Ken Robinson - The Element

what to thank Matthew for the invitation I'm a great fan of the RSA and a longtime fellow and I'm delighted to know that my talk here has been the most popular download I would saying the TED video has been downloaded four million times my son showed me video recently on YouTube of two kittens who seemed to be having a conversation it's 90 seconds long and that's been downloaded 17 million times so I'm not getting carried away with myself thready ID if only I had look cute for 90 seconds my fame would be even greater I just want to say a few words about this book because the real value of today is that we're a small enough group to have a conversation and I would really value that I was asked recently how long it took to write this book and there are two answers that one of them is 8 months 6 to 8 months and the other is 35 years because this book is about something I feel passionately about and have done most of my professional life actually longer than that even most my own professional life and the core idea really is that it certainly in my experience most adults have no idea of their true talents no idea of what they're really capable of achieving most adults in my experience kind of bump along the bottom you know they they do something they feel perhaps more less competent in things they feel they need to do but don't do with any great commisioner passion or commitment or any great sense of fulfillment I don't say this is true view and I can't prove the statistics of this I'm just saying it's been my experience I meet people time and again and yet I also meet people who absolutely love what they do and couldn't really imagine doing anything else that when they discovered this thing for them it was a turning point and they you know that this this is what their life has become so I've long been interested in what the difference is and what makes the difference and the book is therefore based on a wholesale of interviews with people about how they got to be so to speak in that element I had myself saying this a lot you know that people do their best when they do something they love when they're in their element and I thought what is it quite to be in your element and I think it's two things one of them is that if you're in your element you're doing something for which you have a natural capacity a natural feel and it's different for all sorts of people it's different for all of us really one of the people in the book is I call Terence Tao I didn't have the pleasure of meeting him but his story is quite well-known and we included it Terence Tao have you heard of Terence Tao interview he's a professor of mathematics in UCLA at the age of 2 he taught himself to read from Sesame Street so rather quirky accent in in the case of Terence and rather to feathered for most people's tastes really and then at the age of three he was completing double digit equations I don't know what they are by there anybody was doing it at three at the age of eight he took a college entrance exam in mathematics and got 97% at the age of 20 he got his PhD in maths and at the age of 30 got the field medal which is the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for mathematics and the MacArthur Genius award it's reasonable to say that Terrance gets maths you know Kent's got the hang of maths frankly in the way that most of us have not I realized recent I was born in 1950 that's not what I realized recently I knew that oh I have known that for some time now in fact since 1950 so I'm a kind of boomer kind of um and I realized recently I was given a guitar as a teenager around the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar it worked out for Eric you know in a head in a way it is yet to work out for me so part of this is having a natural aptitude kind of knowing what this thing is and taking to it but being good at something being naturally good at something is not enough to be in your element as I see it to be in your element you also have to love it I know lots of people who are doing things they're good at that they don't greatly care for they do it because they're good at it I wrote a book in the 80s and the editor who worked on the book is a wonderful woman she used to be a concert pianist and I was rather surprised by this when she told me and I said how you know what happened and she said she was doing a Const giving a concert the Purcell room on the south bank what one evening and at the end of it the conductor took her for dinner and said you were great this evening she said thank you he said but you didn't enjoy it did you when she said how do you mean he said well you didn't enjoy it she had what he said well playing he didn't seem to enjoy it she said well no not really and he said well do you enjoy playing she said no not really he said well why'd you do it she said well because I'm good at that I suppose and he said you know being good at something is not a good enough reason to do it and she realized that what had happened was she'd spent her entire life meeting other people's expectations you know that she'd shown a precocious talent as a pianist she went to a specialist music school then she went to the Royal College of Music and then she did a doctor music degree and then she did it and then she progressed to the concert platform and she said nobody'd ever really stopped to ask her and she'd never stopped to ask yourself why she was doing it except that she was good at it she just could and said and I realised when he put this to me that I'd never liked it and at the end of that season had I finished the season finished my commitments but I closed the lid of the piano and I've never opened it since she said because I realized when I stopped to think about it that the thing I had always loved was books always I loved writers I love being around writers I loved the literary world I loved reading I loved writing when I could so she said I determined that I would find a role in the literary world so I could be among the people I wanted to be with and do the thing I love to do and should I've never been happier and I said this for several is one is that to say it's not enough to be good at something and this isn't just about the art sometimes the arts trap people as much as anything else trap people it's about finding the thing that resonates with you most fully I've been asked a couple things about the book know this they said is the book about creativity this book is not really about creativity in my opinion this is a book about diversity it's about the extraordinary multiplicity of human talent most of which in my experience is lost and there are reasons why it's also part of the book is describing what I mean by the element and it's it's that point at which natural talent meets a passion I think when you find yourself in love with cement you're good at you never really work again you know um I remember years ago my brother used to be in a band from Liverpool he was in a rock band and he had a fantastic keyboard player Charles and we came off went out with him one night this gig see cutting edge you know I want you know that a gig and we're hanging after the gig and chillin so to speak and I said you were fantastic that like child he said thank you I said but you didn't enjoy it I know I did something I said that you have fantastic night when you said yes it was and I said you know it's casual mark I said I would love to do that he said do what I said play the keyboards I'd love to be able to do that which sitting there with a drink he said no you wouldn't I said that's bit taken aback you know because I felt myself an authority on my own opinions you know sizer I said but I would he said no you wouldn't and we went on in this way for some time you know and he said no no he said he said if you would love to do this you'd be doing it he said to do what I do I practice six to eight hours every day and I'd play every night and I do that because I love it I couldn't do it if I didn't he said I think what you mean is you like the idea of it sounds a bit startled really because it was a casual social comment Franklin didn't mean to be sort of cauterized in this way socially but but he made a good point no that you it's that point at which passion meets a natural facility now the reason I wanted to to explore all of this is because as I say my experience is that most people don't have the experience of finding this configuration in their lives I don't say it's true VI but it's true a lot of people and yet some do and they're in all sorts of different fields now I've had a lifelong commitment as I guess some of you know to education and um I think education is partly responsible for diverting people from their talents I don't mean individual teachers or particular schools it's not a problem of teachers or particular schools it's a system problem it's to do with the ideology of Education in which people are working the things they take for granted as being true in many cases in my opinion things that are not true one of them for example is this extraordinary distinction which still plagues is which by the way the RSA I think as I was pioneered against this awful distinction people make between academic and vocational education I really think it's and it's a dreadful mistake to both make the distinction and then to privilege academic work above what's called vocational work you know as if doing things with your hands isn't ready to be discussed in in polite public the real education is about a certain type of abstract conceptual knowledge and that they're different in some way I was just giving an example of why I think it's so awkward and pernicious I was in San Francisco a week ago signing a book actually I was signing a number of books you'd be interested man I I didn't fly to San Francisco to sign this one book you know I was there were many books but there was a line of people whose books I was signing and what I find is if people tell you their stories and you get you get kind of adept at having a one-minute conversation with somebody for as long as it takes to sign their name really so you're not holding people up but this guy stopped in front of me and I've been having a little rant about academic and vocational education and he said them he said I was really he bought the book in the sides prepared to speak to him and he said how he said this is a he said I loved what you're saying by the way I said what do you do he said I'm a fireman in Danville but the fire services are fantastic um how long have you been a fireman he said well my working life I said when did you know you wanted to be a family so I always wanted to be a fireman I say that no kids say they want to be a fireman I always want to be a fireman all the way through schoolies he said but nobody ever encouraged me he said I was always I was in the school where the whole thing was to get to college into a degree said I never want to do that want to be a fireman and he said I was as made to feel bad about it he's in fact I had one teacher who made a fool of me one day in the class when I we've talked about careers he said I what I want to and he told me I was stupid and that I would never amount to anything he said in a few months ago I saved his life yeah I pulled him out of a crash gave him CPR they said naive ulcers I saved his wife's life as well he said I think he thinks better of me how would you know to mean this this insistence on a certain type of talent automatically pushes other sorts of talents further away you know from the center of attention in education now the book from one point of view is very personal in the sense it has lots of personal stories but it's more than that it's not really just a book of reminiscences by people who are doing things they like to do there are three arguments that run through which I think are also central to what happens at the RSA and there is the first is that what I'm trying to Clayton book I believe is essential to human fulfillment that finding a purpose in work we do or the way that we spend our time which resonates deeply with who we think we are is an essential part of knowing who we are that in a way if you don't know what you can do you don't really know what you might be so it's about that and people are in the book from all kinds of different fields um one of the people in the book is a guy called Bart Connor have you ever heard about Connor Bart Connor is a fantastic guy I met him in Oklahoma a few years ago Bart Bart found that when he was six he could walk on his hands as easily as he could walk on his feet we don't know how he found this out I think it puts fell over but he could do it and he said it wasn't much used to anybody you know but it was a source of social celebration and and then he found he could walk up and down stairs on his hands as well again not a great bit of you know but socially you know engaging he said whenever the parties the house you know the conversation lolled you know his dad would say Bart just do the hands thing they would him and either search do the stairs anyway and when he was I think about eight if this in Morton Grove Illinois his mother took him to the local gymnastic Center downtown with the school gymnastics teacher because she thought this was interesting that he could do this and seem to enjoy it so they took him to the big gymnastics Center and he said he walked into this gymnastics enter into this gymnasium and he said it took my breath away no there were ropes vaulting horses wall bars trampolines he said to me it was a combination of Disneyland and Santa's grotto he said it was intoxicating now you see here again I do not have this feeling when I walk into gymnasium you know I do not find it intoxicating I wanted to get intoxicated you know if I if I come to gymnasium but he found it intoxicating and he started going regularly ten years later he walked onto the mat at the Montreal Olympics representing America in the mail gymnastic squad he became the most decorated male gymnasts in American history he now lives in Norman Oklahoma he's married to Nadia common edge she recalled the perfect-10 they have this extraordinary monastic school and he and Nadia are leading figures in the world Special Olympics movement so between them they've helped to liberate you know the athletic capabilities of tens of thousands of people with disabilities I think it's a fantastic story but the couple things that to say about it the first is that you know some his mother could not have anticipated that that would be the trajectory that his life would follow it wasn't like at the age of eight she saw him doing this thing on the stairs you know thought well he can do that you know there's there's this girl in Romania you know maybe what she did was encourage his talent and the talent created the opportunities to which he then responded and this to me is fundamentally important because it illustrates something I think which is essential to our understanding of how education should work that life our own lives are not linear it's much more appropriate I think to think not of linear metaphors for human growth and development but of organic metaphors that our lives evolved around the responses we have the opportunities that meters and we in turn reciprocate with them so his life became transformed by the investment he made in his own passion for gymnastics he could not have planned the trajectory now I say this because we still run our education systems as if life is linear we run them as if it's mechanistic this is one of the reasons so many things get phased out of education because people say well you'll never get a job if you do that you know things are dropped off the end because they don't meet the linear assumption I came across a policy paper a while ago when I came went to Los Angeles which seemed to me to really exemplify this you know we are obsessed with getting people to universities at the moment it's like the whole job is to get to university why I don't mean you shouldn't go don't think everybody should go and have that type of education people should go into other things I'll not go now you know do something else for it till they understand it but I came across this policy paper which said that it was entitled College begins in kindergarten no it doesn't sure it doesn't I mean if we have more time will you go into this but time is short so it doesn't kindergarten begins in kindergarten you know there's the guy who runs the arc in Dublin made a fantastic comic conscious remember his name as wonderful man but he said a three-year-old is not half a six year old a six year old is not half a 12 year old you know but you know I'm sure it's true in London it's true in New York Los Angeles San Francisco parents are competing to get their children to particular kindergartens competing you know kids are being interviewed at 3:00 for kindergarten you're presumably producing CBS you know sitting in front of unimpressed selection boards flicking through this thing you know this is it you know you've you've been around for thirty six months and this is it you know you've if you've achieved nothing you know you've spent the first six months breastfeeding from what I can tell it it's an outrage you see it's preposterous isn't it and yet the whole system of education is planned as if it's a linear process whose outcomes you can foretell you simply cannot and on this base is many people along the way of being detached from their natural interests in the interests of this faulted model of progress so one it's important for personal fulfillment the second major argument here is that I think it's essential for the health of our communities that if you have people aggregated in large numbers who feel disciplic ate from a sense of purpose was no social investment either in themselves or the communities of it's about what we know the price that we pay for this I made an analogy I think the last time I was here at the RSA because I believe it's strongly between the crisis in the world's natural resources which I believe is real and severe and the crisis which I think this book is about which is the crisis in the world's human resources and I think the origins are the same they lie in industrialism and in a particular intellectual preoccupation and the analogy is even stronger than that because the current status quo serves the interests of massive commercial interests in just the same way as the oil based economy met the needs of massive commercial interests it I know it's not securing them in the UK but in America there's an alleged outbreak of ADHD you know attention deficit disorder this is a a thing a false epidemic I don't mean to say there's no such thing but according to figures in America in the mid 80s half a million kids were diagnosed with ADHD and it's now nearly 8 million you know well this is a bonanza for the for the drug companies and the pharmaceutical companies testing is a multi-billion dollar industry often conducted in the hands of people who know very little about education you know just to keep the system running so I think the analogy is exact and I think I've said last time you're in America for example in California I think the price we pay is enormous next year 2010 in America spending total spending on the state prison system will overtake spending on higher education does that make any kind of sense I don't know what the figures are here yeah but it's a ludicrous conception of human capacity isn't it I just don't think there are that many bad people you know I mean I mean there are bad people but not so many there are people in bad circumstance who make bad judgments but not that many naturally bad people I mean there aren't that many psychopaths I don't think you know actually you don't need that many Psychopaths truthfully I mean I mean one goes a long way I find out you read it you know I say give me give me two psychopaths in the same day that's a bad day but isn't it I'm saying dear diary you know what a day so I think it's a sense of the health of our communities it to me speaks to a broader conception of human resources and the final way in which I think the Arg holds is it's that human talent human ability like the world's natural resources is often buried deep it's not just lying around on the surface you have to go looking for it and that's true of many of the people in this book something happened which enabled them to develop this particular talent they met somebody or there's a conference of circumstances or there was a mentor somebody who spotted something or they came across it it's not just obvious where your talent might be and that's why I think so many people don't know what their talents are because they've never actually come upon them yet and the final point is I think this is a hard-headed economic argument that you know as we look into the future and can't predict even two weeks out you know what the economies may look like what jobs people will do how the economies may evolve what what sort of economic progress will make investing in the old model seems to me to be absolutely absurd you know the old model is is predicated on a particular view of intelligence and talent and I think the future we need to evolve systems of Education and of organizational planning and of community development which are based on a model of diversity rather than of conformity and that's in the end what this book is about it's to try and promote a broader view of the diversity of human talent in all of its many forms so the first two bits of that it's about about ability and it's about aptitude it's all it's also about attitude I have a chaplin book called do you feel lucky because a lot of people in the book say that they owe their success to luck but actually luck is a bit of a get out I think random things happen to all of us that's really not the point it's not what happens to you I think that makes the difference in your life it's what you make of what happens how you meet these circumstance and what you do about it and it's about opportunity you know there aren't that many pearl divers in the Sahara truth the hint not much Bronco riding in the Antarctic you know it's about cultural circumstances things prevent this happening quite severe things happening I have a chapter called what will they think one thing I think of these as circles have constraint one of things that stops us doing what we might want to do is our own self-censorship a fear that will fall flat on our face that will do it me I'm not even entitled to it a second I think is other people's attitudes friends and family often well-intentioned I tell the story in the book of Paulo Coelho I didn't meet him either but maybe that's due the people I mentioned who didn't have to get to meet for the book but the rest I did but Paulo Coelho you know the right of the alchemist one of the world's top selling authors now wanted to be a writer for money as a kid and his parents heavily disapproved this and there when I got to be teenager and persisted in this idea and when I approached university age that he wouldn't give up on the idea they actually had him committed to a mental institution where he had three series of electroconvulsive therapy to try and get this idea out of his head anyway didn't get out of his head and he carried on to be Paulo Coelho the person we know now most of us don't have that and most of us aren't actually plugged into the mains you know to stub is happening but but there are all forms of tacit disapproval that prevents us moving forward it can be the raised eyebrow of a friend you know or a group culture what you seriously what you would do that okay it's nagging or cultural constraints about the roles of women or or other communities so I'm not trying to say that this is easy but I'm saying it's essential and that there are things we can do particularly in the systematic process that we put forward through education and organization of communities that can assist it so the final thing I just want to say is you know I've had a lifetime of interest in education and human possibility but in the end what it seems to me essential to emphasize is that education is not a mechanistic process and organizations are not mechanisms you know if you look at the organizational management chart of most organizations it looks like a wiring diagram and it all kind of suggests that these are like mechanisms and they're not human life and human communities are much more like organisms in the sense that we flourish under certain conditions and we fade under certain conditions and our success is always synergistic with our environment as it is with a plant you know that a successful plant is successful throughout not just in one part and it's success depends on the environment in which it lives and its enrichment of the environment and I find this is true in the human field I know schools across this country organizations which are wonderfully healthy and vital who enrich their environment and the people in it the problem happens when we start to deep personalize education and it continues to impress and depress me when successive governments don't get it when they keep acting as if you can reform education by just tweaking the mixture and standardizing everything and getting back to basics you know I wish politicians who talk about getting back to basics understood what they were saying you know I think we should get back to basics but there are some basics which go well beyond what they believe one is that education is about personal growth it is somebody once said to me there is this book does this Oh some of its ideas the 1960s has it yes and to the 18th century and to the 1920s and to the ancient Greeks I hope some ideas are worth repeating it is about human flourishing but it's also about recognizing that education and our communities are part of cultures and they're not independent insulated from them so there has to be a cultural commitment and it's also about economic development and that has to be synergistic with all of the rest but at the heart of it the elemental bit of it is a different conception of human possibility and that's really what the book tries to be about as a basis for a different type of conversation I came across I'm sure you know this I came across a great piece a while ago from Michelangelo it's quite old this isn't recent - you didn't just say this yes like this just in you know shrimp from a guy named Joe but he talked about the making of the statue the David and and he said you know I did not make this sculpture I didn't make the David I revealed it it was there already in the stone I can't take credit for it I revealed it and he said it's an easy thing to do because all you have to do is to remove the bit the bits that aren't the David and there it is that's all you do as a sculptor remove the bits that aren't the David and I feel it's a it's a it's a good analogy for us we should start removing the bit Siddhartha's and allowed the bits of Dara's to shine for he also said something very interesting he said the problem for human beings is often the not that we aim too high and fail is that we aim too low and succeed and the book is an appeal to aim high and to give us some sense of what success might look like and I think it comes that final bit that finally your passion does change everything thank you where does responsibility duty ethics fit into your kind of account of the way in which we lose those things which we get to the real us as it were but not now these aren't mutually exclusive ideas the I define we actually going back to the oil futures report of 10 years ago now but slightly refined I thought simplified the definition I have in the book actually the work I do for creativity is the creative it is the process of having original ideas that have value and I think the three key things about that are those key words it's a process you know it's not an event to do something creative is a job of work you know it's something that unfolds as you work on that in and evolve them it's not just random acts of inspiration well they may have some part in it it is about coming up with fresh ideas but it's also judging the value and worth of them and you know some good ideas some fresh ideas are not terribly good and I think what we've seen if you talk about the recent financial collapse is not so much an act of creativity as a kind of mass hallucination you know that this was a whole enterprise that was built on thin air from what you can tell and the problem here wasn't that people were being original it so they completely lost their critical judgment you know they left out entirely the essential counterpart of original thinking which is evaluating the use of these ideas and you know I mean I don't have more to say than all of us would say about that but the problem was not that they're being creative is that they weren't being critical and I think of those two things don't hold together then you're in you know you've created a problem for all of us that's simply what's happened but now that doesn't mean therefore we can't afford to be creative again but we need to be creative responsible you know we actually do need to remake these systems now but having learnt the lessons that were we should have learned from this sort of Fiasco of the past few logs can we turn to the issue education because you've been around debates about education you've seen the cycles that policymakers go through over time we're very light of a conservative government elected next year and saying some very interesting things but there is one aspect to its policy which kind of worries me which is that it is precisely asserting this kind of back to basics view I heard it's very talented spokesman education stay of the day that the diplomas are fine as long as they're just for the people aren't academic so there's a very strong push from a party that's likely soon to be in power for a reassertion academic vocational divide a view that practical learning the creative learning that approaches like opening minds or some kind of horrible middle-class conspiracy to dumb down I guess my question to you is what insight do you have in being round and round these debates about why it is the circularity to the education debate whities we find it so hard to move to move on and why in a way it's so easy to appeal in a rather kind of reactionary way to the public opinion in on education well I think you're correct you're right I mean these debates go round and round and it's exasperated I mean don't vote for them is is one thing I would suggest but but but I think I think it's a serious issue you know that this is not I don't think people are acting in bad faith truthfully I don't think they're deliberately trying to run the country off a cliff when they say these things the problem is much deeper than that it's I think of it as ideological what I mean is and what all this is about all what I think my work has been about is trying to challenge the the fundamental assumptions on which people make these argument you know when people say get back to basics it's the thing they don't do they just default to what they think is common sense and they think you don't have to reflect an education because they went to school themselves once and so it's a done deal you know everything about education is obvious and the trouble is most things that are obvious turn out not to be true so my my feeling about this is that what I remember when when the National Curriculum was introduced it was I think well I remember Kenneth Baker was the sector state at the time and essentially he rarely proposed the court came-- had when he was at school as a boy you know is really the commence and Paul's you know that the rest the country was required to follow because it defaulted you know to the way he used to be educated and you know I was worried when people say well it didn't do me any harm I said but but look at you look at the state of you I mean why would you but what of his I think there is an evolution here but I think you have to have a sensible view of the timeframe these are big cultural shifts that are happening I think there's a general paradigm shift happening there's a transformation even this conversation you know is an important part of that and you have to have a theory of change you know I think one of them is that the changes where talk might will not only come about if we focus on trying to change the minds of governments ministers come and ministers go they have all their own interests at stake they want some quick wins they want to impress the electric electorate and the Daily Mail we know that they're more interesting that on the whole than the health of the country schools for the most part in my opinion but should we have to work with governments and we have to get them I think to think the right things and do the right things but it's equally important that we work at the ground level encourage people who are doing the work and empower them and help them to believe that it's important that they do these things you see the thing I get exasperated about as I think we all do is if you if you're working education you're facing 40 kids you know in a high crime area of a city it doesn't help you to have these pronouncements coming you know from Westminster from Exce public school people saying let's get back to basics you know it doesn't help it shows I think an appalling this understanding of the realities of education and what's so annoying is they think that they're being hard-headed you know what if we know anything about education is that people are only transformed if they're engaged and you can only engage them if you look into their eyes and see how they work and how they think and how they are involved in this work my dog just very quickly my daughter for example loved French until she got this other French teacher at school at the school in Los Angeles and and I went to at the end of the year I went along to chance that to the teachers and this French teacher said you know bit worried about Kate's progress in French but five kids in this class by the way and I said why is that and she said well she's at our attitude I said what you mean our attitude she said well she seems bored all the time she's in bored all the time I I said really I said do you have any theories about this said how do you mean I said well could it be boring yeah just putting it out there you know as she said well you know we do try to make it make it as interesting as possible but I think you have to accept that some aspects of learning a language are are just boring well you see she shouldn't be teaching if she thinks that you know because nothing is inherently boring I mean I'm not aware of legions of French teenagers abandoned in French because it's so tedious you know and moving to Copenhagen so they can speak Danish I mean that's I said no said no said you are boring you know I mean I've been with you for five minutes now I'm still too far so I mean getting back to basics includes recognizing that great education requires great teaching it's not enough to know your discipline a great teacher has to know how to engage people and great teachers do and what really I think most people find exasperatingly is when well-intentioned if they are politicians decide they're going to take control of us a process they don't know promote ideas they're only half understand and remove the one thing that improves education which is discretion creative to the people actually doing the work and I think it's I think it's an historic battle and I really encourage to engage with it because I think it's important that we don't let this drag on for another generation I really do okay I'm just going to reinforce our pointman and then and then open it up just to to say that having been on both sides of this to be you can see why it is so difficult to get the right kind of conversation so for example the RSA has its open minds curriculum which is taught in over 200 schools but it's a framework it doesn't specify everything that you need to do and so scum school some schools do it an incredibly ambitious way and in a really really good way and other schools do it in a much more modest way and some schools don't do it very well at all which means that those people who don't like opening minds can hunt around and find the schools that don't do it very well and so the coppa new minds doesn't work and if you're sitting in Downing Street or a department or a conservative central office you think oh we can't possibly have that because it doesn't always work but the point is in order for it to be something which always worked it wouldn't work and I understand that now I didn't understand I was in government I want to apologize to you and to the world but yeah thank you guys you understand it man do you feel better than I do I can't think anyone better to confess to okay than you okay I would say but part of it is I think people who do occupy these positions and their important positions is that is that they seem to confuse you know improving education with improving rail track you know or improving the drainage system you know that if we just standardize everything it'll hum along sensibly forever and the fundamental mistake is that education is a human system it works on relationships and feelings and motivations and aspirations at every school is different every classroom is different classes they've got people in there you know you know the whole thing about raising reading scores is sound it's important of course it's important but it won't happen if kids aren't engaged in reading and being interested I can't think there's a kid in the country who gets up in the morning how can I raise my school's reading standards you know I mean what can I do to contribute you know they'll only do it if they're engaged and that's the job of teaching and so if you if you have had this moment Matthew I'd like us all to be quiet and share it from them because because I seriously think it's important and the RSO has it always been about that I think about recognizing that talent and capability are at the heart of social change and it's not about standardizing but about raising standards and that's something different

Channel: RSA

Views: 324,277

Rating: 4.9107475 out of 5

Keywords: Sir Ken Robinson, Ken Robinson, education, teaching, school, the Element, rsa, the rsa, royal society of arts, creativity, enterprise, organisation, talent, work

Id: 3TAqSBMZDY8

Length: 39min 27sec (2367 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2010