Sir Ken Robinson - Changing Paradigms

yeah thank you very much were you surprised when it was actually me that got the medal are you you could feel the tension building again who will it be thank you I am genuinely humbled to have this award I was thinking earlier that being humbled isn't a normal feeling as it I don't often feel humbled disparaged humiliated you know Dan but humbled is a rather old feeling as I gather it's not a modern emotion but I do feel it and particularly to have this award of the name of Benjamin Franklin it was the most remarkable man he lived nearby in Craven Street the house is a few minutes away and I really recommend you go and take a look at it it's just been opened just been renovated it's a very powerfully vacation of the life of this extraordinary figure a man who is deeply involved in the growth of industrialism a part of the Enlightenment at the heart of the creation of the new world and with a passion for education a man who's also deeply invested in science in the arts in the humanities and in politics a polymath I think a Renaissance figure in the heart of the Enlightenment and one of the first significant members of the Royal Society of Arts if you don't know this institution I really encourage you to find out more about it it was founded I think I'm correct in saying in 1753 by William Chappell II and it's full name is the raw society the encouragement of arts manufactures and commerce and it's had a long history in the promotion and advocacy of appropriate forms of public education I have had a long association myself with the RSA I gave a lecture here even math you may not know this in July of 1990 in this very room and I propose to repeat it word for word if I don't I said don't you I should waste time thing up anything fresh or friendly no no in 1990 I had been running a National Arts in schools project and I had published a book on the arts in schools I have a great passion for the Arts and we were meeting here shortly after the introduction of the National Curriculum in England which profoundly misunderstood the place of the arts in education so I was talking about how the arts could be made part of the mainstream of Education and here we are 17 years later when it's all so different I feel so I want to say a few words about that and I want to show you a couple of short movie clips and then to have a conversation with you one of the it's happened to me since 1990 is that I've moved to live in America and I moved there seven years ago at the invitation of the Getty Center I didn't flee Great Britain but put yourself in my place I had a phone call on the 3rd of January 1990 when I was living there Coventry and this guy said would you like to come and live in California we left immediately I didn't ask what the job was we just went and the phone is still swinging on the hook actually in my house and we hope one day the children will track us down but we don't care but I now live in America and I love it who's been to Los Angeles here anyone it's an extraordinary place we're in Las Vegas recently my wife and I we've been together for 30 years and we decided last year to get married again so we went to the Elvis chapel now I recommend it you should do it we had the blue Hawaii package but uh but there are others but the blue Hawaii package you get the Elvis impersonator for songs the chapel of course a puff of smoke as you go in you have to request that and a hula go that was optional but I opted for it and for reasons I was rather pleased about frankly for another hundred dollars we could have had a pink Cadillac but we thought that was a bit tacky you know frankly we thought that was lowering the tone at the whole occasion frankly return I mention it because Las Vegas is an iconic example of the thing I would like us to talk about not Las Vegas in itself but the idea that gave rise to it if you think of it every other city on earth has a reason to be where it is like London you know it's in a natural Basin so it's good for trade or it's in a harbor or it's in a valley so it's good for agriculture you know or it's on a hillside so it's good for defense none of this is true of Las Vegas there is no physical reason for it to be there the only reason it's there is the thing that gave rise to this organization that affects every aspect of your life which makes humanity what it is the only thing in my opinion which is the extraordinary power which is bestowed on human beings that no other species has that so far as we can judge I mean the power of imagination we take it totally for granted this capacity to bring into mind things that aren't present and on that basis to hypothesize about things that have never been but could be every feature of human culture in my view is the consequence of this unique capacity now other creatures may have something like it other creatures seen but they don't write operas you know other creatures are agile but they don't form Olympic Committee's they communicate but they don't have festivals of theater they have structures but they don't build buildings and furnish them we are unique in this capacity a capacity that's produced the most extraordinary diversity of human culture of enterprise of innovation 6,000 languages currently spoken on earth and the great adventure which produced among other things the Royal Society of Arts and all of its works but I believe that we systematically destroy this capacity in our children and in ourselves now I pick my words carefully I don't say deliberately I don't think it's deliberate but it happens to be systematic we do it routinely unthinkingly and that's the worst of it because we take for granted certain ideas about education about children about what it is to be educated about social need and social utility about economic purpose we take these ideas for granted and they turn out not to be true many ideas would seem obvious turn out not to be true that was really the great adventure of of the Enlightenment ideas that seemed obvious that turned out not to be true ironically though I believe the legacy of the Enlightenment is now hampering the reforms that are needed in education we have grown up in a system of public education which is dominated by two ideas one of them is a conception of economic utility and you can illustrate that directly it's implicit in the structure of the school curriculum it's simply present there is an every school system on earth a hierarchy of subjects you know it you went through it if you're in education you probably subscribe to it or you contribute to it somehow when we move to America we put our kids into high school and it was recognizable the curriculum was totally recognizable math science and English language at the top then the humanities then the arts way down the bottom and in the arts there's always another hierarchy art and music are always thought to be more important than drama and dance there isn't a school in the country that I know I saw a school system let me be clear there isn't the school system actually anywhere that teaches dance everyday systematically to every child in the way that we require them to learn mathematics now I'm not against mathematics on the country but why is dance such a loser in the system well I think one of the reasons is people never saw any on economic point in it so there's an economic judgment that's made in the structure of the school curriculum and I'm sure you it was true of you you probably found yourself benignly steered away from things you were good at at school towards things that other people advised you would be more useful to you so effectively our school curricula are based on the premise that there are two sorts of subject useful ones and useless ones and the useless ones fall away eventually and they fall away especially when money starts to become tight as it always is um George Bush was in town today wasn't it I just thought I'd share the pain that was all I just I'm feeling it ya know President Bush as I call him was responsible with others for a cross-party piece of legislation in America to reform public education and I have lots of conversations about it now I live in America which I shall keep saying by the way to make you feel bad okay I live in California and you don't so they go there no when I got to America I was told that the Americans don't get irony this is not true this is a British conceit I feel okay about it because there other ones when we when we went to America were given a guidebook of how to behave in America honestly by the RRM removals agent how to behave in America I'm handing it out to all Americans I meet now look you do it you do it you know that's all behave properly show me but one of the things that said in it was don't hug people in America that they don't like it honestly explicit don't help them they don't like it this turns out to be nonsense they love it people in my experience love getting hugged in America but we thought they didn't so for the first year we had kept our arms at our side of social defamation the fear of giving offense and this all added to the idea that we we typify British reserve it's amazing or that we're some refugees from Riverdance you know but but I was I was told the Americans don't get irony and then I came across this piece of legislation America called No Child Left Behind and I thought whoever came up with that title gets irony because this legislation is leaving millions of children behind of course that's not a very attractive name for legislation millions of children left behind I can say that but give or take a twiddle it's the 1988 Education Act in this country it was the manifesto pretty much that inspired the work of Chris Woodhead I believe during his time at Ofsted now I think this is important because what it represents to me is the ideology of Education writ large and that's the problem so when we talk about changing paradigms my firm conviction is that we have to do much much more than is currently happening every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education I don't know of an exception mangi what's new we've always been reforming public education but we're doing it now consistently and systematically all over the place there are two reasons for it the first of them is economic people are trying to work out how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century how do we do that even that we can't anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week as the recent turmoil is demonstrated how do we do that the second though is cultural every country on Earth on Earth is trying to figure out how do we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization how do you square that circle most countries I believe are doing what we were doing in 1988 operating on the premise that the challenge is to reform education to make it a better version of what it was in other words the challenge is just to do better what we did before but improve and we have to raise standards and people say we have to raise standards if this is a breakthrough you know like really yes I we should why would you lower them you know I mean I I haven't come across an argument that persuades me of lowering them but raising them of course we should raise them the problem is that the current system education in my view and experience was designed and conceived and structured for a different age it was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution before the middle of the 19th century there were no systems of public education not really I mean you could get educated my Jesuits you know if you had the money but public education paid for from taxation compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery that was a revolutionary idea and many people objected to it they said it's not possible for many Street kids working class children to benefit from public education they're incapable of learning to read and write and why we spending time on this so there's also built into it a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity but it was designed for its purpose which is why as the public system evolved in the in the 19th and early 20th century we ended up with a very broad base of elementary education junior schools every went to that my father my father's father my grandfather he went to that he left school by the time he was 12 most people did then at the turn of the century and then gradually we introduced a layer above it of secondary education and some people went into that but my father left school at 14 having gone into that and then a small university sector sat across the top of it and the assumption was that people would work over and a few would get to the top and would go to university it was modeled on the economic premises of industrialism that is that we needed a broad base of people to do manual blue-collar work and you know roughly could they could do language and arithmetic a smaller group who would go to administrative work that's what the grammar schools were for and an even smaller group who would go off and run the Empire for us and become the logic the lawyers and the judges and the doctors and they were the universities now I simplify but that's essentially how the thing came about and it was driven by an economic imperative of the time but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind which was essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence that real intelligence consists in this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and the knowledge of the classics originally what we come to think of as academic ability and this is deep in the gene pool of public education of the really two types of people academic and non-academic smart people are non smart people and the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not because they're being judged against this particular view of the mind so we have a twin pillars economic and intellectual and my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people's lives it's been great for some there have been people have benefited wonderfully from it but most people have not and it's created a massive problem I spoke at a conference a couple other TED Conference that Matthew referred to one of the others because Al Gore or Al as I referred him our door gave the talk at the TED conference by the way if you don't know the TED conference I do recommend you visit the website Ted calm it is fantastic but Al Gore gave the talk that became the movie Inconvenient Truth Al Gore's view which isn't his he'd be the first to say it dates back to Rachel Carson and earlier it actually dates back if you look even to the work of Linnaeus in the 18th century it dates back to Franklin it dates back to the work of this society our concern with the ecology of the natural world and the sustainability of industrialism in the 17th and 18th century we were concerned about him but his work is an attempt to put the case back into a modern context I believe he's right and it's not just his view a group of geologists have recently published a paper in which they argue that the earth has entered a new geological period classically they the view is that since the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago were in a period called the Holocene period they believe we've entered a new period and they say if people would do a future generation of geologists were to come to earth they would see the evidence of it of a change in the Earth's geological personality they would see it in the evidence of carbon deposits in the Earth's crust the acidification of oceans the evidence of the mass extinction of species the change in the Earth's atmosphere and a hundred other indicators they say it's unmistakably in their view a new geological period the series of Nobel scientists have agreed to this view they're provisionally calling this not the Holocene but the Anthropocene what they mean by that is a geological age created by the activities of people as in anthropods and they said there's no historical precedent of this and this is really what I want to get to Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson William Shipley the great figures of the Enlightenment both in politics and science and the arts were conceiving public education and civic structures and politics of duty at a time of revolutionary turmoil it was the age of revolutions in France in America not long after our civil disturbance here at a time of extraordinary intellectual adventures and new horizons extraordinary innovation for them there was nothing really that ever led to an age of such innovation and such extraordinary change the rate of it and it was a fair characterization of the times but there's every evidence to show now that what was happening then is as nothing to what is happening now I believe the changes taking place on earth now are without precedent in terms of their character and their implications and our best salvation is to develop this capacity for imagination and to do it systematically through public education and to connect people with their true talents we simply can't afford this devastation anymore so why now Gore talks about this I believe in and I think if you don't think there's a crisis in the world's natural environment then you're not paying attention and I would take the option to leave the planet soon really you see I believe that there is a parallel climate crisis now one of them is probably enough for you honestly you know I think I'm find one is good you know I don't need the second one but there is a second one and it's what my work is about and I guess what many of you will be concerned about and I know what edge is concerned about and what Matthew and the RSA is currently concerned about but let me put a particular way to I believe there is a a global crisis not in natural resources that I believe it a global crisis in human resources I believe that the parallel with the crisis in the natural world is exact and the costs of clearing this up are catastrophic I'll give you a couple of quick examples in California the state government last year spent about three billion dollars on the state university system thus their published figures they spent over nine billion dollars on the state prison system now I cannot believe that more potential criminals are born every year in California than potential college graduates what you have are people in bad conditions going bad I remember Bernhard Levin once he wrote in one of his articles in the time she said he'd been at a dinner party and he was asked the question around the dinner table was our people mainly good or mainly bad and he said without hesitation they're mainly good he said now I was astonished to find I was in the minority around the table a minority of one but he believed with Victor Frankl who survived know the holocaust and saw his parents die that for all of that people are fundamentally good I believe they are fundamentally good but there are people living in very bad circumstances and conditions and if you put people in poor conditions they behave in particular ways so we spend a lot of our time remediating the damage and meanwhile I think that the other exact parallel is that pharmaceutical companies are reaping a gold rush from this distress if you look at the growth of antidepressants of prescription drugs to treat depression to suppress people's feelings this is a goldish I mean pharmaceutical companies don't want to cure depression on the country also that one of the things I saw a reason is that suicide rates among fifteen to thirty year olds have increased over sixty percent globally since the 1960s it's one of the largest cause of death among young people what is that you know people born with hope and optimism who decide to check out because they can't cope now I don't say education part of that or responsible for it but it contributes to it that's really all I want to say so this crisis of human resources is I think absolutely urgent and palpable so the challenge for me is not to reform education but to transform it into something else I think we have to come to a different set of assumptions now I say this advisory because I've been involved in all kinds of initiatives over my professional life I start out in drama work I moved I ran a big arts and schools project some of the people in the room I've known for years and have worked with fears and I've had a long association here one of the great initiatives of the RSA in the 1980s was education for capability you should look at education capability it's said extraordinary useful and practical things and there were wonderful people around it Charles handy who I've got to know recently well not recently but I've got to know well in recent years who was chairman Hill of the RSA Terrell Burgess Corelli Barnet Patrick merchants I shared an apartment when I was a student with Patrick son and I kind of a galaxy of really powerful thinkers John Tomlinson who is chairman here for a while who was with Network University there has been a long tradition of arguing for the change arguing for the alternative and yet successive governments come in and do what they did before and this really worries me and I speak personally you know that after all the optimism I felt ten years ago I feel that we've had over the past ten years a kind of myriad of policies but too few principles I can't see what they've added up to and I say that because I didn't see it before and I don't see it anywhere else I mean there are some countries which I feel are getting this right but we're not and that the reason is because we're not fundamentally changing the underlying assumptions of the system which you do with intelligence ability economic purpose and what people need we still educate people from the outside in we figure out what the country needs then we try and get them to conform with it rather than seeing what makes people drive forward and building education systems around a model of person of personhood which is what I think we should come to so let me just want to show you a couple of quick slides - I don't have to but as I've gone to the trouble of preparing them frankly I just want to give you an example of a couple of things here and by the way some of these things as Matthew kindly said are in this book at this book by the way is terrific you are you could not do better than buy this book that is unless you buy this book which is the new book which is coming out in January from penguin I'm very excited about this book this book is about the nature of human talent and how people discover it it's based on the premise that people do their best when they do the thing they love when they're in their element so I was trying to get to grips with what that is what is it to be in your element and I spoke to scientists and artists and business leaders and poets and parents and kids and it seems to me the evidence is absolutely persuasive when people connect this powerful sense of talent in themselves discover what it is they can do they become somebody else and that to me is the premise of building a new education system it's not about reinforcing the old model but reconstituting our sense of self and it happens to synergize is that a verb I'm not sure with the new economic purposes there are two big drives have changed currently one is technology you know that this is a brain cell what I just want them to drill on it but what I want to underline is that technology is moving faster than most people really truthfully understand can I ask you how many of you here consider yourself to be baby boomers or older I thought so all of you who is not who consider yourself to be a Generation X ro millennial okay you boomer types and older actually know if you're over 30 would you put your hand up if you're wearing a wristwatch there we go thank you just curious no no this is interesting ask a roomful of teenagers same question ask them if they wear wristwatches they mainly don't and the reason is that I want to make two points the reason I don't wear wristwatches is because they don't see the point because for them time is everywhere you know it's on their iPhones their iPads their mobile phones everywhere now why would you wear this my daughter converse and why would put a special device on my wrist to tell the time and she said Plus this only does one thing sure just like kayo lame is that you know like a a single function device so you have you cranked up them but we take it for granted don't we you have other options but this what this thing about taking it for granted is important it's a things we take for granted that we need to kind of identify question I mean did you think about putting your watch on this morning truthfully was it like an agony shall I you know is it a what she day I just don't know really I'll I'll put it on to be safe you know you don't do just do it our kids don't and it points to something important a guy called Marc Prensky made this point that our children live in a different world he talks about the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants if you're born if you're under 20 you're you're an immigrant you're a native you speak digital you were born with this stuff and it's in your head like a first language we're less so but the point is this is getting faster and faster and faster one of the new horizons is likely to be the merging of human intelligence with information systems that's a brain cell and that's a brain cell growing on a silicon chip well we see but there are things that lie ahead for which there are no precedent and the impact on culture promises to be extraordinary this is the other thing I want to point to which is the curve of the world's population you see 1750 when the RSA was being established and William Shipley was wondering what to do kneeling there were about a billion people on the whole of the earth pretty evenly distributed mostly in the in the the far-flung parts of what became the Empire but a lot of them in the industrial at what would become the industrialized economies about a billion people London was a tiny place by comparison now if you look at this curve were around six billion and the big jump happened in 1971 from 1970 to the year 2000 where the population the earth increased by over three million 1968 you remember was the Summer of Love it's probably a coincidence if it but we all did our bit you know that's alright but this is interesting that the dark line is the growth of population in the developed economies the real growth is happening in the emergent economies in Asia Africa parts of South America and so on and it's heading to 9 billion the other thing that's happening is that the world is become increasing ly urbanized at the beginning of the 18th century in the 19th century most people lived in the countryside about 3% of people lived in cities of course the great social movement of industrialism was the migration to the cities but even so at the turn of the 20th century is still something less than 20% of people lived in cities currently 50% of the world's population lives in cities 50% of the 6 billion and we're heading to 60% of 9 billion people living in cities not here not in UK not in America not in the rest of Europe but in the emergent economies now this massive migration is without precedent so these are going to be groovy cities you know with information booths and property taxes and Starbucks these are massive sprawling vernacular cities probably more like this this is Caracas in Venezuela a massive and rapidly growing metropolis but greater Tokyo at the moment has a population of 35 million people which is more than the entire population of Canada in one place now by the middle the century there may be 20 mega cities over 500 cities of a million you can see my point here that these are unprecedented circumstances an unprecedented drain on the earth resources an unprecedent demand for innovation for fresh thinking fresh social systems fresh ways of getting people to connect with themselves and have lives with purpose and meaning education is a major part of the solution the problem is I believe were backing the wrong horses now there's a report by McKinsey recently which showed this this is an American figures in America since 1980 more or less spending on education has increased 73% in real money class sizes have gone down to historically low levels but on this indicator literacy there's been no change in achievement more money smaller classes no change dropout rates are increasing graduation rates are declining it's a major problem the problem is they're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and on the way there alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school when we went to school we were kept there with a story which is have you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you would have a job our kids don't believe that and they're right not to by the way you're better having a degree than not but it's not a guarantee anymore and particularly not if the route to it margin eise's most of things that you think are important about yourself and one things that sits right in the middle this is this idea that there are academic and non-academic kids there's something called vocational training which is not as good as academic education the people who with AB you know theoretical degrees are inherently better people than those who can do real craft and and the kind of work which previously would have been venerated in guild systems we have this intellectual apartheid running through education and so lots of people try to defend it or to repair it I think we've just got to recognize it's mythical and we have to strip it out of our thinking this is one of the consequence of it let me ask you another question how many of you who are not how many of you over 30 have had your tonsils removed be frank with me gum okay I ask you this for reason again it's the things we take for granted people of my generation I was born in 1950 now I know you don't believe that I can see the sense of incredulity sweeping through it how could it be you're saying to yourself well I live in Los Angeles you know I've had work done what can I tell you better no but um people of my generation in the 50s and 60s and in the forties I guess the minute they had a sore throat somebody pounced on them and took their tonsils out that's true isn't it it was routine to have your tonsils removed you could not afford to have a ticklish cough in the 1950s or somebody would reach for your throat in a peremptory way and remove your tonsils it was routine millions of tonsils were removed in that beard what happened to them we don't know I mean I believe it's a scandal I don't know but it's one of those things like Rockwell you know like area 56 somewhere in America you know in a desert there's this stock panel anyway now the thing about this is this that nowadays people do have tonsillectomies but it's not common it's unusual to have it done you have to have a chronic case with no hope of it being repaired in some other way to have your tonsils taken out when I was growing up they were thought to be totally disposable we'll just whip them out and let's not have any more about them and some people voluntarily had it done so they could get the ice cream our children this generation do not suffer the plague of tonsillectomies instead they suffer this this is the modern epidemic and it's as misplaced and it's as fictitious this is the plague of ADHD now this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America or prescriptions for ADHD don't mistake me I don't mean to say there is no such thing as attention deficit disorder I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing I know that a great majority of psychologists and children pediatrician think there is such a thing but it's still a matter of debate what I do know for a fact is it's not an epidemic I believe that these kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out and on the same whimsical basis and for the same reason medical fashion our children are living in the most intense intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth they're being besieged with information and course their attention from every platform computers from iPhones from advertising hoardings from hundreds of television channels and we're penalizing now for getting distracted from what no boring stuff at school for the most part it seems to me it's not a coincidence totally that the instance of ADHD has written in parallel with the growth of standardized testing now these kids are being given ritalin and adderal and all manner of things often quite dangerous drugs to get them focused and calm them down now I know this is nonsense immediately you see this thing because the lighter areas are where there isn't much of it now I live in California and people won't pay attention for more than a minute and a half you know so but according to this attention deficit order increases as you travel east across the country people start losing interest in Oklahoma they can hardly think straight in Arkansas and by the time they get to washing they've lost it completely and there are separate reasons for that I believe it's a fictitious disease and so I don't say it's a fictitious condition it's a fictitious epidemic I was saying it I have a big interest in the arts and if you think of it the arts and I don't say this exclusive of the arts I think it's also true science and of math but let me I say about the art particularly because they are the victims of this mentality currently particularly the arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience an aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak when you're present in the current moment when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing when you are fully alive an anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what's happening and a lot of these drugs are that we're getting our children through education by illicit izing them and I think we should be doing the exact opposite we shouldn't be putting them asleep we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves but the model we have is this it's I believe we have a system variation that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it I'll give you a couple of examples schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines of ringing bells separate facilities specialized in two separate subjects we still educate children by batches you know we put them through the system by age group why do we do that you know why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are you know it's like the most important about them is their date of manufacture has been well I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines you know or at different times of the day or better in smaller groups and in large groups or sometimes they want to be on their own if you're interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality these are some of the key words in the industrial model utility which shapes the Ritalin linearity which informs choices and the assumptions of what matters and what doesn't it's essentially about conformity and increasing it's about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula and it's about standardization now for reasons we'll come to just before we're done I believe we've got to go in the exact opposite direction that's what I mean about changing the paradigm we have to question what we take for granted the problem in crushing what we take for granted says you don't know what it is have a quick read of this I love this quote this as you can see it's from Bertrand Russell and it seems to me to be the quintessential question of Western philosophy you know when it comes to what is this no are we all that Hamlet thought we were or are we just kind of cosmic accent of no importance I got really interested in this first part of the question this small and unimportant planet well how small you know how unimportant is this planet it's hard to get an image of this isn't it because if you think of it the distance of the space are so vast you know like for example it's a picture Hubble telescope this is the mega lenok cloud well you know distance in space is measured in the light years distance light travels in a year which is far truthfully you know I mean that is further than brain you know really now that's 170 thousand light years can you get your head round then it's just oh it's big and where does the earth fit in all of that the probably getting any sense of how big the earth is or small is the distances are so immense that they blare our perception of relative size so I came across this image set of moons on the internet I just quickly want to show them to you I think they're fantastic I've had them re-rendered for your benefit these are pictures of something had the brilliant idea of taking the earth out of the sky and lining it up with some other planets in the solar system for purpose of comparison of science so it's like a team photo you know of some of the planets in the solar system and beyond it starts with this not great I love that image now they're coming I think we're looking good that's the first thing central is but the kind of things I want to say about it a couple of things I want to say about it the first is that I think we're less concerned than we were about being invaded by Martian hordes aren't we I mean bring it on I feel don't you like you and whose army I think we're feeling the same thing is that Pluto is no longer a planet and frankly we can see why now come I mean what what were we thinking you know it's a boulder frankly so pull back a bit though and it's a bit less encouraging is it don't you think less encouraging and Pluto is a kind of cosmic embarrassment now so we don't eat me but we know the Sun is a big deal but how big exactly is the Sun compared to the earth so this is I check this with some astrophysicists they said yes this would be about about right here we are with the Sun in the picture did you know that but keep your eye on the Sun because that's not the biggest thing on the block this is the Sun against some other objects not in our solar system but that you can see in the night sky so Jupiter's one pixel now the earth is gone so we want to be friends with Arcturus but keep keep your own Arcturus minute so I think our best friend is Antares I mean that's extraordinaire isn't it so go back to that and we are infinitesimally pitifully tiny in the great cosmic scheme now I just want to say a couple of things quickly the first is whatever you woke up worrying about this morning really get over it honestly make the call and move on right but the second thing is this that this may be but we do have this extraordinary power and I can put it this way we have a power which enables us to conceive of our own insignificance no other species on earth is sitting around getting anxiety attacks over these images you know you don't see other species in little forest clearings saying I had no idea I mean trust me I I wasn't expecting this they weren't and they didn't produce these images either we have this extraordinary human power to conceive of objects and experience outside of our current experience and to express them in conceptual and symbolic forms in ways that other people can engage with and grasp and we are therefore the species that did produce Hamlet and the work of Mozart and the Industrial Revolution and this extraordinary building with its amazing images and hip-hop and jazz and quantum mechanics and the fear of relativity and air travel and the jet engine and all the things that characterized the extraordinary scent of human culture but we destroy it in the way we educate but I just want to end this and open up for some conversation by giving an example of something there is a great study done recently of divergent thinking published couple of years ago divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity I define creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value divergent thinking isn't a synonym but it's a an essential capacity for creativity it's the ability to to see lots of possible answers to a question lots of possible ways of interpreting a question to think whatever the bone would probably call laterally to think not just in linear or convergent ways to see multiple answers not one so I mean there's a test for this I mean one kind of cut example would be people might be asked to say how many uses can you think I'll for a paperclip while those routine questions most people might come with 10 or 15 people who go to this might come up with 200 and they do that by saying well could the paperclip be 200 foot tall and be made out of foam rubber you know like does it have to be a paperclip as we know it Jim you know now they're tests of this and I gave them to 1,500 people is in a book called break point and beyond and on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level you'd be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking ok so my question to you is what percentage of the people tested of the 1500 scored at genius level for divergent thinking now you need to know one more thing about them these were in the garden children okay so which thing what percentage at genius level eighty eighty okay it's not great ninety-eight percent now the thing about this was it was a long two to dental study so they retested the same children five years later age of eight to ten what you think fifty they retested them again five years later ages 13 to 15 you can see a trend here coming they tested two hundred thousand adults 25 years and older just once as a control what do you think yeah I always say if you're in business these the people you're hiring okay the bottom so now this tells an interesting story because you could have imagined it going the other way couldn't you start off not being very good but you get better as you get older but this shows two things one is we all have this capacity and two it mostly deteriorates now a lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up a lot but one of the most important things amps and I'm convinced is that by now they've become educated they know they spent 10 years at school being told there's one answer it's at the back and don't look and don't copy because that's cheating in outside schools that's called collaboration you know but in settles now this isn't because teachers want it this way it's just because it happens that way it's because it's in the gene pool of Education and to transform it we have to think differently well let me just quickly say that about that we have to think definitely about human capacity this is what my book the element is about we have to get over this old conception of academic non-academic abstract theoretical vocational and see it for what it is a myth secondly we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups the collaboration is the stuff of growth you know that if we if we atomized people and separate them and judge them separately we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment and thirdly its crucially about the culture of our institutions the habits of the institution and the habitats that they occupy I came across some friend just put my hand on it a great quote recently which seemed to me to capture some of this about this distinction our cells other species and it says if we just find it probably my other suit isn't it do you think it's about there we go I rather like this there's a view it says that when we come to assess people we should be fairer with ourselves it says after all human beings were born of risen apes not fallen angels and so what shall we wonder at our massacres our missiles or our symphonies the miracle of humankind is not how far we have sunk but I'm magnificently we have risen we will be known among the stars not by our corpses but by our poems and I believe there's a profound truth in that we have it in our grasp to form systems of Education based on these different principles but it means a shift from the industrial metaphor of Education to what I think of as the an agricultural metaphor if you think of it if you look at the organizational chart of most companies and organizations it looks a bit like a wiring diagram doesn't it if you look at the structure like boxes and things are connected but human organizations are not like mechanisms even though these charts suggest the metaphor that they are human organizations are much more like organisms that's to say they depend upon feelings and relationships and motivation and value self value and a sense of identity and of community you know the way you work in an organization is deeply affected by your feeling for it therefore I think a much better metaphor is not industrialism but agriculture or an organic metaphor and during the whole project the moment in the state of Oklahoma where I'm trying to develop these ideas across the whole state but I mentioned Las Vegas at the beginning to show last image of this now not far from Las Vegas is a place called Death Valley Death Valley is the hottest place in America not much grows in Death Valley because it doesn't rain in this in the winter of 2000 for something remarkable happened it rained seven inches and in the spring of 2005 there was a phenomenon the whole floor of Death Valley was coated with spring flowers photographers and botanists and scientists came from the whole of cross of America to witness this thing that they might not see again what it demonstrated was a death valley wasn't dead it was asleep right beneath the surface with these seeds of growth waiting for conditions and I believe it's exactly the same way with human beings if we create the right conditions in our school if we create the right incentives if we value each learner for themselves and properly growth will happen and the growth always happens before were done I want to show a couple of very short videos what we'll demonstrate but we'll go into our discussion with Matthew just now but I think we need to shift in this industrial paradigm to an organic paradigm and I think it's perfectly doable we need to conceive institutions individually not system-wide as ones which don't just value utility but respect and promote living vitality the energy of the organization and its potential to be transformative that doesn't think in terms of linearity but things have creative it here multiple options and multiple possibilities for everybody in it that's not about conformity but by diversity and it's critical about customization this is Death Valley in the spring of 2005 I think all our schools could be done somebody once said the problem for human being there's not that we aim too high and fail which we aim too low and succeed and I think we owe it to William Shipley and Benjamin Franklin to aim high Benjamin Franklin once notably said there are three sorts of people in the world those who are amove Abul and those who move and I encourage you with the RSA to move and get a move on thank you

Channel: RSA

Views: 545,949

Rating: 4.9324293 out of 5

Keywords: RSA, royal society of arts, Sir Ken Robinson, ken robinson, Changing Paradigms, edge lecture, education, culture, attitudes, divergent thinking, public education, adhd, attention defict disorder, motivation, potential, aspiration, innovation, public debate, public discourse, school system, creativity, creative thinking, ritalin, adderall, methylphenidate

Id: mCbdS4hSa0s

Length: 55min 20sec (3320 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2010