How to Change Education - Ken Robinson

anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physical finite planet is either mad or an economist we don't want to focus politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens order to organize their lives we are not as endlessly manipulable and its predictable as you would think what people talk a lot about in education is the need to get back to basics and a bit they'll be talking about this since the beginning of Education by the way normally what people mean when they talk about the basics is a group of subjects that they think are more important than all the others and particularly education are people talk about the STEM disciplines science technology engineering and math so they think it's sounds technology engineering mathematics these are very important fundamental disciplines they are necessary but they're not sufficient for the type of education we need in any case the basics of Education are not any group of subjects or disciplines the basics of Education are the purposes for which we do this why are we invested anyway in systems of mass public education what's it for and if we don't agree on the purposes then we have a problem in talking about the means and the processes well I think there are four purposes to public education and I will labor them but I'll just point them out as a reference point not in any particular order the first time is is economic we all know that education has powerful economic purposes it does and it should we should recognize it as a fact we invest so much in it as communities because we expect education will contribute to our long-term economic health vitality and sustainability that's how we got to have these systems in the first place but the economic model of the day was industrialism which is why the system looks the way it does it is not that system anymore for us we have a different set of imperatives now for our children and for ourselves if we're to make them economically independent as I think we all want to do that we don't we want to make our children economically independent we do I can't tell you how much we want to make our children economic independent and at once if it's possible but what sort of education you need for that there was a report published about 18 months ago by IBM in which they reviewed interviews they had with 1,800 leaders of companies in 80 countries companies and organizations and they asked them what their priorities are what keeps them awake at night and but there were two really that came out in reverse order they are here the first they said in reverse order was adaptability how do you run organizations which are able to respond quickly to change now this is a bottom-line issue for companies because if you don't adapt quickly to change in circumstances you're very likely to go under and the history of corporate life around the world is populated with the corpses of once great corporations that didn't move quickly enough think for example about Kodak Kodak is now in bankruptcy proceedings Kodak was synonymous in the 20th century with photography they invented home photography they invented digital photography and now they're out of business and it's not because people stopped taking photographs on the contrary people are taking more photographs than ever aren't they irritatingly more photographs than ever I get it all the time people posting on Facebook here's my cappuccino check this out from a different angle this time you know and here it is after I've drunk half of it fascinating send me more of these photographs what happened was that Instagram came along and whipped the ground ready from beneath the feet of companies like Kodak they just did not adapt and the reason they didn't adapt is because organizations are not like machines they're like organisms they are living entities made up of people or feelings motivations roles aspirations passions and ambitions and if the if the organism doesn't respond just as in the natural world if it doesn't respond to changes in its environment it dies and it's what's happened to many companies including most recently Kodak so adaptability but the top priority the CEO is pointed to for their company's long term flourishing it was creativity I said we need companies that are consistently and systematically creative and how do you do that you know we need people can think Tiffani but we can't this is the great irony we can't always find them because kids coming out of universities and colleges these days find it very devil to come up with fresh ideas and why they've been educated on this standard routine of routine testing you know of multiple-choice tests we've been sort of systematically quashing the appetite for originality in our education systems the irony is that a lot of these systems are in place now in what people believe to be the interests of the economy and corporations say they want something else so if we're to meet the economic requirement of Education we need to have systems which promote creativity and adaptability as bottom-line competencies the very things that our education systems at the moment of being discouraged from doing the second purpose of Education is cultural we live in the world has been increasingly complicated increasingly Riven increasingly contested many of the great conflicts around the world now are not economic in character although there's an economic dimension there cultural in character and we look what's happening in the Middle East just now look what's been happening in Central Europe look what's happening across America these are conflicts in people's ways of seeing the world the ideology is their value systems hitting each other head-on and they may imperil it in the end and you know it's a small enough planet as it is but it's becoming more and more populated but in any case for ethical reasons as well as strategic ones we need forms of Education which enable people to understand how they came to think as they do why their values are as they are why their patterns of life are as they are and why other peoples are different we need formal education which help people to understand their own cultural identity and what form did and those of other people now for that you need a broad education you need an education it gives equal weight to the arts the humanities to social studies not just to technical subjects but I came across this quote which I thought you'd like about what it is to be British these days I found this on the Internet where I find so many things I thought I but I'm not showing you the other things I'm just showing you this what was the law being as it is so breath I could like this it said that being British these days but you could read American for this or any other nationality you like but as you'll see being British these days means driving home in a German car stopping to collect some Irish Guinness or Danish lager picking up an Indian curry or Greek kebab and spending the evening sitting on Swedish furniture watching American programs on a Japanese TV and the most British thing of all suspicion of anything foreign that's broadly right so there's big cultural agenda for education the third is social we need forms of Education which engage this generation in the processes by which our communities are organized and governed and there's a lot of evidence that people are pulling away from those roles there's a lot of evidence of disengagement disenfranchisement from our political institutions for reasons we can readily see but John Dewey said this once you know you said that every generation has to rediscover democracy I think that's right we live in Los Angeles there was an election for the new mayor a couple of months ago the elections gone on for 18 months millions of dollars have been spent on the election 15% of the electorate showed up to vote for it this was on a day when I'd for reasons just of interest to me I was looking into life at Emily Davison Emily Davidson who threw herself it thought anyway under the hoos of the Kings horse at Epsom in 1930 and died two days later she did that in the interests of sustaining votes for women and here we are you know just over a century later and people aren't bothered to vote people died for this but we end up taking these things for granted and of course we can't actually I have to say it's what I think is one of the great themes of the work of the RSA that it sets out actively to encourage encourage this sort of social engagement particularly in education it's very important that we take part in these civil discourses and that we actively promote it well you don't do that in education by giving people lessons on civics you do it by having a culture which embodies these processes of participation and great schools do that the fourth purpose of Education though is the ultimate one to be which is personal because in the end education is personal it's about people it's not about components of machines it's people who are being educated and if we know anything that people it's they are different they're driven by different talents different abilities different passions different interests and different motivations one of the kind of signature features of humanity is diversity of course it contrasts sharply with one of the organizational principles of education which is conformity and an education which isn't nuanced to individual differences soon finds that very many people are disengaged from it or alienated by it and that's been the evidence in America for example about 30 percent of kids don't complete high school and there are similar figures action in some northern European countries as well this is really what my new book is about by the rich will be pleased me to mention that at this point we're publishing a book called finding your element which is about the nature of individual talent and passion of the things that drive us but if we don't understand that education is about people and individuals in all their diversity and multiplicity then we keep making the mistakes that we make if we treat it as a machine age activity rather than the human process then we run ourselves into a cul-de-sac well if we recognize that when I talk about changing education from the ground up that's the ground I mean see most political strategies start from the top down they think of we can issue directors in the top and get people to conform everything will improve and the evidence is quite the contrary that the more government's going to command the control mode the more they misunderstand the nature of teaching and learning the more they must understand the process of Education the more alienated people come from the whole process so we have a situation here in the UK now where most of the major teacher unions have passive votes of no confidence in the government's education strategy well you know that shouldn't promote a smug expression of satisfaction on the government that should keep them awake all night thinking how badly have we got this wrong now you cannot improve education by alienation the profession that carries it out it would be like trying to improve medicine by vilifying doctors unless you can't do that so recognizing that education I believe can be encouraged in the top-down is one thing but it can only really be improved from the ground up by the people who do the work because in the end it's not Minister State for teaching all our children if they could it's the people actually doing it in the scores so when we get back when we storm out getting back to basics I think we have to recognize at least this basic there was a book published probably 25 years ago now 30 do you care when it was published how much does this matter to you I can check it if you like we can google it we can google it collectively it was called the empty space by a theater director called Peter Brook Peter Brook is one of those eminent theater directors on earth these days and sadly of his generation he founded among other things the Center for theater research in Paris Peter Brook is convinced has been throughout his working life that theater can be a generally transformative experience it can be a deeply powerful experience for people than can change the way they look and feel but he also says that course most theaters not like that it's a night out you know it passes the evening but it would have passed anyway so he said if you're really concerned to make theater the most powerful experience it can be but we have to decide what it is we mean when we say theater we have to get back to basics and focus on what is it what's fundamental and he answers that question and a brief passage in the book by performing a thought experiment essentially says you know what can you take an average theatre performance what can you take away and still have it still have theater what's the core of it what's the irreducible minimum so he says well you know you could take away the curtains you don't need those you could take away the script a lot of theater doesn't have script you could take away the stage crew and the lighting you don't need it you can get rid of the director definitely you can get rid of the building you don't need any of that the only thing you can't get rid of and still have theater is an actor in the space and somebody watching because the actor performs a drama theater describes the relationship between the audience and the performance it's that relationship that we mean so if we're trying to make theater most powerful experience can be we have to focus on that relationship between the performer and the audience and he says we should add nothing to it unless it helps and of course a lot of what we add to theater them distracts that relationship it substitutes for it well the analogy for me with education is exact because at the heart of education is a teacher and a learner and we've over time kind of obfuscated that relationship with every type of accretion and distraction we have syllabuses we have testing regimes testing companies political ideologies political purposes subject loyalties union issues building codes all of the ings timetable schedules it's why we can spend all day long discussing education and never mention teaching or learning but if there's no teaching and learning happening there is no education going on so if we've gone to improve education we have to improve that bit and everything else has to take a place around it and not get in the middle of it or get in the way of it so the focus on teaching and learning to me is vital now what we know about learners is about children is that children are learning organisms children don't need to be helped to learn for the most part they they are born with a vast voracious appetite for learning in fact they evolved in the womb with a great voracious appetite to learn there's a lot of evidence now that beyond a certain point children are absorbing all kinds of things and their mother while they're in neutral you know they're picking up voice rhythms they're actually developing tastes for certain types of nutrient it's why kids come out listen to the cadences of language now what we also know is you don't teach your child to speak most kids get to learn to speaking on the first year and a half or so of their life but you don't teach them do you if you've got kids you know that you don't sit them down when they get to the age of one and say okay here's the situation you know you've probably noticed your mother neither all these noises and authority refer to things that are in the room here all these things have names as we call them and here's a list of them and they're roughly 50,000 to get through in the next couple of months and when we've got all those down we'll start to introduce verbs which can tell you what you can do with these things and later on things you might have done with them in certain circumstances and things you could have done possibly in the past so at least the hypothetical past of course you can't do that they just pick it up I mean you nudge them you correct them you encourage them you know teach them to speak we do teach them to write that's a different thing writing appeared much later in human evolution than speech I mean very recently actually we had a history of written systems but my point is that children have a vast appetite for learning and it only starts to dissipate when we educate them let's say when we put them in buildings designed for the purpose and put them in serried ranks and start to force-feed them information in which they may or may not have an interest now the conceit of Education is that you know children learn anyway the conceit of Education is that we can help them do it better and direct them to things they may not otherwise learn if left to their own devices that's why we plan to do this sort of stuff but learning will happen anyway and with the new technologies happening more and more actually spontaneously what it means is if we really want education to be effective we have to focus on the process of teaching and learning and teaching I think over the course the past number of years these so-called reform movements has become reduced in the political discourse to a kind of delivery system you know your job is to deliver the national curriculum I don't know when we borrowed all this lexicon from FedEx and the one that began to happen that we dropped the curriculum off for you but teaching has become seen as kind of delivery system and teachers have become seen as kind of functionaries in the raising of standards in the administration of tests actually actually teaching is an art form everything I've ever learned and seen about teaching convinced me that is the case it's not enough to be a good teacher to know your stuff though you to know it you don't need to know everything but you need to know enough to be able to teach it but more than that you need to be able to excite people about the material you need to engage them you need to pique their imaginations you need to fuel their creativity you need to drive their passion for it you need to get them to want to learn this you need to find points of entry that's the gift of a great teacher somebody was saying to me earlier today you know how can you do that with 35 kids in the class I know teachers and my wife Terri is among them when I first mater with 42 kids in the class the place was humming and alive with activity and learning and you do that not by you having to teach them everything but by getting them actively involved in teaching themselves and teaching each other in Harvard now they talk a lot about the flipped classroom the physics professors there who have stopped lecturing people which is ironic for me to be reporting on now I know that but but but but instead he gets the students in groups to work together and teach each other and I find it very interesting that finally you know Harvard and our universities have discovered what every good primary school teacher is known for years you know that people teach themselves if you correct the right conditions for it so one of the ways that we improve education is by recognizing that happens at the point of where teachers and learners meet if it doesn't happen there doesn't at all in formal organized education systems so you can't improve education by ignoring that relationship or demeaning it or vilifying it but it also means if you are in their relationship you hold the tools of power right in your hands you can change the system yourself you don't need to wait for anybody to do it now the shift I think is this I said that we have a mechanistic sister metaphors of education we do for the most part we have systems of Education - but it's not a mechanistic system and this I think is one of our points of entry into the future that a school just like a child or a teacher is not a component they are living organisms living breathing entities a school is a community of reciprocating individuals with who develop their own culture their own way of seeing things their habits and rituals and so on we can begin to see that there isn't a single point of influence the teachers in the system the head teachers are just as influential in their own world as the policy makers and if you are a teacher if you're a school principal if you're a superintendent if you run a school district so far as the kids are concerned to go to your school you are the education system if you close the door on your children you are the education system it's not the secretary of state it's you and if you begin to change your practice if you begin to change the environment of the school if you in other words concentrate on your own microclimate in the school as part of the larger climate event you start to affect the whole that's how all social movements have happened when people say times change what values don't they're making a fundamental mistake actually values do change over time but they don't change by the activities of governments they've changed in the ground of people starting to act differently and demanding something else I'm always struck by the fact you know that rock and roll one of the great cultural movements of my generation was not a government plan you know it was not the case that a group of culture ministers got together in Brussels for a briefing from two civil servants who discovered three chords yeah and said we think ministers these will come together and lots of interesting combinations and Jenkins here has designed some hairstyles that might go along with it we thought we'd run a few focus groups and see how it takes off no this thing just took off and bowled over everything in its path people thought this is great the internet was not a government plan Al Gore despite what he says didn't think of it and the people who did think about it Tim berners-lee did not have in mind what actually happened and how fast this has grown human culture is essentially unpredictable but it it accumulates over the creative activities of individuals feeding off each other that's how organic growth happens and when I say the revolution is needed and it should start the ground up what I just want to tell you is it's already happening this isn't a theory they're already pointed destruction across the whole planet here and I'm just encouraging you to believe in it and to try to move our systems into the 21st century I was in Austin Texas last week where the whole school district has given their kids iPads for example it's a revolution in the way their teaching and learning in that school district look at the massive online open courses the MOOCs which are beginning to really drive a wedge into the whole process of higher education you can multiply these examples the system is already adapting the part system that's not adapting is the high level of government policy and if any of the social movement is entered to go by the movement will gather force before they waken up to it and I hope that they'll recognize that they too are part of the ecosystem and that they should at least understand that the real role of leaders when it comes to education with you're a teacher or a head teacher or you're the head of a district or you're the secular state for education your proper role if you have a loving relationship with education is not to try and command and troll it but to recognize your place in climate control and if you can help to change the climate of expectation in education if you can change what's happening at the ground then you've changed the world you

Channel: RSA

Views: 532,137

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Keywords: education, ken robinson, the rsa, rsa, matthew taylor, economic, cultural, passion, learning styles, creativity, creative, talent, student, school, academic

Id: BEsZOnyQzxQ

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2013