Sir Ken Robinson: "Reimagine Learning that Can Change the World" - Reimagine Education

it's my pleasure to introduce Sir Ken Robinson I probably like many of you first met him online because his TED Talks been watched more than any other TED talk in the history of TED talks and and when I first watched it I I wanted to accuse him of plagiarism because so many of the things I had been writing about and speaking about there he had it very concisely and far more masterfully because he has that English accent it is put it all together and and and ever since then I've been a fan and this past summer I had a chance to actually meet him I told about what we were doing and with the center and with this conference and he merely said if I'm available I'll be there and and lo and behold he's here so I really thankful to you Ken for making the time Ken is on the road often it's hard to to catch him when he's in Los Angeles my Mike Dean Marcellus was the Rosco who you met earlier today when he met him welcomed him to Los Angeles and found out that he's been living in LA longer than Marcello so it's truly an honor to have him here at this conference to help us in pushing our thinking about what's possible with children and with education Sir Ken Robinson [Applause] Thank You petrol job my microphone I would that one over there I could have done that myself but Edwin's being paid to do it so thank you I didn't appreciate it this has been great hasn't it today it's been fantastic it's true I live in Los Angeles I've lived here now for almost 17 years I live round the corner as it turns out and so it was lovely when Marcelo welcomed me to Los Angeles why don't people think I'm from Los Angeles I don't understand dear but I moved here I live here I moved here not long after No Child Left Behind started leaving children behind and I love Los Angeles I have to say and also America and more California let's be frank and people were talking this morning about being aliens and alienated I am an alien I just want you to know this I am officially an alien I have a green card from this country I am officially a resident alien so thank you and yet I move among you and I'm taken for one of your own actually six months ago I applied for citizenship okay I might have picked a better time you know looking back I had 17 years to do it but I did it this way instead no look I live around the corner from here and I travel a lot as Pedro said and I have been driven for most of my professional life by the same mission-ready in the same set of interests and values and they've been evident throughout the whole morning I got here about 10:30 no 11 o'clock do you care when I got here I can check it if it's bothering you I was about to leave the house and then I realized it was being streamed online so I just got back into bed and watch petrol streaming himself but all the themes have been running through the day including that fantastic luncheon presentation by chef Alice but being close to my heart for a very long time and I think they're all connected that's my point I think as we talk about how to reimagine learning for the 21st century part of what we need to do is not reimagine learning but remember it because we know how to do this in education and effective learning and education is not some puzzle that's just been thrust upon us and you know like some new disease that we haven't encountered before and we're desperate trying to crack the genetic code there are brilliant schools everywhere there are fantastic teachers everywhere wonderful school leaders everywhere and there always have been it's not that the situation is unfixable we know how to fix it the problem is that we attack I think politically most of our country suffer from a form of cultural amnesia about what it is that helps people flourish there was a I'm involved at the moment in a couple of global campaigns I only act globally frankly you know if it's not global I'm really not interested so so don't bother move with local nonsense that's all I'm saying you know just keep it global no there is the reason I say that is every every human issue presents itself locally and you have to deal with them locally but the issues we're talking about today are not unique to Los Angeles or California they are genuinely global issues and people all over the world are discussing them and trying to figure it out and some people are more ahead than others in figuring them out and implementing the solutions but I think this is a genuinely existential set of issues that we're discussing how we educate our children how we educate them to understand themselves how we give them a sense of promise and hope and fulfilment in their communities is based I think on the same principles as the bigger challenges we face outside the school system in the natural environment our relationship with the earth our relationship as communities our relationships politically and they're being frustrated by the same ideological obstacles I'm leading in advising on this global campaign on the importance of play children's play we did a survey of 12,000 families in different parts of the world and discovered something really rather shocking I think can I ask you how many have much time did you spend as kids playing an outside playing in the street a lot hours probably I mean I did and I'm one of seven kids I was grew up in Liverpool and when we came home from school we went outdoors and played we played outside all weekend this in the middle of know one of the toughest seaports in the world but we just played outside and we came back if there was food we were like cats you know we were our parents our parents understood this we were feline essentially and if there was food outside we would come home and if there wasn't we'd go to any house that had food and and and stay there we just got pushed out the door and played up until recently that's what kids did they played I don't mean I don't mean computer games I don't mean Little League I don't mean you standing on the sidelines holding their clothes while while you're shouting instructions at them I mean just playing and being kids this jet what we've come to call real play free unstructured physical active play where kids get messed up no scuff their knees fall out have routers you know come back exhilarated and desperate to go to sleep that type of play that we're all designed to engage in so we asked parents 12,000 parents in different parts of the world 12,000 families how much time do your children spend outdoors typically playing the majority of kids these days spend much less than an hour a day unsupervised outdoors about 10% of kids never go outdoors without an adult at their side and the vast majority don't play at all outdoors as most of us did for the most for most of human history so about an hour let's be generous about an hour a day but it's often much less the international protocols for the treatment of maximum security prisoners require that they spend two hours a day outside so our kids are spending less time outside than high-security prisoners they're incarcerated in their own homes several reasons for it one of them is parental fear people are terrified if their kids go outside awful things will happen statistically there no more risk than children ever were in fact there's a good case to be made that they are in some ways less at risk previous generations been because there's so much fuss if anything does happen but it depends course on your neighborhood we're hearing this morning some of the toughest neighborhoods in Los Angeles are not battlefields constantly there are good places to play and always have been there's that there's the proliferation of digital games I mean when I was growing up there's no good reason to be in the house frankly there's nothing there you know it changed when we got some furniture but until then obvious that made a difference when we could sit down but but generally speaking there's no good reason to be in the house and every good reason to get out of it but now you know kids can plug themselves into devices and get lost so there's a whole range of digital distractions but that's not real play and I'm not decrying it bother I'm not being some kind of anti progressive in saying digital games of that they're not they're fast they're fantastic they're very engaging but they're not what we think of as real active physical heart-pounding running around jumping play which is what young children are not only designed to it's what they have to do if they're to grow properly socially emotionally and physically another big pressure is school there's terrible pressure of homework and testing and competition that is turning this generation into probably the most anxious and nerve-racked generation in history I want to talk a bit more about this in just a minute but the price we're paying for all this competition in schools is an epidemic of tension and anxiety among parents and students like you know and I'm not I don't know any teacher likes it either it's one of those systems like well who's actually running this turns out nobody is which is good news because it means we can change it but for example South Korea is largely vaunted as the most successful system in the world in terms of testing on the Pisa tests long with Shanghai and Singapore in parts of Hong Kong South Korea and some of these other high performer countries also have the highest rate of teen suicide anywhere in the world so we pay a high price for this nonsense and there was a report I saw the other day I think was on CBS might not have been though it could have been NBC I'm just saying but it happened anyway this it was a report on an experiment in Texas where a group of schools had started to allow more time every day for recess elementary schools so these kids were outside three times a day for 20 minutes running around and playing and they were reporting there was a reporter in the playground you know like they were out on some Battlefront know this just in you know I'm here embedded in the playground in Texas as if something remarkable was taking place and said all around me there are children playing staggering really and and they're reported that the result of all this was the kids were more interested at school they're more engaged at school and then there was a panel in the studio where experts were debating whether this was a good thing that what's the research show is it improving test scores and I think you have lost your mind we have lost our mind seven way if we have just rediscovered childhood in Texas as some odd phenomenon where children run around and play and they feel better if they do and we need a panel of experts to explain to us to try and fathom what might be going on here we should all give up and go home I think at this point because you know it's like now we have agricultural systems of the industrial systems and agriculture which are devastating the planet this thin little layer of soil that surrounds the planet on which all life of our sort depends has taken billions of years to accumulate and we're washing it away in a chemical mix in less than a couple of generations it's been estimated by the way that in Europe if we don't reverse this trend we may have Optimus Li about a hundred more harvests well this is planed insanity isn't it we know there are conditions under which people flourish and conditions under which they don't there are conditions under which all living things do well and conditions under which they don't and the reason that so many kids don't do well in schools is not because the kids it's because of how we do school and if we did school differently the kids would do well and do better because kids want to do well and it's kind of that straightforward and a lot of the work I've been doing is been around this idea like what are those conditions under which people do well and it turns out we've always known what they are we've just forgotten them or rather there's been a kind of political culture for the past 25 30 years which is required schools to act against their better instincts and I think this is why it's so important as Pedro said this morning that we shouldn't be talking about reform we should be talking about transformation there's no point trying to fix this we just need to change it and do something differently years ago I was born in Liverpool did I say that well I was so you know I defy you to contradict me on that I was because I was there that's the point so when I environment in my early twenties I went round an abattoir in Liverpool in a slaughterhouse a slaughterhouse an abattoir back I can't remember now why I went honestly it's a long time ago I think I was on a date you know I know how to please a woman frankly I mean before we go to the restaurant let's go and see where this all came from you know so so so you don't over order tires go around this abattoir no with a group of us it's like a popular thing you know with a tour guide an abattoir is a factory that is designed specifically to kill animals and they do they are tremendously successful honestly they're kind of been fallible to be honest very few escape and form survivors clubs and have annual reunions you know that was close absolutely you know no it worked and when I was going around this thing at the far end of it I was it's a bit of a grisly experience to have it you should have it by the way if you're nobody into an abattoir you should go around it will change your mind about a lot of things it's like my wife's mother OSU smiland that she was in she always used to say she wasn't being morbid but she said you should at least once a month you should go to a funeral she wasn't being morbid it's just like just to remind you that this isn't forever I think it's very important that we need a sense of perspective about how much time we have and you know and what we do with it I'll come back this in just a minute but anyway moving on from this cheery notion of funerals and appetizers for a moment and another thing know as I went around this abattoir there was a door of the far end and the sign on it that said veterinarian and I was baffled frankly because I thought he must be depressed another fruitless day at work these animals failing to respond to all my attempts at revival I said I said why why do you have a veterinarian in the abattoir and he said well he comes and does random visits to do random autopsies on the animals I said well he must have seen a pattern by now surely you know this isn't CSI is it I mean another 500 animals with boats in their head you know there's there's something going on in here and I'm gonna get to the bottom of it you know this cannot be a coincidence I said but my point is is if you design a system to do something specifically don't be surprised if it does it and if you design a school system to do something in particular don't be surprised if that's essentially what it does now our systems are not designed to encourage the things we're all talking about they were designed to do something else they were designed to promote I mean saving Horace Mann who did have a wonderful vision for education but as they've evolved and particulars have evolved in the past 50 years they've turned into something else they've turned into systems which celebrate conformity compliance and linearity and we pathologize difference in our school systems one of the ways we do it is we have a very narrow conception of ability in schools we know we think that human intelligence is a synonym for academic ability and it's simply not academic ability is important but it's not the whole of human intelligence by a very long way but if you start out with a narrow conception of ability you automatically generate a large conception of inability of disability of people who need remedial help it would be wouldn't it like running an entire national sports education system that was entirely focused on lacrosse or cricket in fact I rather like the sound of this now no but seriously if you know sport takes multiple forms and engages multiple areas of people's intelligence physicality and athleticism but if you reduce it to one and said look the really important sport is lacrosse or you know pick your own sport and the people who are good at that isn't really the people were looking for that they're the top performers they're the smart ones and you get the whole system to do that and if the pan if you find people who aren't good at that you can say well endowed we do have remedial programs in baseball you know in the high jump in athletics but the real people were looking for are that are across players well that's what we've done in our school system effectively we have produced a narrow conception of the mind and people who don't show it don't have a capacity for it don't have a any enjoyment in it our pathologized by the system they become the problem a lot of the work I know that Pedro and the team here is involved in is focusing on the school to Prison Pipeline which is an outrageous aberration in our education systems you see what the reason it's like an industrial system is industrial systems are focused on conformity and compliance and on producing certain types of things and it's a feature of industrial systems and linear systems that they produce waste products products for which we cannot find a proper purpose or which are marginal to the intention of the system when it was designed and we're doing that all the time in schools there are people who don't make it you don't get through the system want and valued by the system who are considered to be wasteful byproducts of the system and they end up in all kinds of other places now it's not I mean Pedram shor confirm this it would be wrong to say if you leave high school early that you end up in jail that's not true what is true is a very high proportion of the people in the prison system left high school early and didn't graduate it's a roughly as you look across the country is anything between 50 and 30% of kids don't complete high school in some districts it's more like 50% well you can't at that but I dislike the word dropout because it implies the kids have failed the system with numbers like that you can't tell yourself that anymore I mean you have to say the system failed them don't you because kids want to learn they just don't like the way they're being engaged or the fact they're not being engaged so my work and I think this conference is about this but I think it's what we're all being talking about implicit and explicit is what are these conditions under which people flourish and can we make them a central part of how we educate everybody there has been for the past 20 odd years now a concerted effort to raise standards in schools its global in character it's been fuelled by the lead tables published by the OECD in Paris and it's a my friend Pasi Solberg from Finland refers this is the global education reform movement or germ for short and and it is infectious all countries are doing it America has thrown itself wholeheartedly politically into trying to improve its rankings in the international lead tables in reading math and science billions of dollars billions of dollars have been spent in America to the commercial for-profit testing companies to commit more more tests to raise standards it hasn't worked it's greatly enriched the testing companies it's done nothing to improve standards graduation rates engagement levels or the motivation of teachers in fact on the contrary it's a busted flush and yet we keep doing it billions and billions of dollars every year it's what we're hearing this morning about California I came across this image recently I just like to share it with enhance my pocket I want to show this image to show you that this presentation has been prepared I have thought about this what while I was screaming Pedro live this one no that's not unusual an unusual image you know that's the sort of thing that goes on what's happened in the reform movement has been based on three big principles the first time is competition in a big order it's a very very competitive system particularly it's been expressed here in America kids against kids schools against schools districts against districts State against state you know the Obama administration who did lots of wonderful things but education their signature initiative is called race to the top all the rhetoric is about racing competition outperforming the competition if we know anything about human life it's what we're hearing from the community representatives this morning great communities great schools great family as great districts great countries thrive on collaboration now I'm not saying there's no room for competition but human life is a collaborative enterprise it's the only way it works we are seven half billion people on this planet we are intensely social creatures our knowledge is a densely woven intricate fabric that we compose together none of us knows more than a fraction of it the whole system only works if we work together in the other education systems don't practice all preach I mean your school may but politically you're not encouraged to practice or preach collaboration the message of the system is it's about competition kids learn more than anything else from each other learning is a very social process and yet in many of our schools because of this competitive dynamic children learn in groups but not as groups it's Don assured me that people are going around saying have you come across this new thing called project-based learning what when did that become a new thing you know when when did you know participant research become a novelty these things have been around forever Montessori as we're hearing from dr. and that Chef analyst earlier based their entire system on collaboration kids working together on the social character of learning but instead this is what this is the message we got sooner or later you have to sit down and outperform other people because all this is about getting people into college now we can talk about that a bit later on if you like I mean I like colleges I've worked in colleges where in a college but not everybody has to go to college there are other ways to have a fulfilling life rather than lining up and doing an academic degree plenty of good ways but one of the results of this is that we have completely marginalized vocational programs in schools all those things you used to do at school shop you know workshop activities practical things with your hands getting out and doing things it's all gone in favor of this the balance is completely shot here there's another way let me give you another version of this picture then I'm going to stand it on its head I don't know how many have you seen this picture before but this was taken in the Indian state of Bihar and it was about two years ago it cost a few raw a few raw in Bihar among politicians among others because let me just explain what's happening here this building is an examination centre and inside it our tenth graders who are taking a test which has a critical bearing on whether they progress for the next level of their education and what institution they may go to the people scaling the walls are their parents who are shoving cheat sheets through the window to help them pass the test they're doing this because they feel the quality of teaching has been so low in Bihar that these kids don't have a fair crack of the whip this is the equity argument so their parents are doing what they can to give their kids an advantage cause it corrupted the whole system what you can't see are the dozens of people on the floor waiting to climb the wall when there's a space now this is this is madness isn't it this is no way to run the education system of our young but I show it to you not because it's some odd thing that just happened in Bihar although it doesn't look like this in America we're doing the same thing now our parents are literally being driven up the wall and so our schools and teachers trying to keep pace with this increasingly intense mode of competition and point is it doesn't have to be that way and the other thing about this of course it's all to too little end at the moment there are 1.2 billion kids in the world that's kids between the ages of 15 and 24 about 14% of them are unemployed have never been in work and feel they have no prospect of a job it depends where you go in America youth unemployment runs at about 10% it's about twice adult unemployment typically when there's a recession it's the kids that get hit first typically in parts of the Mediterranean the rate of youth unemployment is over 50% Greece that's true parts of Italy that's true so despite all this money being pumped into these systems the very people it's meant to serve which are people in business in the economy are the ones who are being least served in some respects by the system it's a very expensive failure so the thing is that the system did work at some point but this is the problem of reform what's happening is that we're trying more and more to make the old system work putting more resource into it trying to make it more efficient but if the system is designed to do the wrong thing it doesn't matter how efficient it gets it'll still do the wrong thing so my argument is that we have to rethink how it works so one of the issues is competition we need collaboration now there is that education is based on standardization human life isn't human life is based on the opposite principle of diversity can I ask you how many of you here have got children okay how about two children or more right and the rest of you have seen such children small small people wandering around okay well I will make you a bet which I will win if you've got two children or more I bet you they are completely different from each other aren't they you would never confuse them would you like which one of you remind me yeah your father now constantly being baffled at breakfast yes sir a simple system of badges the point is every human life is different um a few years ago I was at a a peace summit in Vancouver it was called the vancouver peace summit they're very good at titles in canada that's what we discovered so the the opening session was called world peace through personal peace and i was hosting it we had an hour to sort that out we're just killing time for the final 20 minutes ready but there were ten people on the panel one of whom was the dalai lama he was the guest of honor so i i had to introduce the dalai lama Petro had to introduce me i had to reduce the dalai lama you know but then i thought i don't really have to introduce him do i because i thought anyone whose name starts with v jimmy you've arrived socially haven't you ready you can you can relax in most settings ready sorry Wichita Adama are you that be V so he was asked all kinds of great things and and he's a wonderful wonderful man but he said a couple things I just want to tell you about one was he was he was he said to be born at all is a miracle so what are you going to do with your life it's such a simple question but such an important one you know can I see how many human beings do you think I've ever lived I mean I mean I don't mean prehistoric creatures who went round on their knuckles you know I'm talk about people like us you know groovy people yeah attractive people you know with attractive profile isn't it yeah and a sense of irony so how many of us do you think there are being now I'll give you a clue the earth has been around for about four-and-a-half billion years so as we know I mean there are some people in the Midwest who doubt this but on the whole the body of evidence is against them human beings like us we've been cooking a long time but we have in this form this exquisite form that you see before you this form like this final word of nature form that's what we're talking about we we we evolved about people disagree 150 to 200 thousand years ago let's say 200 thousand how many of us do you think there have been human beings like you and me with our sensibilities our capacities for language our forms of intelligence of this sort of physical configuration walking upright by NACA division you know what we're like else modern human beings how many of us do you think they've been in the past 150 thousand had turned a thousand years thank you so much that's great that's my point Allah no go on give us a gimme number 10 billion thank you 40 billion thank you do I hear 50 50 thank you frigate 50 salute fifties a lady at the front 75 thank you 75 people who are 400 here now okay let me tell you at this time short nobody knows okay no I mean not for certain but people have tried to calculate it the serious statisticians have tried to figure this out and what they figured out is that over the course of human the history of modern humanity it's estimated somewhere between eighty and a hundred and twenty billion people have lived so let's cut that up and say a hundred billion most people would go with that as a number but a hundred billion people now the point is every one of those lives has been unique unrepeatable different and unto itself nobody's had your life before nobody's been born with your sensibilities your particular mix of talents and characteristics and genetic predispositions nobody not your parents not your twin nobody every life is one-off and to be here at all as Adeline said is a miracle every child in your class every kid in the lah Dee's school system is one-off unrepeatable unto themselves diversity is the hallmark of human life just as it is the rest of life on earth the planet thrives on diversity and our big mistake is to try and impose conformity on top of it because it automatically pathologized his difference of every sort of gender of race of ethnicity of faith you name it the human life is intensely diverse as every other form of life on Earth plants flora and fauna the other thing is said by the way he was asked a question and it took him a very long time to think about it and I was a bit disturbed because I was chairing chairing the session you know I wonder if he'd kind of drifted off you know and I can't on what the question was now but he closed his eyes and got very thought for a while and I think it was a question about philanthropy but we're all sitting thinking this is gonna be great and then he leant forward open his eyes and he said and I thought this is it and he 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 no but you have the definite article in your name so he said what he said he said I hadn't had not never thought about that what do you think to the room now the reason I mention it is because it illustrates something important to me only one is that here is one of the world's greatest teachers the leader of one of the world's oldest most profound wisdom traditions perfectly comes from saying I don't know and why does he know because nobody can know everything it was outside of experience it's not somebody thought about he didn't think he could find out on Google he thought I don't know and because nobody can know everything and it's perfectly fine to say you don't know it's fine as a teacher to say you don't know to your students because they may well know something that you don't and that was the second part of his point he said what do you think and what did simply illustrate is the world's great teachers are also great students learning is a conversation it's not a monologue saving what's happening right now but it's it's a conversation we learn collectively so we have systems which are based on standardized standardization rather than on on diversity but our systems are also based on the idea of division rather than on synergy no we separate the arts and the sciences we separate elementary schools from kindergarten we celebrate that we separate elementary from high schools we separate teachers from each other we separate schools in the districts but synergy is how life works it's what the whole principle of ecological development is ecosystems work by the mutual enrichment of their various parts but we have schools which are run separate so one of the effects of compliance is as Pedro was saying earlier they are to get pushed out the sciences get pushed to the front now the sciences are deeply important but they're not more important than the humanity is they're not more important than literature they're not more important than physical education they're important but because we have this divisive system of thinking about schools politically the effect is that we push things to one side and Marja nice things that matter just as much and then I get policies and saying to me all the time no we have these problems of disaffection disengagement low graduation rate how do we solve them and I'm not being facetious to say stop causing them because if you created if you stopped doing that the problem would go away and it actually does that's what happens in alternative schools it's what happened in the Harlem Children's District it's what happens when people gather together in the communities something being said this morning empower the community get parents involved work with them collaboratively push back on these restraints change the model and the problems aren't somewhat solved they evaporate they get replaced by something much richer and I want to give you a cup of quick example that before with them as Petra said that a lot of people know the work I do in part because of these TED Talks you know I gave one in 2006 the first one and it became very popular in I think in about 160 countries when I say I think I know for a fact yeah obviously and and the first one's been downloaded oh I know roughly what would it be 47 million five hundred oh it's no but it's a short talk on creativity and how kids are created that's not an earth-shattering thing to have to say the kids are naturally creative but here's the thing there is a difference between education between learning education and school and it's an important difference to dwell on learning is the natural process of acquiring new skills and understanding human beings are intensely curious we are the most curious species ever to walk the earth so far as we know we are also driven by a set of powers which so far as we can judge are unique to us in their quality and range there's one way of describing it but it's not a single power it's a multiple set of capabilities but the way I think of it is the term imagination human beings are gifted with profound powers of imagination and we marginalize it and take it for granted but if you think that imagination is the root of everything distinctively human imagination is the ability to bring into mine things that aren't present to our senses with imagination you can anticipate the future you can't predict it always not with people or living creatures you can in the physical world not so much with people with imagination you can visit the past so you can reappraise the past you can reframe the past with imagination you can step outside the present moment and see the world as other people might it's the seat of empathy but this power to bring to mind things that aren't present is deeply potent in human culture because from it flow whole set of other capacities that we call creativity I mean creativity is really putting your imagination to work it's it's materializing your ideas bringing them into being and it could be in any form whatever but creativity is a very practical process that involves using media there could be numbers that could be clay it could be steel it could be fabric this whole building began in somebody's imagination and became a collective enterprise of crafts design applied thought and the manipulation of materials and space one of the best examples I can think of of collective collaborative creativity was the moonshot remember in nineteen was it 61 when President Kennedy said by the end of the decade we're going to put a man on the moon it was a man and 1968 it happened it involved thousands of institutions hundreds of thousands of people working in dozens of disciplines around the world to make that happen but it happened through a massive effort of collaboration driven by a single vision and what interests me about it was although they were daunted by the objective they didn't try to negotiate the objective you know I mean they didn't say look mr. brezin this is great but could we move the moon a bit closer because it's like ready far you know if we could just like have it that would be great you know the objective is what it is and I think we have a similar challenge in front of us the transformation of the life chances of our children through the transformation of schools it will be a massive collaborative effort it needs a unifying single vision it needs a common set of principles it needs people working together and all their disciplines and all their capacities parents teachers whoever they happen to be but it can be done because we created the system in the first place and so we can recreate the system if we choose to do that but this power of imagination creativity is what is at the heart of human achievement in the arts and the sciences and technology in every field it's not unique to the arts it takes a particular turns of the arts but it's in every part of human life we live in a veil of conceptions that we create together as we work together to frame our understanding of the world and the drive here I think has we have to recognize first they say the children are born with these powers and they love to learn human beings are intensely creative and very curious they don't all like kids don't all like being educated and many of them have a big problem with school but the problem is school it's not the kids we don't need to fix the kids we need to fix school let me give you an example I've got two kids and like most kids by the age of two issue no they were learning to speak your children probably learnt to speak around the age of two ish their rights depends all children do and the interesting thing about this is that if you're a parent you didn't teach your child to speak did you you didn't because you couldn't they taught themselves you didn't because you couldn't because you don't know how you do it either no they didn't come a point that they when your child was 18 months old where you sat them down and say look we need to talk you know or or more specifically you do and just to pin this right down and this is how it works you know you probably noticed your files and I'm making all these noises for the past 18 months and it's rather baffling but but these noises make sense as some of them other names of things we call them nouns and there'll be about 5,000 of them you'll need to learn before you start school there are other noise that we make which aren't the names of things their names the things we do with things their verbs and if you change your tone of voice at the end particularly you can indicate whether you have done something or whether you're going to do something they'll be about $5,000 for you to learn as well and and don't worry about the subjunctive nobody gets it and I say it's fine you can fathom that later on it doesn't happen you don't teach your child to speak your channel learns to speak because she wants to and she can and they take it in through their skin through the culture they learn it socially kids love learning until they get going through school and then gradually start to lose interest and not it's not your fault as a teacher necessarily at all it's the system in which it all operates what Pedro was talking about earlier chopping the day open to bits and pieces ringing bells dividing things away making them sit down all the conditions under which you would not choose to learn yourself and didn't when you were younger either so my point is this system can with an effort of will and a concerted and collective vision can be transformed and it has to be transformed for our children's sake for our communities and for the larger existential challenge that we face collectively and when I say it can me I'm gonna show very quick video just to illustrate it but when I said a lot of people know me through the TED talks it's very nice but you know I I've spent my whole life in education I didn't just I wasn't invented at Ted you know and I was at a conference a few years ago in the Midwest and that chopped all the students and one of the faculty said to me you've been at this a long time haven't you I said what's that and he said trying to transform education I said to have yeah he said what is it seven years now I said seven years how do you mean he said you know since that TED talk I said yes but I was alive before that you know that was that was like a thing you know I just showed up and glad it went well you know but but when I did the first one I didn't know I was going to go online even you know it's gone on to be seen all these times but I mean if I'd known for example I tell a story in that talk about my son's girlfriend you know take another look at it you know but if I'd known it was gonna go viral around the planet I might not have used a real name now I'm just saying I'm still expecting this text message arrived from this woman I showed that Tokyo to my wife I said what'd you think of it she said it's all right she said I wish you'd want a different shirt I said thank you thank you all right anyway so I published this book a few years ago because of that because people said okay well that's the problem what'd you do about it so this book is an attempt to set out the principles on which the transformation can happen it's this isn't something I've invented I stand as you all do in a very long tradition we have to fight this amnesia problem there are being people they bring arguing framing out how to do school better since the time we first had schools back to the Greeks and beyond that in all parts of the world people have had there was a deep history and in the last 200 years particularly there have been concerted efforts in every part of this country to apply the proper principles of holistic education and the conditions under which children will thrive in school districts around the country there's a massive and honorable repertory of research in practice for you to draw from you are not isolated pioneers you stand in a very long tradition so I've tried in there to say a bit about but the thing about the bottom is the grassroots coalition is important somebody said this morning that the change will come from the ground up all change comes from the ground up no matter how bad it may seem temporarily with the people at the top real social change cultural change happens from the ground up it's a grassroots movement I mean for example I say I was born in 1950 and I lived through the 1960s I was a teenager 1960s I lived through the sexual revolution as you can see and I missed it as it turns out I was I didn't go out that weekend but but I read about it later on it seemed to be in a fantastic time but at the height of the sexual revolution people writhing around in the streets uncontrollably it's exhausting it doesn't last long that type of thing on this day it's a fizzles out within an era too but but what what that was going on nobody you know when feminism was in its first of all I should say its second its second big movement after the suffragettes in the 60s and 70s nobody was discussing same-sex marriage it was not on the cards it wasn't on the table it wasn't up for debate it was still a criminal act in many parts of I don't know it is still in a few what interests me is that over the past few years every state in the Union here has passed legislation to prove same-sex marriage yet look like of course that can we just get on with that and do that it's been largely uncontroversial I mean there have been pockets of controversy but most people say that's fine that's such a huge shift and it happened without anybody specifically being responsible for it I mean there are being key people keep campaigns Harvey Milk the rainbow coalition's mean lots of things Ellen has been a major influence I'm sure in changing the minds of people in Middle America maybe this is okay you know willing grace somebody talked about recently there have been things in the popular culture but these weren't designed to do that these came out of the shift in the popular culture the reason I'm saying it is this shift which most people now accept which is a big strand of the diversity argument did not happen because members of Congress went on a retreat in Aspen where they spent the weekend deciding this was an issue they had to go back and sell to their voters you know it was it was too long coming and we have to go back and tell people what the right thing is it happened because the boaters told them they wanted it to happen and you've got to remember most politicians have a very short shelf life you know they they they're there for two or three years I mean that some people last a lot longer than that political life but the shift happens from the ground up and that's my point when people say how do we change the education system don't wait for anybody to do it you are the system we're all the system where it if you're a teacher for the children your school you are the education system when you close the door if there is a door on your classroom what you do next is the education system if you're a head teacher when you stand up in front of all your teachers and kids on a Monday morning you are the system and what you do next is the system and there's a lot more room for innovation in the system than people believe there to be there are two big constraints on the education and one is the political culture which bears down on schools but the other is the habits of mind which keep the system in place within the schools most of things that we go into schools don't have to happen I mean when I say there's different learning education to school learning is natural education as a formal process of learning an organized system a school is a community of learners that's it it's a community of learners and how schools are organized is it up to the people who run them so let me just show this quick video are you moving into position to get me off the tape of what happened Petrov you said our head told seven o'clock oh let me let me explain what this is you see what Petros don't know this is the problem with the center frankly interference at the top petrol has to go you know I'm saying we need a popular leader what what you have to finish now it's too late Petra it's over this whole Petra things not working for me I don't about you I saw this anybody here speak Dutch doesn't matter not right this is something's on Dutch television this is a puzzle see if you can solve it people are invited to go into this room and solve this problem in the room there's a table on the table there's a plastic tube and at the bottom the tube there's a peanut they have to get the peanut out the tube that's it see if you do it before they do oh the table is bolted to the floor the tube is bolted to the table that's not it [Music] and to get it who got who got it all right I didn't run the first sorry but look I'll tell you most people don't get that the ape got it so there's hope yes there is a plan B that's what I'm saying but here's the thing everything those people needed to solve the problem was in the room all the resources they needed were right there the people who solved it saw the resource that was available to them and made use of it the people who didn't didn't include the resources in their framing of this of the problem or the solution I'm sure many people went in they saw this bottle of water at the back with a little bowl of fruit because it was at the back with a bowl of fruit and thought that's very nice these people I don't have time for that right now but I solved this problem the people who solved it made available made use of everything that was available to them the thing is can you imagine anybody failing to solve the problem if they'd gone in and the water bottle had been right next to the tube it just wouldn't automatically think oh that's easy straightforward with a few exceptions and that's my point well that we have all the resources we need to solve the problem we've got teachers parents kids and cultural organizations and goodwill everywhere we need to get everybody involved in restoring the culture of our schools human resources yours your kids the parents human resources are just like theirs natural resources they're very diverse they're often hidden you have to go digging for them children's talents anymore no towns don't immediately show themselves and that says the opportunity why you need a broad curriculum and when you've discovered them you have to refine them and do something with them to find out their real value and purpose and what this leads to for me is to say that the analogy with education and industrialism is not so much with manufacturing the real analogy is with industrial agriculture because industrial agriculture grew up at the same time as industrial you're factoring in the 18th and 19th centuries the analogy is perfect because they're dealing with living systems industrial agriculture revolutionized the way we produced living things plants and how we raised animals industrial agriculture was based on three innovations the first them was mechanization which made it possible to till huge areas of land simultaneously let me just show quick images I'm gonna the stuff I'm not gonna show you here don't worry about this forget that Reddy doesn't matter don't even worry about it it was we don't want you this is an image to me of industrial agriculture now it's a harsh image but all across the world this is what we've been doing with the land this planet is covered by a very thin smear of soil and we depend upon it and I say it's taken billions of years to get to where it is the earth until we got to grips with industrial agriculture was a scene of massive natural diversity in the past 300 years we have come collectively as a species there are now seven half billion of us on the planet and we're heading benign billion by the end of it that's almost 10% of all human beings who've ever lived on the earth right now the biggest generation by far in the whole of human history we have come through these processes to depend on about 11 plant species to sustain the population of the planet you know corn maize you can name them potatoes rice but there are literally tens probably hundreds thousands of other species that we've discarded pushed to one side in the mania to depend upon these sorts of crops along the way we have brought ourselves to the brink of what's called the sixths extinction we've also come to depend not just on eleven forms of plant but on about five animals I don't mean five individual animals mean that'd be that'd be a big pressure on them wouldn't it five species of animal largely among the countless thousands of species of animals that were on the planet living their lives comfortably until we dr. Griffith all this when now say on the edge of the sixth great extinction caused so as we can tell by human activity in the preoccupation with this sort of way of living in the past ten years we have lost something like 75 percent of the biomass of flying insects around the world on which we depend for the propagation of plants on our own survival and no amount of apps on the iPhone will solve them this is a catastrophe in the natural world that were for menteng but it's based on this form of industrial agriculture which as you can see is intensely unnatural it's based on mechanization which meant you could grow mono crops as far as the eye could see the second innovation was chemical fertilizer because the emphasis in industrial agriculture is on yield and output more vigor and chemical fertilizers for things to grow more quickly we're doing exactly the same thing with animals by the way this is not unfamiliar feature and how we're dealing with animals currently were housing them as if they were inanimate objects and the third innovation has been chemical pesticides because natural ecosystems protect themselves they have their own forms of immunity and they protect each other if you separate them out and put them in great open fields and destroy the ecosystem then their prey to all kinds of blanks and problems which is Rachel Carson's Silent Spring now the thing is I know it's it's a complex area this but industrial agriculture has been focused on yield and it's been very successful but in terms of yield but it's destroying ecosystems it's polluting waterways and rivers and oceans and it's eroding swords which being washed away prodigious rates all around the planet this is stuff we depend upon and the reason is that industrial agriculture has been focused on the plant and on size and yield organic agriculture is based on a different principle organic agriculture is based on natural processes of growth and development and organic sustainable farmers which is what chef Alice was talked about earlier know something different if you want to really increase output in the healthy environment and for it to be sustainable not short-term not to bankrupt the the the planet you don't focus on the plant you focus on the soil if you get the soil right you can grow things in perpetuity if you follow natural cycles of growth and developed and composting the soil will be rich and it will sustain us as far as we know in perpetuity that's the whole movement or sustainable and organic agriculture well so this is how people tend to think of the core purpose of organic aggregate the soil right we depend upon that and the plant will take care of itself create good conditions and things will grow we've done the same thing I think with education we have been focused the past 20-30 years on output and yield graduation rates league tables competition and along the way we've neglected the conditions under which people naturally learn and want to learn and along the way we've eroded the culture of Education the diversity of that culture the values under which people flourish best that culture depends on diversity of learning we need the Arts we need the sciences we need physical education we need people to get up and run around but they need to play there children are growing physically emotionally spiritually as well as cognitively we have to attend them holistically there's an ecosystem of learners and teachers and students and parents and cultural groups if we get that mix right it happens every time if we get the rich culture in the school where it should be growth and learning happens automatically achievement levels go up they always do they tend to decline when we forget the culture of the school and make it barren and sterile I think it's an absolutely existential challenge for us just now where our seven half billion people heading for nine billion the vice-chancellor said this morning quoting HG Wells education is a race between civilization and catastrophe it is I'm optimistic we can do this but I think we should never underestimate the importance and power of Education in restoring these conditions to our communities and to our children it's probably never been more important than it is now and if sometimes you feel marginalized in education don't forget that you're doing the most important work anybody could do creating the conditions for the growth and well-being and safety of our children now when you look at a plank robe it does seem miraculous that something from a small seed will grow into this luxurious being education is like that there being lots of examples during the day if you create conditions for growth people who are no otherwise written off flower flourish and become themselves they need entirely different lives which are more purposeful for them and more fulfilling for the people they're associated with but you know just like in the natural world if you say it's a miracle it sounds like it's a one-off and it's unusual but in the natural world miracle is a commonplace and it's true in schools if you get the conditions right miracles happen every day and they do they're happening here in this city and our job is to make more of them we need more Meryl hooding as many as we can because if you're in education you're in the miracle business and it's the only business really I think that we should be in thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: Center for the Transformation of Schools

Views: 169,757

Rating: 4.8635225 out of 5

Keywords: education, conference, public education, ken robinson, ucla

Id: ZT3QpUfEg1Q

Length: 64min 52sec (3892 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2018