can only make sense of it retrospectively you come to write your your CV and you try as best you can to make it look like a plan because the last thing you want to is convey the actual chaos you've been living through all these years but with luck and the following wind and with an open heart and open mind you can do all kinds of extraordinary in the morning this afternoon I wasn't here this morning fortune but the sample has been full of people we've just done the same thing you you know there isn't a path that's part of my argument in life and why we need to think so hard about education there isn't a path you create your path as you take it it emerges as you try to walk along it and so for us though the path led to California not forever just for now now one thing about LA that I think separates it from other sort of major sort of global capitals as well as that it's such a is obviously such a it's obviously the the with the so much of the economy around entertainment and that there's this huge value in creativity and content that I think it's very unusual for other places and I don't know it was that that must have been a very fertile place for you to developed your your stuff your research and your your think there's there's a great line from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright who once said if you turn the world on its side and shake it everything loose would end up in Los Angeles and and there's a bit of truth in that but actually people caricature Los Angeles as being just about Hollywood in the entertainment industry it's you know the Greater Los Angeles has a population about 12 million people it's not the size of Greater London if you take in Los Angeles County it's over 30 million it's one of the biggest seaports in America it faces you know the Pacific and off to the Pacific Rim it has huge huge manufacturing base there I think it's got the largest Korean population outside of Korea a huge Armenian population it's a big thriving cosmopolitan city of which the entertainment industry is a small but very noisy part and you know it would honestly be like reducing the whole of Liverpool to to rock music I mean rock music being such a big part of Liverpool but there's so much more to it so yeah it is a quartet of creativity but interesting you very often these place that you expect to be called as creative and every field struggle with it and so yeah I mean I find it that there's a demand anyway things that we talk about it there is as much as anywhere else so obviously around it was a few years after that after moving to LA that I guess at some point you sort of obviously got onto the Ted radar if you will and what sort of what led up to that 2006 talk which job is to become such a when I got to California I'd heard about this conference I had spoken a lot of conferences hmm over the years and I've heard about this conference it was at this legendary status it was happening at me mom to Ray as you say it was expensive private made up of the kind of glitterati of Silicon Valley and and they said you know you should speak at Ted some time that's what that'd be nice but no you don't invite yourself to Ted hmm just hang around outside looking cute and but they did eventually invite me and at the time it was a private conference and the talks didn't go in the internet they went into a box set of DVDs they were given to the participants it was part of the ticket price and there they sat and the year I went there were fantastic people speaking they were actually said that people who mentioned Al Gore and Tony Robbins the people talking about limb regeneration there were people talking about like Aubrey de Grey who was talking about putting an end to Aging he thinks aging is the disease and we should stop it it's very interesting actually so all kinds of fascinating people Hans Rosling and I thought what can I reason to be doing 15 18 minutes and you know that education and creativity and trying to make the best of people's talents is what's driven me all my life and I thought about to try and say something about that hmm and it was a few months later that Chris Anderson who runs Ted called me and said you know we're thinking of putting some of these talks on the website and would you mind if we included yours I think were five of them and I said what can I take a look at it hmm so he sent it to me and Terry my wife and I we sat and looked at so what'd you think I said it's okay we should want a different shirt she wasn't there at the time and so it went online then and it just took off it just took off yeah we think it's been seen that first one by well it's been viewed online just over 27 million times so but it gets shown at events like this all the time so it's often large audiences so you're probably who multiplied it by 10 you wouldn't be far adrift it might be seen by maybe 300 million people or more yeah well actually we've Canada for talks including YouTube and the Ted channel it's well over 40 million views in 50 but who's counting come on it's it's 52.3 we're making a bike but let's not get pedantic you know so I guess I mean one question is I mean how I mean that's obviously it's a it's something you didn't plan I mean it you know you came to give a talk you were invited by Ted to give a talk and and I'm sure that you went with that retention giving a great talk the fact that it took a couple years after your talk but they've before they even suggested to putting on along is that right kind of months come once right oh okay so there was all kind of plans were already in train with I just said that okay we just covered that very point I'm just saying no it was it was a couple of months yeah there was a couple of months but it was it took a little while for it to take off but I'll tell you what it was honestly it was the conjunction of several factors may forget the after all talk it's not for a minute but it happened that they were expanding the website the YouTube was starting to have an impact social media were kicking off you know Twitter was starting to get people's attention and Facebook so it's like you know there was a conjunction of several factors that made it possible site and rock music they had to wait till liquid electrifying guitars there were great guitarists in the name in an 18th century but you needed certain technologies to make it spread you needed distribution methods for records and so on so Ted has been a phenomenon partly because it's inherently interesting but because the technology has been available to spread this out in millions motive motif is ideas worth spreading in this we have the technology to do that now and I suppose I mean how has how did life changed after that was it it was an immediately apparent that life things were going to be different for you know I mean it took a while truthfully it was I did an event recently in in Michigan it was a University and I was speaking to students in the in the evening and what has happened is it's it's really multiplied interest in these sorts of ideas so when I went they said what I come and speak to some students well though I think 7,000 of them in the basketball Stadium and any was having lunch with the faculty beforehand and one of these guys said to me he said you know you've been at this a long time not having you I said what's that he said you're trying to transform education I said yes I have he said what is it eight years now and I said how do you mean yes he said you know since that TED talk and I said yes but I was alive before that you know that just mean I wasn't invented Ted I mean I I've been banging on about this for years in one way or another and so what he did do is it created a huge megaphone and and Ted will say also it was one of the reasons that Ted itself became so widely distributed but yeah I do get I could get very gratified truthfully by I got a lot of kids coming ups and I've shown this to my parents parents say I've showed it to the teachers teacher sent I've shown it to my head teacher and you know you can't plan up that any of that but it seems to have hit a chord with people and I'm thrilled about it because it's what matters to me now I know that we were talking before about some of your work is involving working with with companies and you mentioned it can I mention Disney and you mentioned the fact that you are ironically brought in to help the Imagineers Riis park their imagination I suppose to some extent yeah well I work currently a lot with education systems mean that's my home ground and where I I came from and I still did that I've worked with retired state systems and and national systems here and elsewhere but I have been asked quite a lot to work with companies on innovation strategies because the great irony is that our kids I think in our teachers being stifled in schools by this suffocating culture of standardization and utility if the one thing those interested me is that politicians of all parties are not just in England often talk about the need to raise academic standards in schools as if academic is a synonym for intelligence but actually the world depends on a multitude of different sorts of talents and possibilities and passions I mean look at the stories we hear today you know from from Peter antara from home-baked and from Haley all people who have found an extraordinary passion deep inside themselves which is in itself a manifestation of deep intelligence but if you reduce the whole of intelligence to the ability to pass a levels you know or to do low-grade clerical work in primary schools then don't be surprised if you don't get the best out of people and it seems to me it's a matter of Human Rights apart from everything else that were investing our children's the hands of a system that misunderstands them and the irony is that politicians talk all the time out they need to raise academic standards and yet academic is a synonym for abstract removal from the real world you know the only way the best way to kill any out and say well it's purely absent it's purely academic isn't it in academics live in ivory towers apparently but now we all want to be like them to save the world I think it's ridiculous and I love academic work you know but I'm not but it's just not the way we should measure all forms of ability or intelligence compassion so you know to me it's it's a kind of long standing campaign that and it and it cuts right at the half I think of what education should be about but the irony is a lot of these measures these standardization measures in schools are being emphasized in what politicians claim to be the interest of the economy but if you work with companies they all say we want people to be more creative more innovative and all your businesses and charger Peters depend upon people being able to pull on the rope but with different levels of force and with different levels of talent and if you keep stamping people out on this uniform standardized process you'll betraying the very interests you meant to be serving so to me it's it's a matter of deep significance and not just personally it's a global issue now and I think we face such enormous challenges in the world that we can hardly afford to get this wrong and yet we continue to do it is there anyone that's doing better than others I know if you are at a national level or well you know there are great schools everywhere great schools everywhere and I've just recently agreed to become the patron of the Everton free school and not because it's free but because of what it's doing no it's the interesting the Adrian Packer is here today was the spark behind this it's part of evidence community program and they're giving fantastic supportive but you know they're building this school in spello Lane which is where I grew up on wasteland a bit like the land at Anfield because they're not these houses down with no good reason but now there's an empty space there and they're building a freeze based on the principles tonight our key four and this is for kids who are in many ways failed by the current system now say I don't speak in criticism ever of teachers or of head teachers it's a systemic problem and teachers and head teachers suffer as much as the kids do in this system and to me it's about radically personalizing education and recognizing that talent is diverse and different and passions are unique to the people who have them and and the education should be much more like agriculture it should be about cherishing diversity in creating conditions for growth and there are many great schools doing that in spite of the this rather hostile climate and what I'd like to see is the not doing it in spite of the climate of policy but because of it if we put policies in place where people could actually flourish would see a huge difference and this is true in housing it's true in the economy it's true you sit all across Liverpool people create conditions of blight and then wonder why people aren't happy with it and if you create different conditions as you're trying to do with home-baked the whole place comes comes alive in a different sort of way you have to believe in that you have to believe in the vitality of the human spirit if you give it room to grow and to flourish it will far exceed the expectations of policy makers who seem to try to want to control it and why the the one of the sort of attachment to I mean the to quantifying everything and and you know what and instead of approaching things different you develop things that aren't necessarily going to be measured that easily why do politicians do it yeah I mean well you know there are as many as there are politicians but I think it's it's partly that that that politicians have very short lives know they have the half life of a dragonfly really and you know junus I mean that I mean that they I mean they're a good and bad the first school I went to in Liverpool I got polio when I was four as part of the epidemic and I thought I should join him you know as I was a you know I hated to be left out and so but I went to the market Bevan school that suppose now but Margaret Pavan in Norris green but Margaret Bevan was the first lady mayor of Liverpool she was a tremendous force for good among the city and and had a particular interesting kids with with this there are brilliant policymakers out there I mean to tell them all with the same brush but increasingly it become a profession rather than a vacation it's people playing to each other in order to further an advancement up the political ladder and they have very short attention spans particularly the median how you know they may have 12 months of innovation but then they start to try and create data that'll persuade people at the next election it happens in education the whole time there's a an international league table system now called Pisa in educational program of international student assessment where countries being ranked through samples of kids the age of 15 and these league tables come out and politicians square up to each other against the league tables and flex their biceps and say look we're doing well or we're not you know Pizza has become like the Eurovision Song Contest for education and we all know what the Eurovision Song Contest done for the quality of music you know in the in the world so it's about it's about applying appropriate criteria I mean I was fascinated listening to Tara's account of what's up with you know what's the matter of antimatter and I followed almost the entire first two sentences of what you're saying it's a brilliant account I thought of what you're dealing with but I'm sure I would be here there's a brilliant scientist should be the first to say that science itself is not driven by the data not only in the heart of science there's judgment there's you could see the passion in her eyes as she talked about it which as strong as anybody else's this afternoon talking about the thing that drives them science is a highly passionate occupation the highly passionate calling which is supported by data it's not about the data you need the data and it's true in education and the human sciences like education you it's fine you need data but you mustn't become a slave to it at the end it's a human process and you need to engage it and interpret it and make sense if you lose sight of the fact that education like this building like the arts you know like the science - at the heart of you lose size fact there are essentially human processes that's when you start to make a mistake and when politicians believe that their role in life is to gain high office rather to serve the people who elected them that's when you get into trouble and I think we're in big trouble with them absolutely ok um actually you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 13,798

Keywords: tedx talk, ted talks, United Kingdom, Culture, ted x, English, History, Dance, Education, TEDxTalks, tedx, Career/Life Development, ted, tedx talks, ted talk, Public Policy

Id: Pm3ZJjWj8yE

Length: 21min 32sec (1292 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 03 2014