RSA Replay - How to Change Education

in place whether or not the hottest ticket for this kind of extended period this weekend was the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury or Ken Robinson at the RSA and I think it was Ken really that's the that's the more elite contested tickets so I'm delighted to welcome you to today's event I'm Matthew - chief executive of the RSA could you do whatever you have to do to your mobile phone including me so it doesn't make a noise but feel free to keep it on and to tweet today's hashtag is RSA Robinson also we are streaming live so hello to all our web viewers I know there's a lot of web viewers because we had about 10 times as many people wanting to come to the event then could get in so welcome to you you'll be able to watch this event again on our website in a few days time and share it with other people a couple of other different out sment before I introduce Ken we're delighted that today's event also launches a new collaboration with Samsung Mobile and it's due to their generous support that were able to hold this event also Ken I think since the first time you came at the up to the RSA I'm able to say that the RSA is education work has expanded a great deal over that time partly inspired by your ideas so we have a growing program of policy research and practical innovations based on our core principles here at the RSA of tackling disadvantage building democratic participation and fostering open-minded inquiry so I think on your seats you've got a copy of our education update and in July some of the things we're doing is we're launching a new program called gran curriculum designs which is around enabling teachers to develop the skills to develop their own curricula a report on in Europe missions and also podcast created by five by students about five academies on the issue of dealing with uncertainty and indeed some students are here today from Whitley there they are hi and at the end of the event they're going to be going around with mics grabbing some of you for Vox pops so I know you've got a rush off but if you can give them a few seconds to tell them what you think of the event or whatever that would be absolutely great now all that's out of the plate out of the way it's my great pleasure to introduce our speaker Sir Ken Robinson he really doesn't need any introduction and I will being very brief second is one of the world's leading authorities on creativity innovation and education he's worked with governments organizations and companies around the globe the RSA animate of his changing educational education paradigms has been watched over ten million times and my colleagues and I receive daily e-mails from teachers and students around the world whose everyday lives have been changed as a result of engaging with Ken's groundbreaking ideas he joins us today to deliver the long-awaited follow-up to that celebrated talk and we are needless to say absolutely delighted to have you back again so without further ado please join me in welcoming Sir Ken Robinson [Applause] Thank You Matthew I was very impressed when I was told this room sold out I had no idea it was so small and free so it's much less impressive isn't it ready if this was 50 pounds of tickets at the o2 arena I'd be feeling better but Thank You Matthew it's a pleasure to be here I say that because you have to don't you what am I gonna say I really wish this wasn't happening but I am very pleased to be back and not least because we're now back in England my wife and I Terry is here we live in Los Angeles in California these days we've been there for 12 years and it's a pleasure to be back to discover that everything is fine with education here but all our work is paid off and we're now in calm waters fully competent in the leadership that staggers ahead into the future so congratulations everybody it's been a big big group effort and it's all been worth it I feel when I was last here I was asked to talk about changing education paradigms and I gave a talk about an hour and a quarter you can relax don't worry this is short by now and a quarter and a few months later Matthew sent an email saying we have condensed this talk into 11 minutes and animated it and here it is and it wasn't is this okay it was here it is and it's online now and it's gonna be seen by millions of people so we hope you're happy and I am happy with it and but of course it was truncated necessarily I've got a lot of kudos in this talk actually over the past few years because people many people think it's my hand doing it you know they think how does he talk and draw that quickly so I was impressed but the people from cognitive media here today aren't you somewhere in that presence yeah I want to offer congratulations I think it's a fantastic visualization of of what I was talking about and I really just wanted to pick up ready from there since there was only 11 minutes of it remaining but really what I was arguing about was that education is in the grip of a series of ideologies which are counterproductive I would say on the one hand were in the intellectual grip still of a very narrow view of intelligence we tend an education to confuse and conflated intelligence with a particular form of academic ability an academic ability is extremely important but there's much more to human intelligence than it it's a very particular set of capacities for deductive reasoning for propositional knowledge and it's important but if that's all there were to human intelligence most of human life would never taken place there would be no culture as we know it and there are historical reasons why our conception of intelligence has become so narrow but I see it reflected still in the government policies of the day I'm not here to make any ad hominem comments about this particular government but this particular government still Labor's under the misapprehension that the highest form of human aspiration is to go to Oxford or Cambridge now I'm not criticizing Oxford and Cambridge there are lovely towns and have wonderful pubs but the idea that the whole purpose of education and its success is to be judged by entrance to these two universities is preposterous and moreover that the whole system that can be measured against how many people from working-class backgrounds get to these universities it's a laudable aspiration for those people who may be interested but I have been to Oxford Cambridge and I know they are smaller than the whole country so we can't all go can we there have to be even if no other argument there are logistical arguments why we cannot expand them beyond the perimeters of the the m11 but it all reflects this obsession with a particular type of academic ability and it's in the name of this as so many people have gone through the whole of their education feeling they're not very smart and I think it's a disastrous waste of human talent I always have done the second feature of our education systems that I talked about last time is that they are modeled on the organizational principles of industrialism it's essentially a factory model most of what goes on in our education systems does not happen outside of them you know this business for example of having bells ringing and people being shuffling around the building if you're running a business on that basis you wouldn't last you know if you had a business with a thousand employees and every 40 minutes a bell rang and everyone had to go to a different room in a different part of the building and do something else with a separate group of people and you rinse and repeat eight times a day you'd be broke in a week and yet we say we think it's a good way to run education it is not most of the organizational principles that we still adhere to in education have nothing to do with education there's simply logistical devices to promote efficiency people shuffling through so when I talk about the need for there to be a revolution I'm not a lone voice in this and people have been calling for it for a very long time and what I want to do just here today because we have some time for conversation too is to move on from saying what's wrong to how we might fix it and what what the emergent system might look like and really what I want you to believe is that the industrial model which likens human systems to machines is wrong now at every point it doesn't answer to the way human lives are actually live and it doesn't answer to the way we should be running our institutions governments still believe that's the case you see it in that language you hear it in their their policies in the rhetoric I'm not just all mad here in the UK I've been around long enough now to have seen many seconds of state come and go and I look forward with enthusiasm to my next experience of this very process but it's also turned in this in the United States that's to say many policymakers not all of them and I'm not attacking policymakers mother I want to encourage them to think differently too since we need them that many policymakers seem to think that you can improve the system simply by issuing commands to it by tightening standards by issuing directives it's a machine Age attitude it's it's the idea that inputs equal outputs and if we just tell people how to behave they will do that and it will be fine and my argument is this is a false consciousness of how the world works it's a false image of how education actually works and should work and the good news is that if we all absorb that too we will see that there are many entry points to making the system shift I find a lot of educators get very frustrated because they believe that our task is to persuade politicians to do something differently and I think if history tells us anything it tells us that if we do something differently they will have to respond to it and if you're waiting for a government to come into power who understands how education works you'll be waiting a very long time that's been evidenced already in most countries not all countries are similar I think who think differently about this one of the problems is that politicians have very low very short time horizons they're really looking for statistics they can brag about at the next election which is 18 months away and education is a very long process long term process and it's the quick fix really gets in our way so I want to argue for shift of metaphor and to say it's an empowering shift of metaphor and it means that we can get something done here and that we should because there are multiple points of leverage but first it see 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 and back in England I can say mathematics can play which we should anyway because there are many numbers of mathematics explore isn't it if there is one number we could call it math whereas the whole principle is there are several numbers mathematics it shall be 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 that we need in any case the basics of Education or not any group of subjects or disciplines the basics of Education are the purposes for which we do this but 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 and 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 that there were two ready that came out in reverse order they are here the first they said in reverse order was at debility how to 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 the Kodak was synonymous in the 20th century with photography it was the it it was based on the invention of home photography Kodak invented the brownie camera which was the iPad of its day in the early part of 20th century it has much of a transformative effect on people's lives as the iPad is having on our lives now you know relatively speaking they invented home photography they invented digital photography and now they're on to 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 really 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 with 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 happened to many companies including most recently Kodak so adaptability but the top priority these CEOs pointed to for their company's long-term flourishing it was creativity they said we need companies that are consistently and systematically creative and how'd you do that you know we need people can think Tiffany 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 so 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 as being increasingly complicated increasingly written 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 us 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 formed it 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 by the way 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 but I'm not showing you the other things I'm just showing you this what were the law being as it is so I thought you'd 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 programmes on a Japanese TV and the most British thing of all suspicion of anything foreign that's broadly right so there's a 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 he 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 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 is on a day when I'd for reasons just have interest to me I was looking into life of Emily Davison remember Emily Davison 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 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 and 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 a contraction play 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% of kids don't complete high school and there are similar figures actually 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 now 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 change graduation 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 on 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 would 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 education by vilifying doctors and nurses and medicine I'm sorry we like improving education 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 ministers of state who are 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 and can change the way they look and feel but he also says that of 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 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 under 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 a 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 time to make theater most powerful expense 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 theorem distracts and that relationship is 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 obfuscate 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 that'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 for them 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 utero you know they're 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 speak you know in 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 you know when they get to the age of one and say okay here's the situation you know you probably notice your mother I've kept making all these noises and actually 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 solely to 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 I 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 that's to 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 a lot of 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 I don't know when that's been 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 and 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 him you don't need to know everything but you need to know enough to be able to teach it to me no I mean I don't speak Romanian and I can't therefore teach it truthfully there's no point saying to me oh go on come on I mean how hard can it be you know really small children speaking in Romania come on you're a grown-up I can't do it so you need to know your stuff enough of it anyway 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 Tara is among them when I first met her with 42 kids in the class and 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 create 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 it 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're in that relationship you hold the tools of power right in your hands you can change this 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 this is the 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 own habits and rituals and so on you can define culture in different ways one is a more formal way to say it is it's the the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups in American corporate speak they often say cultures the way we do things around here it's like that and I said at the end of my last talk it's about habits and habitats it's about the rhythms of behavior and the physical space that people occupy all scores are different all communities are unique and they're all living organisms all of them and it's why I think we should recognize that education is not mechanistic it's better to adapt metaphors from agriculture or ecology or from biology you see biologists will talk about different sorts of systems there are for example simple systems like in the physical world in the chemical world you know the break on a bicycle is a simple system press the lever clamps the wheel simple there are complicated systems like airplanes which are made up of thousands of simple systems but they all have to articulate so it's actually a complicated system but at the end of it the plane hasn't changed is still a plane still the plane that took off it hasn't learned anything from the process a bigger plane in biology people tend to not much more about complex systems that say systems which are evolving and reciprocating like a human body where all the parts reciprocate and feed and support each other or more technically people call them complex adaptive systems systems which are highly intricate which are internally evolving and constantly adapting to their environment it's why Kodak went out of business is stopped adapting and it could have adapted had they thought differently education is like that it's not a single system it's not a system in which one person's in control it's a vast complex adaptive system which involves incest of teachers parents the business community politicians architects it's a complex reciprocating adapting system and the like with any ecological system its affected by the climate and if you change the climate you can change how empowered under what conditions this thing will begin to flourish now I say this because I have been in schools all around the world which have been in very desperate places but the schools themselves have been thriving and enlivening the whole area because they've recognized they're part of an intricate ecosystem I was in a school recently in West in Koreatown in Los Angeles this place is in an area of high crime and low-income high poverty area and yet it's an absolute OS of achievement because the particular teachers I was working with has inspired the kids in the class with a sense of their own possibility that's what culture is really you know culture is a set of expectations and a set of permissions I think if we recognize that schools are ecosystems and they're part of a larger ecosystem and that this is constantly interacting with economic shifts technological changes social movements cultural changes as well 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 policymakers and if you are a teacher if you're a school principal if you're a superintendent if you run the 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 a larger climate event you start to affect the whole that's how all social movements have happened we were in we've been saying in Soho this weekend is the gay pride march this weekend it's a fantastic event it was interesting to me though at the height of flower power in the 1960s that March couldn't have happened wouldn't have happened people weren't didn't have that permission at the time and it'd be very hard to say when it happened but it did have cultural change happens like that it can be incremental it can be sudden it can be incremental but it 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 change from the ground of people starting to act differently and demanding something else and what was 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 and said we think ministers these will come together and lots of interesting combinations and Jenkins 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's actually happened and how fast this has grown the last example I'll give you is the I mentioned the the brownie camera I was thinking reason about the iPad you know or actually the iPhone when the iPhone was introduced in 2007 it had a facility built into it by Jonathan Ives and Steve Jobs and his team there to receive apps and when it was launched I think there were 800 apps available to the iPhone there are now 750 thousand of them that these apps most of not thought of by Apple in fact the vast majority have not thought of by up or anticipated by them I one of them turned your iPhone into a blues harmonica actually 36 version is but you damned thing and your phone becomes a blues harmonica no you turn on sad you get these little holes along the side and you can suck and blow on your phone why I mean I know meetings can be depressing you know but do you need to play the Delta blues in the coffee break I don't know you see I can't imagine that when Jonathan Ives and Steve Jobs sat together to plan the iPhone they said look here's the situation Nokia is dominating the world at the moment gonna take them down we're gonna produce a smartphone and here are some of the things that has to do you have to be able to get online with it the actor got to send text messages you have to be able to search the internet maybe make a phone call yes it's not vital but don't forget it's absolutely essential that you can play the Delta blues on this thing because who's gonna carry a phone where you can't channel Howlin wolf it's just not going to happen 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 from 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 wake wakin 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 whether you're a teacher or a head teacher or you're the head of a dish or the secular state for education your proper role if you have a loving relationship with education is not to try and command control 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 [Applause] ken thanks a lot good do you mind just saying 1 2 3 what just say 1 2 3 1 2 3 thank you it's just you made 4 points if we have to edit it down we'll have to change up to 3 points so two points I just no no to all three at once a living I'm only go off one question because there's so many people here and they will have questions of their own I just ask you and if you think of your question make it short and sharp swing as many in as we possibly can um there this kind of debate between progressive and traditional views of Education has been rumbling on for far far far too long and some people would like to kind of caricature the debate written for example as that between the followers of IDI Hirsch who talks about facts the sage on the stage subjects and knowledge and you who talk about creativity the guide at the side projects engagement is that in any way a useful characterization how much we better understand the division that exists between you and someone like Hirsch for example I don't think it is very useful honestly because when people talk about creativity is the opposite of learning information or the opposite of discipline they're just misunderstanding the terms of the argument I mean I've argued from the outset that that you can't be creative in the abstract you to be creative you have to do something you can't be generally created for example in mathematics if you don't understand the mathematics you can't be creative in music if you can't play the instrument but understanding what what the dynamics that process are is the thing is the thing addition I wrote a piece reason in The Guardian taking issue with Michael Gove who said on question time that you can't be a great a musician if you can't until you've learnt all your scales well the evidence is all against that I remember you know when the Beatles start out they knew two chords in fact they heard there was some guy in Liverpool who knew a third chord and they got on the bus and went and met him and they they got the third card and they started the Beatles but they no knew an awful lot more chords by the time they'd finished you know there's a dynamic here I'm not arguing that that you shouldn't understand that I've just been arguing we should understand the past I think the issue of people ie D Hirsch is he wants to set it out in some Canon it seems things that people have to know and particularly the new National Curriculum it seems things you have to know by when and that to me contradicts the essentially dynamic nature of teaching and learning but on the broader question I think the whole issue between progress and education is misconceive probably on both sides I think the progressive educators so-called think that education is all about finding it out for yourself and not having any structural discipline they're mistaken and if people who argue for traditionalists and think that the way we're going to face the future is by getting back to some 19th century view of the grammar school they've got it completely wrong and why does this dichotomy continue I mean we don't have this dichotomy and health we don't you know there's a kind of fundamental divide between a group of medics who think the treatment should be like I mean there are people who just miss conventional medicine but overall the kind of there is a general set of general consensus amongst most people who work within the kind of Western medical tradition what so why is it in education there's always been Riven all the way back to the kind of black reports in the sixties you know all the way through what's going on there well I mean there are these big debates in medicine to us you know about traditional alternative forms of tribal in this way though I think somebody's you know that's not I know it's just a reference point but I think there are people who argue strongly for a holistic approaches to medicine rather than just a prescription drug approach but interestingly when I'm arguing for forms of Education which are highly personalized you know that we we should be tailoring education to the learners it should be individualized around individual talents I don't mean we should only teach people what they want to learn but we should recognize you have different learning styles that's part of the they are form of being a teacher we should recognize that we have different talents and possibilities among all the things we need to learn in common and there's a movement in that way and educate in medicine too towards personalized education there's no point giving people of different sizes weights and ages exactly the same load of drugs you know you need you need to tell to the individual I think the difference here though is is that education is nestled into cultural issues it's nestled into political issues it's an expression somebody wants used for education is that education is an essentially contested concept there is something at the heart of it which will always raise people's opposition Olivia it's like religion you know people aren't going to sign up to the same religion if they've been brought up in different traditions they've gone to argue about the relative merits of it so I'm not trying to smooth them out and say well it can be able to sell hands and and and and agree I see part of my role these days there's champing championing a view of Education which has been around for a very long time which is holistic which is pluralistic and which is personalized and I'm not the first person to argue for this you can trace everything I'm saying back to Julie Montessori Pestalozzi you can keep going back if you like it's all and Plowden it's been part in and out of the mainstream all I'm trying to do is argue for what I see every day as being practically the case that if you have scores which engage but what's magic they're better schools if you wrap a few respect and venerate the teaching profession you get a better profession and I spend a lot of my time trying to counter what I say is misconception I'm happy people to disagree with me as long as they understand what they're disagreeing with what I find as we all would irritating is when people tell me I think something which I don't and then disagree with it right I'd make myself very unpopular now by any choosing a handful of questions probably lots and lots but let's just take three questions first of all let's take one here and make them really short even though you're brilliant the expert you could talk for hours yourself there's the mic no we all know he is but just hold the rope I'm going stone the idea of teachers and students kind of jamming together about education in the classroom not just being creative within education but being creative about education teachers clearly in some sense of the senior partners and have to take a lead in that process they have to be the ones who are going to push the network as you described it of what was it permissions and expectations so tell us a little bit about what they might do differently on Monday morning do you know the game just a minute because that's the position you're in now you've got one minute no hesitation no deviation any repetition that way we can get eight questions in okay you're going to keep saying nothing I'm not occasionally say repetition in our well guy those who don't know guy's done wonderful work on learning and learning power and I highly recommend the stuff he's written on this I was at an event a couple years ago it was a peace summit in Vancouver it was called The Vancouver peace summit as my phone the Canadian is very good at titles we found and the guest of honor on the platform I was hosting the opening session was the Dalai Lama who's an absolute wonderful man and at one point he was asked a question and there was a very long pause of 2,000 people in the room was very long pause and people were thinking what you're gonna say this is going to be great it's the Dalai Lama and we all kind of mentally leant forward and after about a minute it seemed he opened his mouth we thought here it comes and it said I don't know and I thought what do you mean you don't know you're the Dalai Lama you know we don't know you know but but he said no I hadn't thought about that before what do you think I thought that was wonderful you know there's one of the world's great teachers quite happy saying I don't know and I think sometimes that is what great teachers should recognize they can easily do that there aren't you're right they are in the lead they're the facilitator but very often the role of a teacher is to engage kids and answering questions they themselves don't know the answer to the teacher doesn't I've always felt this the role of a teacher is to enable learning to facilitate it in the end you can't teach anybody to learn anything you can't make them learn it learning it is a personal process you can create optimum conditions where they will and often ask them the question rather than telling the answer is the way to do it and encouraging collaboration between kids is the best way to do it and I think if teachers take some of the heat off themselves whereas they don't always have to be the one who knows but that real learning often happens most effectively by asking the really pertinent question the intriguing question and being on hand of course if you do happen to have things that you that you know I mean I mean like with Romanian I mean I don't want somebody to say to me well what do you think we word for table might be you know and we spend the next four weeks trying to guess you know I think no tell me so it's a delicate balance here between instruction and intrigue and with the growing use of data and education do you see that helping or hindering your vision for the future growing use of data I'm all for data and in its place you know it's like I mean doctors I was want to compared doctors to teachers in a sense because being a teacher is it's an act of connoisseurship you know I mean if you've got to see the doctor you want the doctor to know lots of stuff you don't want to be on the first day of the degree you know you want them to no a lot of things but you don't tell you everything they know you want them to be able to plant to your case particularly here and now so being a doctor is is to exercise judgment and connoisseurship and so it is we're teaching you don't have to download everything you know to have every student yes you're very selective about it and doctors need data too teachers need data I mean it's important to have information that you can based on diagnostic data is very helpful in teaching to get some sense of progress some things lend themselves in education to quantitative data can you do this or can you not do this and that's true in the arts for example as much as it is in the sciences it's it's the use that's made of it that the this issue and the place it occupies in the culture the problem I think laterally in education has been that would be become data obsessed and data-driven you know the standardized testing is replaced has come to replace actual learning it that the kids have become kind of instruments of of the data rather than the data being a helpful resource for teachers and if this isn't to argue against any form of testing but testing should be a support it shouldn't be the purpose of Education I mean I was saying I mean I can't imagine this kid in the country who gets up in the morning think what can I do to raise the nation's reading scores I mean you know call me you know I'm here to serve it's getting the right way around and of course it's a particular amount it's a particular issue for Pearson you know which is very active in the whole field of testing I just want to see it in its proper place in education not dominating it together but they've got to be really brief there's a woman here and there's a guy right in the back row over there we were out in Austin Texas over the Easter period and are setting aside all that we learned on the pedagogical approach there were two things that came out on an organizational one one was about moving towards smaller institutions rather than larger institutions and the second one was grant funding new organizations particularly on the new technology side where the outputs would woody would mean that you would get the grant to go forward so what's your view on those two aspects hold that can then write the back briefly Sam Khanna from Liberty you gave a lot of clear ideas that individuals professionals and organizations within the education ikan system can do but if we're gonna move from education being something that happens to young people or move from a push to a pull what would your message to young people directly be for the role that they can play helping the revolution take place okay and then finally on that topic there's a person from is a you're gonna have to choose one of your students yeah wait we might wait for Mike Prince geez this whole debate and discussion seems to have excluded students do you think students should have a voice in this and if so how do we get involved in how do we make ourselves heard and also slightly attached to that why aren't policy maker to make makers and especially Michael Gove why is he not listening to what the teachers unions and students are clearly saying - okay so fortunately the second third question kind of overlap yes about listening to young people and there was the first question which I was looking around restrooms liked initially here at birth what did you I was listening oh good probably doing this job in or just in reverse order honestly I wouldn't presume to parents' the psychology of Michael Gove I think that's a dangerous place to look I don't have the strength of character to come out of there alive I don't think I don't know why why isn't even teachers I don't know I think it's outrageous as I say you know you can't improve education by alienating the profession I don't know what do you think sir and there was an egregious article that he wrote in the Daily Mail attacking the the hundreds of some academics who wrote to him offering some advice I mean guy was among them and I would have signed it if I'd been there and he referred to professor of Education and people that who work in education research as the blob and said that this is a group of people who have been a blight on education I think it's preposterous ly rude and outrageous from anybody but from a Secretary of State for Education to attack the people who do the work in the field have devoted their lives to it I think it's beyond belief that he were doing why why I don't know I've never met him he's probably a lovely man I'm sorry if I gave you the impression of leaving students and I was hoping to imply it I put them at the very heart of this post process it's all about the students of whatever age they happen to be and and I say students of all ages can teach themselves these days of that the active support and it's partly what I'm arguing about here is that I'm encouraging students to get involved in the process and it's why I mentioned the Dalai Lama thing in particular for example when it comes to the Dalai Lama thing is that a thing I don't know the Dom are not particularly when it comes to the opportunities in new technologies we call them new they've been around for a long time now but one of the opportunities in the new digital technologies is to radically personalize education there's a school for example in New York called the school of one not because of this one person it's really not a very popular school to be on this bed but it's ready bad school no because every student in the school has their own daily timetable there's a computer program and at the end of the day they fear all information it next day they go in the printed and said this is what you're doing today and it depends on what they did the day before where they feel they're up to so every is everybody's timetables personalized it's no reason we shouldn't do that really in scores and we only do it this way because previously there was mr. Jenkins with the timetable and the pence and the rubber and he couldn't work it all out or she couldn't you know how did you move fifteen hundred people around individually you couldn't do that so you did in blocks so there is a there are many ways in which I think students should be active engaged in this revolution and I think they always were in a good way I mean student-centered education was always at the heart of what we're talking about so it's great that you're here to talk about that on the sides of school thing you know I'm always tempted say the size of school doesn't really matter I mean we know it does I think once you become the size of a small town it's not to get a bit irritating but but but Bill Gates for example has spent a lot of money through the Gates Foundation on the small school initiative it didn't make much difference they've spend all kinds of money on all sort things they have made a lot of difference and the reason is that the only thing that really makes a difference is the quality of teaching and learning and that can happen in big schools it can happen in small they people are obsessed of them with structural issues like for example the government's putting all you know betting all its money on free schools and academies in America there's a big move for charter schools there are good charter schools bad charter schools it's not whether it the structure is not really the critical issue if you look at Finland they're not trying to do all this stuff in the same way that's not happening in South Korea the structural issues are not at the heart of it I think if we if we don't understand at the heart of it is the quality of teaching and learning and everything else has to gather around that and if it helps find if it doesn't stop it then we'll miss the point and I I assume for my own path that what lies behind this here and in the states is a determined effort to break up the state system you know it's to privatize education and and put aside this massive investment in public education and I think it's a catastrophic mistake myself because for most kids it's the only shot they get and we should give them the best opportunity that we can and if the aim of the government is to break up this the state system and to privatize it then could they please tell us that so we can have a proper conversation about it rather than slipping it under the radar which is what I think is going on so thank you all for coming sorry to all those whose questions I didn't take sorry to all those who are watching online cuz they couldn't get in the room and I didn't take any of their tweeted questions I'm really sorry copies of Ken's new book are available here and if you bring a much the stage he'll happily sign them for you but before that stampede also also also thank Samsung who made this event possible today again for doing that that but before you come and get your book it just cemented me to ask you to join me in thanking Sir Ken Robinson [Applause] [Applause] you you you you you

Channel: RSA

Views: 67,231

Rating: 4.9385405 out of 5

Keywords: Ken Robinson, Sir Ken Robinson, Education, Matthew Taylor, RSA, The RSA

Id: 9HRXhRjfS7Q

Length: 63min 56sec (3836 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2013