Sir Ken Robinson - Educating the Heart and Mind

I work a lot in education I have done my entire life it's where I'm from professionally and and spiritually really my home is an education and for as long as I can remember I've been worried about it I was worried about it when I was in it so that's an early start isn't it I remember sitting there thinking what's this we doing this I can't remember and I went to Al Jackson about this recently about how I got started actually asked myself about it I was nobody else asked me so I asked myself it's good I often speak to myself it's the only way of getting somebody to agree with me frankly but no but I uh I went to a special school they used to be called I always think about this recently I wrote a book a while ago called the element how finding your passion changes everything and and Terry my wife we've been together 35 years she said you should tell your story in the book and I said why I don't think it's interesting really anyway she insisted and and it turned out to be fascinating if I say so myself I was riveted no but I got until I was four I was all set to Wallace my family was convinced I was going to be a soccer player my father was anyway because I was fit and fast and deeply attractive toward the four-year-olds anyway and so it remained actually seven City anyway I got polio when I was four and so that put an end to my soccer career ready with Everton it wouldn't do now by the way I'm back I think I have a good chance of making the team these days the weather going on but but if you've been watching their performance recently but any I went to this special school and for a few years and and I was I suppose discovered there by a school inspector rather wonderful man called Charles Stratford who saw something in me I don't know and encouraged the school to take more of an interest but the reason I mention it is I suppose I've been struck from any age by how different we are and how deeply hidden often our talents are nor abilities that we all have tremendous natural talents and often people don't know them they recognise them and they don't develop them they and to the extent that they don't know what their talents are they don't really know what they can do and to the extent they don't know that they don't really know who they are I believe I think that's true of all of us and I felt at the time that the kids I was in the class with as well probably we were branded in a way by a single fact it's like people get branded by their gender or they get branded by their ethnicity or they get branded by their religion you know there's an old grammatical device called us I call it I used to call it cynic doke it's called synecdoche isn't it where a single item of something is taken to represent the whole of it like in Shakespeare let's say a masked meaning a ship and I think we'd have this kind of symmetrical thinking all the time about each other we take a single facet to somebody and extrapolate from it and believe that's the whole of them somehow it's convenient to brand them that way while I was in school with kids who had cerebral palsy they had asthma and the guys sat next to me had spasticity he couldn't hold a pen in his hand he could only hold it in his feet but he did it beautifully actually so he had and he didn't actually have much better handwriting than I do was it handwriting we don't know what was that what was he doing we don't know anyway whatever it was he was great at it and there's a guy next to me about hydrocephalus and friend Robert all kinds of people I was saying that our classroom was like the barroom scene from Star Wars you know they were it was that people wandering around with bits detached and falling off him we had a monitor for had a body parts monitor you know other scores have people clearing away their chalk we'd say just collect whatever's dropped off with you but the thing was you see that but that it wasn't what was of interest to any of us in the class what interested us was rather people interesting or funny or had something to say you know whether they entertained your engages that that stuff but I felt that for a long time I mean afterwards that that's not quite how it was seen from the outside well in a way special education I suppose ever since it struck me as a particular example of a much more general principle which is that we do that to everybody and education does it to everybody one way or another we have stereotypes in our minds about what counts as ability what counts as success what counts as normal and and we apply them everywhere they're often just built into our mental furniture we don't even know we're doing it half the time so a lot of what I've been arguing for us was oh my life is for a more thoroughgoing principle of diversity in education that human life thrives on diversity and our education systems are modeled ironically on the principle of conformity and it's why so many people don't do terribly well at it people who could do a lot better a lot of people go through education never discover what they're good at at all or conclude that they're just not good I think of this as the other climate crisis what I mean is that we've become useless at least I hope we have to the idea that there is a crisis in the world's natural resources I mean there is I think if people doubt it just wait another thing you know it's a waiting game this then but I think there's a and by the way that that crisis and the natural climate has been caused by us we know that let me ask you how many people do you think have ever lived on earth how many human beings you think they're being I mean I between troglodytes in the under Thals I mean modern human beings Homo sapiens yeah groovy people like ourselves you know with with cocktail shakers and and credit cards you know I'm sorry how many people do think that it's rare it's estimated that human beings emerged on the planet in our modern form about fifty thousand years ago so how many of us you think there aren't have been altogether thank you very much do I hear ten gone seven billion eight billion I'll dump it to get in silly though now go on how many any advance on eight billion fifteen buddy thank you thank you so all to the gentleman well let me tell you first off nobody knows okay well I don't I mean that how they're gonna know I know nobody's been counting you know nobody's been I was going round with the calculator to go for more over here hang on you you to separate a second note six eight six no but what were there being so smart as a species people have been trying to figure it out and if you google the question how many people have ever lived you'll find that estimates by serious people with poor social lives have have resulted in the series of estimates and the estimates range from 60 billion to 110 billion so it's a bit of a margin so let's split the difference let's split the difference and say maybe 80 billion maybe 80 billion people have lived in the whole of history the last 50,000 years well they're two things to say about it the first is is that of those almost 10% of the total is on earth right now we are the biggest single generation I mean everybody living I don't mean people over 30 people under 12 right i all of us this collective cohort of humanity is there almost 7 billion dollars that's more people than it's ever been on the planet at the same time in the whole of human history and we're heading for 9 billion by the mid of the century so around 10 percent of the total for most of history there was hardly anybody around honestly if you go back to Shakespeare's day or go back to the high Renaissance in Florence I mean Florence you know it was probably about the size of Red Deer you know it was just warmer if Florence had been in Alberta the Renaissance would not have happened hey it wouldn't because nobody would have ventured outdoors are they nobody there they'll be home inventing electric blankets and things like that but we are now the populations rocketed in the past 300 years pretty much that's 250 really and growing exponentially well there was a study done a while at a great program by David Attenborough done recently said if the question was how many people can live on Earth how many people can the planet sustain and it came to the following conclusion which is that if everybody on earth consumed food water fuel at the same rate as the average person in Rwanda the earth could sustain the maximum population of 15 billion if everybody in Earth's consumed the same rate as the average person in North America that tells the earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.2 billion and we're at 15 billion that's a 7 billion and Counting and honestly the only reason we're getting away with it is because they're putting up with it or they're not really aware of it so what it comes to for me is is that we are living in times of revolution and over the next 50 years will face challenges which no previous generation of humanity's ever had to deal with and to do that we have to think differently about ourselves and about the way we run our communities and our schools and our education systems and our our organizations I think we should always have thought differently about it I think if we thought differently about it in the first place we wouldn't have so many of these problems you see I think of this is the the other climate crisis we're creating one but were also victims of another which is I think of as the crisis of human resources that most people have no real idea what they're capable of and it it plays out in pretty disastrous ways sometimes for I mean there are lots of symptoms of this now one of them is the high levels of dropout from education now I know it varies I'm not speaking about British Columbia now but I live in America where the drop rate is 40 percent from public schools 40 percent in public schools I'll tell you why in a minute but you see similar figures not just in dropout rates but in disaffection in disengagement of people who can't be bothered you know it's suicide rates especially among people from 15 to 20 are at historically high levels and four times as many young men commit suicide around the world as women it's it's the fourth largest cause of death among young people suicide there's people checking out for whatever and evan has the wrong story of course I mean there isn't you can look at generalities but among the things that people believe are the lack of social cohesion the breakdown of the family unemployment few prospects and a whole suite of depressive conditions there are six hundred and thirty 1 million young people on earth at the moment at you between 50 nothing at 25 and of those 80 1 million or about 13% are unemployed so people at the International Labour Organization talks about this about a lost generation you know what I'm talking about and people who who don't know what to do that would do it themselves in America one in 31 people is in jail one in 31 in jail are on the way to jail or leaving jail well you see this to me is a catastrophe and you know the price we pay in mopping it all up and trying to deal with it and it's it to me it need not happen I mean everyone has their own story you know they're 80 billion others and we all have our own biography and that's my point rather we all chuck chart very different courses of course through our lives but one of the biggest infants I'm not saying education is responsible for these things but education could be the solution and too often I don't mean individual schools or individual teachers or anybody in particular but systemically taking it as a whole as a system education doesn't contribute to the solution to these problems as thoroughly as it could in fact in ways that it should not it contributes to the problem it makes it worse and that's why I want to come and talk about this business of educating the heart and the mind um I I was born in Liverpool I mention this because it's very ten minutes since I mentioned myself and now you get palpitations don't you did it no I can get you badly now I was born in Liverpool in in 1950 and my brother John at the moment is doing our family tree it's not much of a tree Freddie it's a kind of small shrub ready with a curious blight I wrap around the roots but John discovered something very interesting to me which was that our eight great-grandparents were all born in Liverpool in the mid 19th century within two miles of each other that's how they met they bumped into each other that's how people used to meet the people they spent their lives with people until quite recently led very local lives now you might say no no no this is nonsense this is not what happened the this was the cosmos at work in its secret ways that these eight soulmates it was contrived coincide at the same point in the space-time continuum that they should further the process that has led to the miracle that is me you can you you can say that I don't think so myself I I just think people had lower standards then frankly I think I think people bumped into it and thought you'll do yeah this is yeah you are not to shoddy I can spend my life with you without without feeling embarrassed the rest of it the reason I say this I mean think of all the people all the people of those eighty billion over the past fifty thousand years in the most extraordinary circumstance how many of those people had to meet each other and did meet each other and procreated down the centuries in a sequence that has finally led to you to all the different relatives ancestors who on the top of which pyramid you currently sit all the things that had to happen the chance meetings the places the meals yeah and latterly the movies and the bottles of Sancerre you know why the expensive chocolates in or and all the things that may have stopped people meeting you know the wars the catastrophe is the natural all the stuff that had happened before you made it it's extraordinarily Merced he said that to be born at all is a miracle so congratulations you know you made it we made it guys you know so and what he also said is so what are you going to do with this life now you have it what are you going to do with it you know many people never got the chance and here you are so what are going to do we're going to do something with it or frittered away and education is meant to be the process by which we engage people in their fullness to give them a sense of who they are on their capability so they can lead a life that means something to them and to the rest of this and too often it simply doesn't and we end up with lots of remedial programs or people being half educated or willfully pulling away from it leading to what I say I think of as this the other climate crisis I think certainly contributing to it there are causes for this and I think the remedy lies in the type of work we're here to talk about this evening that we'll talk about when Linda Murray and I get together as well but let me just sketch up what I think the problem is the problem as I see it is in the ideology of Education it what I mean is the values and assumptions that are taken for granted the things that we don't think about so much but which kind of calibrate our actions there are two in particular one of them and I've talked about about it is this idea of standardization and conformity I don't want to go on about it now but but let me just ask you a question um well I'll make a point buddy the first is it exists that I believe that what we've developed in our education systems is analogous to what's happening in the catering industry you know in the catering industry there are two modes of business and two methods of quality assurance there's the fast food business and there's like the Michelin Guide with fast food if you've got a favorite outlet you know whichever one you go to you know exactly what you're going to get no matter where it is you can get the same food at the same bo the same fries the same bun the same Cola or the same chicken nuggets what are chicken nuggets my dinner what what what are they Taron I used to live in the countryside and we had chickens they did not have nuggets it did they didn't or if they had them they weren't showing them em they were they were keeping them out of sight I can tell you I do do not eat chicken nuggets the result is that whichever fast without let you go - you know exactly what you're going to get it's all horrible and bad for your health but it's guaranteed the and it's tribulus the worst outbreak of diabetes obesity in the history of the planet but hey the the other form of quality assurance in catering is like the Michelin Guide and that's very different they set up criteria of excellence and they say if you meet these criteria you're in the guide it doesn't matter what food you serve you can be an Italian French Asian fusion doesn't matter you can all be in the guide they don't tell you what time to open they don't tell you what uniforms wear or to have uniforms whether to serve wine or not you meet these criteria in your own way and the consequence is under that system you get very high level restaurants with great great stuff to eat in every type of genre and culture and they're all different now I think what's been happening over time and education is is becoming more and more standardized it's becoming more like the fast-food model when it ought to be much more like the Michelin model every school should be different and great every classroom should be different and great it should be built on diversity and not conformity and one of the symptoms I think is becoming more and more worrying can I ask you how many of you here would consider yourself to be baby boomers come on thank you me too well you know how many of you if you don't mind me asking I have had your tonsils removed there we go that's a lot isn't it how many of you here are under the age of 30 no mercy how many of you have had your tonsils removed they go now it's interesting said as a proportion you see our generation the Boomers routinely had our tonsils removed didn't we when you're a kid the first sign of a sore throat some good pants on you and take your tonsils own they did when I was a teenager you couldn't afford to clear your throat in public or someone would be on you and wiggly tonsils out and your adenoids and and your appendix any loose bit of flesh they couldn't account for it's not true anything that was lying around out it would come when it'd be stacked in the corner of the surgery for collection later on what happened to all the tonsils what are chicken nuggets Remy I mean come on what are they witness we should be told which Jeffrey told it's a conspiracy now the thing is that then it was a false identity medical profession people still get sore throats they still get inflamed tonsils but they don't whip them out anymore as witness the fact people under 30 of mostly got them they let them heal they're given but there are other ways of treating them it was a fad just a fad oh what a chance I just take the tonsils up you staff up their entire sets of teeth removed because they needed a filling that's what people did it's a it's a medical contagion that runs through the profession our kids don't suffer from that the kids in your classrooms they do suffer from a new false epidemic I believe which is the plague of ADHD now I don't mean to say and I've said it elsewhere that there is no such thing people agree they were qualified to pronounce these things that there is a suite of conditions called ADHD what I can test is its status as an epidemic and there are studies around would support that view there's one published reason you can read about on CNN they reckon in the United States last year maybe 900,000 children were falsely diagnosed with ADHD often apparently if if the kids who a youngest in the class will be diagnosed with ADHD if they're in because they stand out more they may have more restless energy but you know I speak to a lot of people about our speaking somebody recently had a son was being diagnosed with ADHD and I said what does he like to do said oh he loves to play the guitar and write songs and I said does he lose interest when he's doing that I don't know no we all sit there for hours doing that so part of it is this obsession of conformity we now have a suite of narcotics or drugs available which can help people stay within the barriers so standardization is a big issue I think we should be personalizing education not standardizing it on the basis that we're all different but there's something else which is the heart of our academic culture our education systems have evolved really based on many of the intellectual principles of the European enlightenment and that way of thinking which has many benefits and of course has previous spectacular success in science and technology and the rest it's nonetheless predicated on the division between intellect and feeling if you read a lot of the architects of enlightenment the whole burden of it the whole drive of the enlightened was to push out intuition and superstition only reason and objective facts would do human others right about keeping feelings away from our attempts to understand the world and that view and we could talk a bit more about it later on has contributed to I think a schismatic view of of human beings we have developed a view of the mind which is based on a particular view of rationality and we've come to mistake the mind that entity that consciously thinks with consciousness which is the broader character of our being we can engage with the world in many other ways than are made available through our normal systems of Education in fact the meditation is the tradition in which the Dalai Lama Center sits and others I'll dedicate the proposition that there is in a sense more to us than the conventional sense of a thinking mind Eckhart Tolle who in the city is a friend of ours I'm not sure doing a program with them on Saturday if you've read his book a new earth or the power of now is also dedicates that proposition that that we can apprehend ourselves and the world more effectively if we don't depend upon or collide our association of consciousness with this rather narrow view of the rational mind the other thing that comes from this is a division between thinking and feeling and I've been a longtime advocate of the Arts in education and and the arts are always at the bottom of the pecking order in schools so when cuts begin to be talked of in education or when standardization becomes the order of the day the hierarchy of schools becomes apparent you know maths and science the top and languages and then the commands the arts get pushed further and further down and in the arts I saw the hierarchy music and art are normally given a better place in theatre and dance and it's partly because we've also become to associate those other disciplines with those particularly science of mathematics with hard knowledge and the arts with a softer form of knowledge the arts for some people are seen as being less rigorous not really knowing at all some form of self-expression some form of recreation some form of leisure and it's a terrible caricature how the arts actually work and we've also in a way disembodied our children we've become to focus on them as minds in a head rather than as people embodied an example is we have two kids so far as I know how would I know I mean dear sir no and our son James is great our daughter kate is also great our two children who are equally great our whom one is called James when he was 16 James asked as if he was taking some exams at school in England and he said he wanted to get a Playstation a Sony Playstation and he said if I do well in the exam was kind of get a Playstation and Tarin I said no you cannot he said but all my friends get anything this you know for doing well in the exams we said well great he said well so what's gonna be my motivation I said we'll be thrilled we we both said Terry is much more astute on these things than I was but pushed for this anyway we didn't bribe him but after he got his exams he and he did well he said to us you know could I could I have a Playstation it's like a few weeks later and I said to Terry I think I think we should getting one you know because I wanted one you know ready I thought we should have a Playstation ever we start placing the house is not complete any so we got we got this PlayStation and I I spent an Arab says in James's room fixing the thing up I mean this was 10 years ago so I it's fixing up this PlayStation and and I got the thing working it would have done it without leave probably a lot faster but I'm a dad you know sit there my boy grasshopper you know and I others I know so I went downstairs and Kate was in the kitchen we lived in the countryside of time she said would you make me a swing she was 12 and so I said okay I think I might perhaps they were 14 and 10 okay so I went out and she found this 15-foot piece of rope in the shed where we did have this apple tree outside the door so I rigged up a swing you put a piece of wood across the bottom and she was on the swing playing and out elated James came down to get a drink glass of water them England and he saw Kate outside he said what's that I said up matrice wing so he dashed out and he spent the whole of the rest of the afternoon on the swing with Kate in fact they spent the whole week and went on to spend most of the summer on the swing in the garden swinging backs forward so they kind of created this ditch underneath in destroyed the grass most the apples fell off but they were doing Star Wars set to sell a you know parrots the Carribean ten years before the movie came out I think we're still no word royalties for it Harry but you know they were doing they were just lost in this fantasy world and they were exhibited by the whole thing and of course the reason was it was a physical embodied activity which was firing up their imagination it wasn't just all here it was a full physical embodied experience and I just found it fascinating Tony I was saying it's interesting is because I think if we'd said to James in the June you know James if you do really well in your exams you can have that piece of our rope in the shed you know I'm not sure it would be the incentive he was looking for frankly but there is something about the physicality of that type of play well there is a there are Legion reports now from every quarter about emotional dysfunction Daniel Goleman you know wrote famously the book emotional intelligence there was a book written actually 1974 by a guy called Robert Witkin which had a title with the same meaning but it was expressed definitely he called his book the intelligence of feeling and he begins it by saying you know des cartes thing that I think therefore I am which is a contestable argument right there but wicken said perhaps we would be better saying I feel therefore I am that we are above all feeling organisms we are organic but he makes a very interesting point at the beginning of the book which is an obvious another point but he says that and he speaks in a long tradition in saying is that we all live in in two worlds there is a world that exists that existed before you existed and we're all being well it would exist after you have ceased to be because in the end we're not here for long you know in terms of the history of the planet the planet is four-and-a-half billion years old and we've been here for fifty thousand years apparently if you were to liken the whole history of the planet the lifespan of the planet to a single year human beings appeared on the planet at one second to midnight on the 31st of December there's a great piece on the onion recently about save the planet you know commenting on everyone saying we should save the planet they said don't worry about it the planet will be fine we may go as a species the planet may decide to shrug it off and say we tried humanity not so good the next planetary conference don't recommend it we gave it 50,000 years it ended in tears so the planet will continue but his point was Robert Witkin is that there is a world exist whether or not we exist it's the outer world of objects and events and physicality and of other people but he said there is also a world that exists only because you exist it's the world that came into being when you did and will end or change according to your beliefs when your physical being ceases to be it's the world of your private consciousness of your own being and whereas we all make attempts to know the outside world nobody can truthfully know the detail of your inner world it's the world of RD Laing one said in which there's only really one set of footprints it's your own inner world of consciousness well what we constitute try to is to bridge these two we try to relate the one to the other we tried often to understand ourselves in terms the other I think the problems that have arisen in education because of our obsession with that certain type of rationalism is that we spend a great deal of time in education now getting children focused on the external world giving them data and information about it and increasing that world is becoming more and more distracting and kaleidoscopic and insistent I'm sure that is one of the contributions to people's lack of attention the constant flickering of data but our education systems are remorseless II turned outwards to the outer world when what kids and all of us des we need to is time to look inward and to dwell in that inner space where in the end we find the only things that truthfully make sense for us and education is increasingly poor at giving people techniques to look inward and to understand the relationship between the two you see science if I can caricature it seems to me the primary purpose science and I'm a great advocate for science education but the primer and I've written a lot about the creativity of science but broadly speaking Sciences broadly speaking the physical sciences are directed to understanding the external world in its own terms seems to me that the enterprise of science is explanation we're trying to figure things out and to be as objective as we can I don't think objective means true and we might talk about that you can be objective and wrong and the history of Sciences of people being perfectly objective but wrong but trying to be right but people have often believed things to be factually correct which turned out to be nonsense the role of the arts I think is is self-consciously to manage this relationship between the inner and outer world it's to and the aim of an artist is not so much to explain their experience but to describe it to give an account of it in objects or somehow convey that sense of perception well I think we pay a high price for the exile of feeling in education this remorse is turning out and the failure to help people engage with what's within them I believe that what identifies us as human beings above all are the powers that flow from our deep resource of imagination to I write such a lot about creativity if you ask you know for the most of the past fifty thousand years we have lived harmoniously with the rest of life on earth our ancestors did in the last 300 years which is a blink of an eye we've taken off like a rocket and are about to bring the house down around our ears and what a cancer eat or what is it that makes us so different because in most respects we're like the rest of life on earth were mortal organic no different from them lives are short but what makes us different why are we sitting in a building that we've made you know rather than sitting outside while all the dogs are sitting in here you know all the lemurs and the squirrels sitting out in meetings we're outside in the trees trying to figure out what to eat you know there is a difference and the difference is that we have evolved this powerful sense of imagination the ability to bring to mind things that aren't here and from it flow all kinds of powers like creativity and uniquely and distinctively the power of empathy the ability to put yourself in somebody else's position and to imagine what that might be like what happens in all times of conflict and crore tears we shut empathy off so that we can do things that are unimaginable and the way we avoid that is by killing our imaginations and making those things unimaginable in turn empathy essentially in imagination are the things that make us human and the powers that flow from it creativity and intuition so it seems to be we have two big challenges in education one of them is to have a more unified conception of what it is to be a person one that recognized that feeling and knowing are parts of the same complex of a whole being that our feelings our forms of perception and they're affected by what we think by our frameworks of ideas they're affected by how well we can express ourselves and the languages we have available to do that so part of the task graduation is to connect ourselves with ourselves and I think that the reason some people get depressed and last is they have lost the connection with themselves they have no sense of purpose Carl Jung said this he said in his thirty years of professional practice he said there wasn't a single person who came to see him whose Millais he said couldn't in the end be attributed to a loss of faith in religion now I don't think he meant and I said he don't mean in quoting him organized religion I think the word I would use and perhaps he would have accept it would be spirituality a sense of your spirit but he said in the end nobody either nobody either got well without regaining a sense of spiritual connection so part of the task education is connect ourselves with ourselves but the other great task is connected with each other through the power of empathy through the power of intuition and mutuality and all those things get lost in an industrialized homogenized atomized system of Education and the price couldn't be higher and we're paying it every day in disaffection disengagement and emotional turmoil now I don't see education as the whole of it but we contribute to it it's the old Marxist principle isn't it that part of the problem or you're part of the solution and we have to be careful not to be part of the problem so what do we do about it so let me cue up the conversation I hope we're going to have I think any rate there are a number of practical strategies which think about the first is that we have to recognize that education is personal if you make education impersonal people pull away from it or pull out of it or just disengaged interests me that all the remedial programs and education are based on personalized curriculum I was in a meeting in LA the week about alternative education to get kids back into school alternative education is based on all that was the same thing always the same thing on personalized curricula on clothes working research between teachers and students negotiated programs and collaboration group work and mutual support and I remember saying to this meeting it's interesting that's called alternative education because that's really education it's the alternative that's causing the problem you know we should call all the mainstream stuff alternative education and get on to the good stuff I feel this by there in all of what I do I feel I standard in a very long tradition of people who've been arguing for something like this for a very long time you can there are precursors and ancestor for every Ardoin I ever think I put whether it's Bruner or prj or Montessori or or pestalozzi or freeball all in their different ways people have been arguing for holistic approaches to education since we had education it's just the mainstream has rocketed away into this on these rails of conformity and I think it's time to make the alternative into the mainstream so personalizing it is a big piece of it and we might talk a bit about that the second is I believe we have to put the arts back into education the arts are not only but among the prime ways in which we negotiate our own understanding of ourselves in the world around us it's through music and art and theatre and dance all the things that are marginalized that we express our own unique individual humanity not just doing them but learning about them learning about other cultures through them and creating our own unique forms expression in the process the arts should be at the center of this not instead of but Foursquare alongside the humanities and the sciences and physical education I think a school that marginalizes the Arts is not doing education they might be doing something else some version of it but if you leave out of account one of these major areas of human growth and develop then you're not doing the job it's and I think it's as simple as that and the final thing is that we can we are learning more and more through studies of the brain through the fusions of ancient medical processes about what's increasingly being called mindfulness there are practical things techniques that we can use in classrooms to get children to focus in on themselves to create some common amaya some points of meditation some points of practice which if they became routine I think would start to show themselves in the change the overall culture of Education and we're going to be having some more about those in the conversation we're about to have but those particular things seem to me at the heart but they're all versions of personalizing education but the root of it to me is that they're all point to a different metaphor for education you see most of our systems of Education are mechanistic I think they're kind of data-driven and and impersonal the trouble is that human beings are not mechanisms we are organisms and schools are like organisms too and if you create certain cultures people flourish and in other cultures they tend to feel demeaned and to pull away so to me it's about looking again at the nature of the culture of the school the vibrancy of the school recognize that we're all unique individuals but that together we create unique patterns and forms of behavior which we can change I've seen terrible schools improve in the space of six month when a new T head teacher came in and saw the potential to make people work differently I've seen great schools go down for the opposite reason schools have much more freedom I think than we often believe we do there's nothing I think in the legislation we all operate within that says that you have to have 40-minute periods in high schools they have to have separate subject departments how the school is rung is really about the leadership of the school and the collective one of the people who work within it but there's we pay a high price for the current system but there's a great prize in the new one there's a wonderful quote remember and niacin in the poet she once said interest use an organic metaphor she said of herself that there came a point in our own their own life in a way where she had to be true to herself she said they came a point when the pain of remaining tight in a bud was greater than the pain it took to blossom I thought that was lovely but I think it's true in for all of us that very often the pain of containing our consciousness or our failure to understand us is greater than the painter would take to go on the journey to make it happen and I think that's true in scores the pain of containing people who are being disengaged is more than the effort it would take to reconnect with them if we changed our metaphors and I think if we do I think as we sit here at this point in humanity's growth and development we may be feeling that shift I know Eckhart Tolle writes about it but he calls he subtitles his book a new earth the flowering of human consciousness it's again it's an organic metaphor but I think it's true I feel a shift as I go around the world and I think you can sense it in lots of ways that people it's often a long revolution but I think it's beginning to unfold but if we go with it if we understand that these things are are making and that we can remake them that education and human life is organic and it's a matter of culture if we get the culture right that I think will witness a harvest of human flourishing that will amaze us thank you you

Channel: Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education

Views: 737,846

Rating: 4.9147558 out of 5

Keywords: Sir, Ken, Robinson

Id: I1A4OGiVK30

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 03 2011