"The Ideal Education" - Sir Ken Robinson with Sadhguru

Sir Ken Robinson: We are creatures that grow from small beginnings, and what we grow into depends on several factors. One is the conditions that surround us, and one is the extent to which we engage with the life within us. For the past probably twenty years more, education has become a strategic issue around the world. You know, when I was a student, nobody was very interested in what was happening in other countries in education. I mean, I was growing up in England, we didn’t really care what was happening in Finland. People in America weren’t that bothered about what was happening in Spain. But now, governments are, education has become a strategic issue. And it's become a strategic issue because of the nature and pace of globalization, and education has become seen as a process to encourage competition and economic success between countries, and it's led to the most corrupt and sterile form of education you can imagine it for our children. Our children are suffering now from high levels of stress than ever before. More and more kids are not graduating from high school. I hate the expression… Is hate a strong word (Laughter)? I hate the expression ‘dropout.’ Sir Ken Robinson: In America currently, something like thirty percent of kids, who start the ninth grade, don’t complete the twelfth grade, and the… every single child has a reason for that. I mean, there are trends but what’s interesting is not the statistics, it's the reasons individuals have. But you know, if you’re running any kind of enterprise and you lost thirty percent of your clients every year, you might wonder whether it was the stupid clients, or your enterprise. And to call these kids dropouts makes it sound like they failed the system. And it's much more accurate to say the system has failed them because I don’t know any kid, who doesn’t want to learn. You know, children are born with immense possibilities I mean, infinite possibilities and they have a massive appetite to learn. I mean, I think what happens in the first eighteen months of life, children learn to speak. Little babies, in the first eight months, learn to speak and nobody teaches them. You don’t. If you’re a parent, you didn’t teach your child to speak. It's far too complicated. You know, you wouldn’t have the time and they wouldn’t have the patience. You know, it's not like you sit your child down at the age of eighteen months and say, “Look, we need to talk” (Laughter), you know, or… or more specifically, you do (Laughter) and this is how it's going to work. You know, you probably notice your mother have been making all these noises the past eighteen months. Some of these are names of things, we call them nouns. There are other noises we make, they’re not names of things, they’re names of things we do with things, we call them verbs. If you change the noise, you can say what you will do and what you have done. And don’t worry about the subjunctive, nobody gets it, you know (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: It doesn’t work like that. You know, kids absorb language through their skin. You nudge them, you correct them, you even… you know, you… they mimic you, but you don’t speak, you don’t teach them. And by the way, if they grow up in a… in a home, where there are six languages spoken, they’ll just learn all of those. Kids love to learn. The problem they have is with education, which is the time when we saw to decide systematically to teach them things. And many of the rhythms of education are obstructive to the natural rhythms of learning. So my premise is that children are born with immense natural capacities, they have a tremendous appetite to learn and education has become the problem. When you say, “What is the aim of education?” and I put it this way, that… and I’d love to know what Sadhguru has to say about this, coming from a different cultural perspective, but my take on this is this that all… all of us are born into two worlds. You know, that there’s a world that existed before you came into it. It was there before you were, it's the world of historical circumstances, it's the world that existed whether or not you exist, that would be there when you’ve gone, according to where your metaphysics take you. Sir Ken Robinson: But there’s another world that exists only because you exist. It's the world that came into being when you did. It's the world of your private consciousness, the world of your ‘self,’ the world of… of which it was once said, there’s only one set of footprints. But the world of your own anxieties, hopes and aspirations and talents and fears and ambitions and so on. Education is filled with the outer world, and most of the problems that children experience are to do with their inner world. So as I see it, the role of education is to help children understand the world around them – that’s clearly essential – and also the world within them, so that they can become you know, compassionate, fulfilled and engaged individuals. And for me, the great deficit in education at the moment is the extent to which we fail to engage the child’s inner world and recognize how much they could become, if we invested enough of our time, effort and own conscious understanding, if they… what their possibilities are. Speaker: Sadhguru, socially your work has been about helping people blossom to their fullest potential, to live a full-fledged life. I remember visiting your amazing Isha School, which reflects many of the values that Sir Ken has described. And I wonder if you could tell us in your view what makes for a perfect school and how them does Isha or any of your schools address the natural longing in a human being to know? Sadhguru: I’m glad that there’s no perfect school anywhere because this aspiration for perfection is very death-oriented. It's something that most people have missed. The nature of life is it’s never perfect. Only death is perfect. Never has death happened imperfect… imperfectly. Never has life happened perfectly. If school is about life, then there is no perfect school. Having said that, as someone said – not him (Referring to Sir Ken Robinson), somebody from… from England… Sir Ken Robinson: Somebody over here (Laughter)? Sadhguru: No (Laughter). I’m… I’m seeing… I’m seeing him as a representation of England (Laughter). Someone said that education is a necessary evil. It is a necessary evil because there is a resident evil in the cou… in the world. We have very convoluted aspirations, in the sense – largely, most part of the education is trying to manufacture cogs for the larger machine that we have built. Our children are the fuel, unfortunately. We have to put them into some slot, where they’ll function well. And when we say the world, world is no more about people. The world is about the economic engine that we are driving. It's become bigger than us. We have to keep the engine going. We are scared to stop it for a moment. We have to keep going. Now, the problem is this, that we have created a world – if our economies fail, we will be depressed, if our economies succeed, we’ll be damned for good. I feel it’s better you’re depressed (Laughs). Sadhguru: Now, talking about a school as a way of manufacturing cogs for the machine – there are many ways to do it, every nation has its own system. If I have to shape you into a particular shape, that you must fit into a particular machine, it's a cruel process. But now, we can't let the machine fail, it needs spare parts, constantly it has to absorb. And humanity is the spare parts. So our children are the fuel and the machine parts, which go into this to run the larger machine. That’s one aspect. So this is why I’ve addressed education in three different dimensions, which people around me are still trying to grasp, why these three different things (Laughs). There is one form of education, which is called Isha Vidhya. I think they might have showed something about that. This is for the rural masses in India, where the problem is they are in a economic and social pit, which they cannot get out by themselves. The only ladder for them is education employment generating education (Laughs). But there are reasonably well-to-do people, where they might have gone through that in the previous generation, but this generation need not think about “how to earn my living.” They have to look at how to expand who they are. So we have Isha Home School, which caters to that. Bis… Because this kind of education costs money, so only people who can afford it can do that. Costs money means not like how it costs here. By Indian standards, it costs money (Laughs). And there’s another form of education, where people are not interested in serving this machine or that machine. They want individuals to blossom. So we have Isha Samskriti, where there is no academic education of any kind. They only learn music, dance, art, Sanskrit language, kalari, which is a very… the mother of all martial arts, and classical dance, classical music, yoga, English language as a passport to the world. So these children are a treat to watch. This is how children should have been. Just to give you a glimpse of what it is – at the age of fifteen, for three years they go into monastic life. Compulsorily they must go and compulsorily they must come out at eighteen. They cannot continue. They’ll take monastic life for three years. But after three years, they cannot continue. They have to discontinue that and get back to normal life. This is for discipline and focus. But you can't make the entire world like that. This is an ideal (Laughs) to work towards. The idea of this kind of schooling is just to develop human body and human brain without any intention without any intention as to what they should become. They can become whatever they want. Only thing is human body and human mind should grow to its fullest capability. And attention is the main thing. An indiscriminate and unprejudiced attention is what we’re trying to evolve in the children, that they learn to pay attention to everything the same way, that you don’t divide the world, as something as good and something as bad, something high, something low, something divine, something devil, something filthy, something sacred. No. You learn to pay the same attention to everything. Sadhguru: This is the fundamental of this form of education. “What will they do? What will they do?” is the aspiration. So I guaranteed them one thing – twelve years… If you enter the school the commitment is for twelve years. You have to… Six if you come, eighteen if you… you can leave. So they asked me, “What will the children do?” I said, “One thing I’ll assure you, we will not give you a certificate in the end” (Few laugh). They said, “Sadhguru, what?” I said, “Did anybody ask me, what is my certification?” Only in the American embassy, they asked me (Laughter). So, I said no certification because doors in the world may open little slowly for you, but when they open they stay open, because… not because of qualification but by competence, you open doors. It is just that everybody is in a mad race. Your children should do better than your neighbor’s children – this is a disease (Laughs). Sir Ken Robinson: I agree. I didn’t know you’re unqualified, by the way, I am sorry (Laughter). Sadhguru: That’s the… Sir Ken Robinson: I… I actually have to go. Sadhguru: That is the only qualification I have and that is the only striving in my life, how to remain uneducated (Laughter)… because this is the biggest problem. Why education has become a problem in the world is, people become who they are in the world because of what they have gathered. This is a very unfortunate situation. Right now, whether it is material things or knowledge, whatever information they have gathered, it makes them who they are. No, who you are and what you have gathered are two different things. This is the distinction we are trying to bring into child’s life in our schools. Whatever you may gather, it doesn’t matter. What you gather is just information and things. Information is a thing by itself. It should not determine who you are. Who you are is determined by a different process, what you gather by a different process. So, when I keep repeating to everybody… some…. lot of these people feel ashamed, my guru is uneducated, they try to say, “No, he only says that, he is really educated” (Laughter). What I’m saying is (Laughs), whatever I have gathered does not determine who I am, because the biggest problem in the world is this. From the day you are born, all kinds of people are trying to teach you something that’s not worked in their life (Few laugh). Sir Ken Robinson: I think if I can say one of the… the major problems – (Coughs) excuse me… I agree with all of that – is that we didn’t have systems of mass education, as we know them now, pretty much until the middle of the nineteenth century. You know, they were invented, made up. Sadhguru: Part of industrialization. Sir Ken Robinson: Yes, it was part of the Industrial Revolution and it was associated with the big move from the countryside into the cities to provide a workforce for the industrial economy. It's very straightforward from that point of view. It was a massive piece of social engineering. It's why the system is shaped the way it was. We needed a majority people to do blue collar work, which is why we had a broad base of elementary education, and a relatively small group of people to do clerical administrative work in suits, which is why we had a small university sector, and the system is created that way in Britain. You know, when I was in school, at the age of eleven, while we all took an exam – ____ (Unclear) would remember, it's called eleven plus – and it determined at the age of eleven, which type of school you went to, which sort of high school, the grammar school or a secondary modern school. It was really an IQ test, but people thought it was a blood test (Few laugh), you know, that told them how smart they were. And actually, it was just a capacity to do that type of test. And like a driving test, you could get better at it and I mean, a lot of people were trained to do it and they got through it. Sir Ken Robinson: But the consequence of it is that we created this kind of system, where there were small group of winners and they did very well by it, but the vast majority didn’t. And part of the problem, as I see it, is that the system of education is burdened with certain ideological assumptions. One of them is a whole set of ideas like intelligence. So, the whole ideal of Western education is to get people to university, and therefore – and that’s because the university is abrogated the system to the wrong purposes – and therefore we have in the system this deep… deeply mistaken assumption that the… that intelligence is the same thing as academic ability, And academic ability is very important, but it's a very specific capacity, the capacity to certain types of deductive reasoning, certain types of critical discourse. But the upshot is that if you’re not very good at that, you’re thought not to be very smart, because the… the truth is if you create a very narrow conception of ability, you create a very big conception of disability and inability. Sir Ken Robinson: I… I just… I thought as we’re doing personal stories for a second. I’m from Liverpool in England and I’d like to mention one thing. I went to school across the city center, from the Liverpool Institute, which is where Paul McCartney was at school. I didn’t know him then, I’m sure some of you people do know him quite well, but I… His… I wrote a book a few years ago called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. And I interviewed lots of people for… for the book, one of whom was Paul McCartney. And I tell you this because I think it’s very important you don’t leave here today unaware of the fact that I hang out (Laughter) with… with Paul McCartney (Laughter). Anyway, Paul, as I call him (Laughter), was…was… I asked him… I interviewed him for the book and I said, “Did you enjoy music at school?” And he said no, he hated it. I said, “Did your music teacher think you had any talent?” He said, “No, not really.” He does, doesn’t he? And then one of the other people in the same music program in the same school was George Harrison, you know, the lead guitarist of the popular music group, The Beatles (Laughter). And… And I said, “Did any… Did your music teacher think you… George had any talent?” He said, “No, not really” (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: I said, “Well, look, would this be a reasonable comment, that there was just one music teacher in Liverpool in the late 1950s, who had half the Beatles in his class (Laughter) and he missed it?” He said, “Yes. Well, it’s a bit of an oversight, isn’t it” (Laughter)? So (Laughs), “Anybody stand out in your class this year, Mr. Wilcox?” “Not really (Laughter). Nobody leaps forward frankly” (Laughs). What I mean is, if you create this narrow view of ability, then you automatic… to do all this stuff. In… in… Sadhguru may remember this – but in the fifties, there was a big polio epidemic, you know, that ran right through America and Europe and… and I got it, you know, I was one of the f… the… I’m one of the seven kids. I was the only one in the family to get it and the only one in the street to get it, you know, despite my vigorous attempts to cross-infect the entire neighborhood, you know (Laughter). I thought, “Well, you’re… you’re coming down with me” (Laughter). But anyway, I was in hospital and I… I end up going to… into Special Ed for… from five till eleven and that’s what they used to do. So… So I was in school, which had lots of kids of polio, lots of kids with cerebral palsy, partially sighted, blind, deaf kids. Sir Ken Robinson: I would sit next to one kid in school, who had a really bad case of cerebral palsy. And it's a terrible thing to deal with, you know, because if… you know, if you don’t have it, you can just… to move your arms right, you just have to relax muscles, contract them, you don’t think about it. But if you’ve got cerebral palsy or are affected by it, you’re fighting your body all the time, so you’re doing this type of stuff (Gestures) and… And if you try to speak and it's affected your face, it… it's… you sound as if you’re talking nonsense. And of course you may talk… be talking absolute sense, it's just you can't get the sounds out. Anyway, so the guy sitting next to me in one… my final year at the school couldn’t grip the pencil in his fingers. But he could grip it in his toes and he had beautiful writing, better than mine actually. Was his handwriting (Laughter)? We don’t know. We don’t know (Laughs). But… But the point is we are surrounded by people like this. I… I was saying, in my classroom at school was like the bar room scene from Star Wars. You know, there were kind of (Few laugh) people in varies degrees of dec… decrepitude, you know, being brought in. But nobody was interested in what people’s disabilities seemed to be. What we were interested in is what they were good at, and if they were smart or interesting or what. And the fact is that many of the things that they had difficulty with weren’t what really defined them. Sir Ken Robinson: But because there’s this narrow view of ability, if you have trouble writing or speaking, it's assumed that you have some associated mental incapacity, which is why you get this big conception of disability surrounding it. But if you reframe the conception of ability, suddenly you discover all these talents and possibilities that are inherent all the time. I mentioned it because it's a dramatic example, what Special Ed is to me, of what happens all the time in general education. All kinds of kids are told they’ve got problems, who don’t have them. They’re created by the system. And it's the problem with the system that we need to… to address, that if you re-frame the ability, all of these difficulties people seem to be suffering from suddenly disappear. If you find the things they’re good at, if you do as Sadhguru is suggesting, if you create an environment, which is holistic, which is addressing your spiritual development, your physical development, which recognize that human life is not linear, it's organic and it will take many different courses – then you have a completely different set of conditions, under which people will flourish. And it’s the fact that this… the conditions themselves, which are industrial in character, create problems for kids, which they then begin to rail against. Sir Ken Robinson: So we now have a system based on competition, narrow view of ability, and one in which people being medicated to stay with the program, they’re being pathologized for losing interest in what is essentially very boring stuff. We sit them down all day long and wonder why they fidget. And there are different ways of doing it – better ways, I mean. For me, it's… it’s as plain as day, really. You know, education is not one of those things like an incurable disease and we can't figure out what to do. We know what to do in education. It's about taking this thing to scale. But taking it to scale doesn’t mean replicating it because as you say, there’s no perfect school. Actually, there are no two… two… two schools alike, that… like there are no two individuals alike. But there are principles you can apply everywhere, and getting those principles in place to me is the big challenge now. Sadhguru: As we are looking for an evolution of a human being through the education system, the education system should be always an evolving process by itself. When we think in terms of a perfect school, we are thinking of again fixing it somewhere. That’s what needs to change. As one can develop – because Ken mentioned this IQ test, I’m saying – as one can develop muscle by doing certain things with the body, one can develop intelligence. The fundamental aspect of developing intelligence is… Right now, there are some studies – I know… I don’t know, you must tell me, I’m not an expert on these things – which say, if a child goes through twenty years of formal education and comes out with a Ph.D., they say seventy percent of intelligence is irrevocably destroyed. Because we had…. Sir Ken Robinson: Sorry, I have a Ph.D., I don’t know if you’re suggesting (Laughter)… Sadhguru: (Laughs) I’ll leave that to you, Ken (Laughter). So essentially, what's being said by these studies is we are mistaking information for education. By deadening the brain with too much information, definitely the possibility of intelligence is lost. This is why I said, what we accumulate and who we are should remain separate. Who I am should not be influenced by what I have accumulated. Whether they are material things, or information, or impressions, this is of the world. I would like to little differ in what was said in terms of child’s inner world and external world. What we are mistaking to be inner world is still external, in my perception, because a child’s fears, ambitions, aspirations are all external – inspired or infected, I would say, by the outside situation. It is not natural aspiration of life. Natural aspiration of life, if you look at it… If you leave someone uninfluenced from outside, the natural aspiration is always to expand, not to become less. But if you look at today’s form of education, because it's purely intellect-based education, there is no other dimension of intelligence in it… And I think in this part of the world, there is a serious mistake that intellect has been mistaken for intelligence Sadhguru: Intellect… Your intellect can function only with the backing of your memory. Or in other words, your intellect functions with accumulated information. If I take away all your memory, your intellect is quite useless by itself. But there are other dimensions of intelligence within you, which does not need the support of memory. If education systems do not focus on activating these dimensions of intelligence, you will find factory workers, you will not find a genius in every home. What you need is an innovative intelligence. Today, when I say… when I use the word innovation, you think developing a new i8 phone. I’m not talking about that. Maybe we can develop a world without a phone (Laughs). We don’t know what's an innovation. Innovation need not necessarily mean improvement of what we have, little by little, little by little. Yes, that is also needed, but that is not what life is looking for. People are not any better with phone, without phone. Maybe we are doing more things, but equally confused, equally struggling as it was before. Sadhguru: So the point is not about what we have gathered. What we have gathered is useful in creating comfort and convenience for the world. What we have gathered is not useful for creating well-being for ourselves and for the world. If well-being has to happen, we have to access dimensions of intelligence, which are not intellectual, because intellect cannot function without accumulated information. If you function always out of accumulated information, you naturally get identified with it. So depending upon what you have accumulated, you become that kind. Because you have become that kind, another kind and your kind always goes into conflict. If the purpose of education is to expand horizons of individual human beings, you can see that’s definitely not happening. The more educated somebody becomes… As people get educated, they really can't get along with anybody (Laughter). They… Not-so-educated people can live together. Hundred people can live together. Once you become educated, you become isolated because this is the nature of the intellect. Because you’re employing only one wheel out of four wheels of your car, it is like that. Sadhguru: It's like suppose you’re driving on the street and you are some kind of an expert. You drive on just two wheels. What must you do? You got a car for that (Laughter). You’re driving just on two wheels. Maybe you’re good at it, but nobody else on the street want to drive with you. They will all stop. If you’re driving on four wheels, everybody will drive with you. So the other dimensions of intelligence have to come, otherwise the moment you get intellectual, unknowingly you sin… in some way you exclude the world. So in a way, the way of our education has been to butcher the existence into tiny fragments and we’re trying to fix the fragments. It's not going to work like that. If education has to become holistic…. There are systemic problems, I’m not saying no. But more than the systems, the people who deliver the system, if we can upgrade them in a huge way, every system can be made to work good. I’ve seen in India, the most rudimentary system is the state education. I’ve been there to these schools before we went into starting our own rural schools. I was… just wanted to see what’s right or wrong with these guys. I found some schools are like… as good as pigsty in terms of what they’re producing. Some schools – same stuff, but they’re doing wonderful work. So it's the people, who deliver that. Whatever the system, if you upgrade the people who deliver these, if the best people… See, if we’re interested in the future generations of our humanity, the best people in the world must go into teaching. But right now, the lowest grade of people are going because everything is determined by economics. How much are you paid, that’s how you go. So this is where, what I’m saying earlier is important. What you accumulate shid… should not determine who you are. As long as that is so, the economic values will rule. As long economic values rule, it's the muscle which rules, not the intelligence. Speaker: Sir Ken, we tend to measure what we value – you were talking about standardized tests – because so much of teaching and learning is about relationships that imply intimacy and caring and witnessing and seeing one another. The teacher… I know you have a story about the teacher and the doctor, who noticed that the little girl, who was fidgeting, was actually a dancer. Sir Ken Robinson: Yeah. Speaker: So how do we… Is it about training the teachers, or is it supporting the teachers in a different way? How do we create inspiring teachers, or give them the room to help foster all the different types of intelligence that you both have been speaking about? Sir Ken Robinson: Well you know there are, excuse me, there are several strands to education obviously, one of them is the curriculum – I’m talking about organized education I mean the people learn on their own and… and can learn informally but if we talk about organized education as in the schools that Sadhguru is describing, or the schools you’ve been involved in, so is the curriculum which is what we want people to learn. So a big part of this argument is we need a different sort of curriculum. At the moment, in America for example we have a very narrow curriculum that’s based primarily on a fairly impoverished view of science, technology and math. I say “impoverished” because math can be a fantastically invigorating and interesting discipline. Years ago I… I asked a professor of pure mathematics with the university I worked at, “How you would assess a Ph.D. in pure mathematics,” his intelligence had gone at this point obviously (Laughter)… Sadhguru: Only seventy percent (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: Only seventy percent (Laughter) but the… but the small shard of it that was left I said… I said to him, “How would you assess a Ph.D. in pure math?” Actually first I said to him, “How long is a Ph.D. in pure math” because I’d never seen one and he said, “He’d seen one recently that was twenty pages long,” you know like twenty pages of math, you know page after page, page… of math with ‘equals’ at the end and… and I imagine, I’ve never seen one. So I said, “Well, how would you judge one?” I mean presumed it’s right. You know you’d be annoyed, wouldn’t you, spent fi… five years doing a Ph.D. in pure math, comes back wrong. See me (Laughter). He said, “No, they’re normally right.” I said, “Well, how would you judge one?” And he said, “There are two criteria as originality, in other words it’s how creative it is.” I’d like to talk more about creativity in a bit – but whether it breaks new ground. But the second I loved, he said, “It’s aesthetic.” I said, “Why does that matter?” He said, “Because mathematicians believe that mathematics is the purest way we have of describing some of the truths of nature and since nature is inherently beautiful, the more elegant the proof the more likely it is to be true.” You could be talking about a sonata or a dance or a poem and of course mathematicians do feel that way. To a mathematician, mathematics is a beautiful abstract language like poetry, and the problem people have is that they don’t speak math. You know, if you don’t read music, if you look at a page of notation what you see is a visual puzzle, if you read music you don’t see a puzzle, you hear a symphony and it’s the same with mathematicians that mathematicians who speak math see a symphony, they don’t see a puzzle. And… So a lot of the problems in mathematics is a… it’s… it’s a literacy problem, we have phrase book math. You know, it’s like trying to court somebody with phrase book French, it’s just not a very good idea, take my word for that, it doesn’t work out (laughs) Sir Ken Robinson: So… So part of it is that we have a limited conception of these disciplines, a fairly impoverished view and what I’m arguing for and it’s implicit I think in what I understand from… what I’ve read about Sadhguru’s schools and what he’s been telling us is you need a broad curriculum that recognizes that education has a whole range of functions and that we have to address physical development, spiritual development, our emotional development and all of that is tied up with a bigger view of consciousness, and therefore you need a school curriculum which has the arts, the humanities, the sciences, technology not incidentally, not in a hierarchy but equally and coequally important. It’s important for every reason and also for some kids that’s where their… their real life is going to lie, that’s where they will discover themselves most fully. Sir Ken Robinson: The second part of education is pedagogy which is how we aim to teach people these things and I think you’re right, I mean, pedagogy, teaching is the most important part of it. I mean the reason Sadhguru is having the effect he’s having on the world is because he’s such a brilliant teacher. Teaching is what this is about, and teaching is not something that can be reduced to direct instruction. Teaching is not about telling people what to think, it’s facilitating knowing. It’s creating conditions where people will come to understand for themselves by probing them, questioning them, raising their curiosity, probing them so they might go in a different direction, giving them some tools, some techniques. And to reduce it to a process of developing… of delivering information to people, I really don’t like this language that’s got into education of “delivering the curriculum”. It’s like education is some branch of Fedex you know (Laughter) it’s… it’s not. Great teachers know that instruction may be part of it but the larger part of it is enabling, facilitating, peaking people’s curiosity, engaging them and… and inspiring their imaginations and seeing the possibility in something. It’s a very sophisticated process and one of the reasons that our education systems stumble is precisely because we’ve demeaned the profession of teaching, we haven’t respected it in the way that we should, we don’t compensate people in the way they need to be in order to concentrate on the job and do it properly and you know… and the best teachers aren’t necessarily the ones with the most degrees; on the contrary I mean I know all kinds of very smart people with degrees who can’t teach at all, and it’s the big mistake that we’ve made. Sir Ken Robinson: And the third bit of education is assessment. Well, assessment is important, I can’t think of any education process doesn’t benefit by people making assessments of it. But assessment is not testing, assessment is about making judgments of what’s going on and whether it’s worthwhile or it isn’t, and how people are progressing. All great teachers do that, they’re sensing whether this is happening or not, you know. And you don’t have to give people numbers for that. And what’s happened I think in America is that we’ve ended up with a very narrow curriculum which has been compressed because there was a piece of legislation passed here was it twenty years now? Almost. Called “No Child Left Behind” which is one of the great pieces of modern irony (Laughter), and what happened was that the… the government decided that America was falling behind in the international race in education and we have to… we were going to have to compete and the children were the foot soldiers in doing this and… and the way standards were to be raised was through standardized testing. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse standardization with raising standards, I think. But then what happened was they released this opportunity to the publishing companies – I…I looked at this recently so on the one hand you’ve got conformity is one of the big principles of the current system, well if you want conformity then you need compliance and that’s what the standardized testing movement is about and this is a business, that’s the point, it’s a business and it’s… it’s really stifling our children at the moment. In 2013 we looked at some of the figures the national football league in America which is not of course is not “football” (Laughter) as we know… Sadhguru: I’m a soccer fan (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: Exactly. Exactly. We have to call it soccer because they appropriated the word football, it’s not right. Sadhguru: Don’t tell me you are from Leicester. Sir Ken Robinson: What? Sadhguru: You’re not from Leicester? Sir Ken Robinson: I’m from Liverpool. Sadhguru: Okay. Sir Ken Robinson: It’s near enough but you know, it’s rugby, isn’t it, in Armour (Laughter)? So, but the NFL (Referring to the American National Football League) was a nine billion dollar business in 2013. The U.S. domestic cinema box office in 2013 was an eleven billion dollar business. In the same year, the education testing and support industry in America was a sixteen billion dollar business It’s massive, isn’t it? So it’s a business and… and that’s what’s squeezing the life out of our kids. What… what… The reason I’m saying this is that governments have taken the view that the way you raise standards is by focusing on the curriculum and on testing, and the opposite is true. The only way you improve education is by focusing on teaching because in the end, it’s children who are trying to learn, it’s students, you’re trying to get students to expand and to learn, and that’s an expert personal job. As soon as we lose sight to the fact that this is a very personal process of cultivating interest and curiosity and talent and ability and all of those things and an awareness of the world around you, that if we lose sight of that and the role of teaching then we end up in the mess that we’re in. But the good news is we… this can be changed. It is being changed. But I just want to say too that a lot of what you (Referring to Sadhguru) talk about I absolutely totally agree with, I mean I agree with most of it, I’m not saying there’s some bit of it I just think is nonsense but (Laughter) because I haven’t heard all of it (Laughter). But this couldn’t be more important. Sadhguru: With a Ph.D. I expect that (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: Exactly. Exactly. I can’t grasp all of it (Laughter). But it couldn’t be more urgent you see. One of the figures you quote and I… I… I do too is that… we currently face on Earth challenges which are without precedent in the history of humanity. On the one hand you have exponential growth in technology and its impact on culture, on economy, on the way the people live. It’s revealed all kinds of possibilities, many of them are miraculously good, as you said there are things we are capable of now we couldn’t even contemplate fifty years ago. Big problem is that our spiritual development seems to be lagging a long way behind our technological capacities. Secondly, the population now is accelerating at a point where… where we’re already the largest generation in the history of humanity. For most of human history there’s nobody around really. It took the whole of history to get to a billion people in the 1800. In 1930 it was two billion, in 1970 it was three billion. Between 1970 and 2000 the population of the Earth doubled from three to six billion. Right after the “Summer of Love” as it turns out (Laughter), you can’t tell me it’s a coincidence. But now, 7.4 billion heading for nine billion by the middle of the century. And we don’t know if the Earth can handle it. Actually, now we know it can’t. There was a really good program on the BCC (Referring to British Broadcasting Corporation) a few years ago about how many people can live on Earth – it was called “How Many People Can Live On Earth” (Laughter) and it was… it was presented by David Attenborough. They’re very good at titles at the BBC (Laughter). But they concluded this, that if everybody - because we all need… you’ve made the same point Sadhguru that we all need food, fuel and water to survive and air to breathe and if everybody on the Earth, they concluded, consumed food, fuel and water at the same rate, all seven-and-a-half billion people, at the same rate as the average person in India, the Earth could sustain a maximum population of fifteen billion people. Sir Ken Robinson: So we’re half way there, we’re seven-and-a-half billion people but of course we don’t all consume as they do in India. They said if everybody on the Earth consumed at the same rate as the average person in North America, the Earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.5 billion and we’re five times past that. That’s on current methods of production and consumption. So we are heading to an abyss here and if we don’t change course by the middle of the century we’re going to need four more planets to make this work. Now the interesting to me is, as I know it is to you, these problems aren’t being caused by the rest of life on Earth, they’re being caused by human beings and it’s a problem of consciousness and of creativity. We’ve created these problems so we either have to… Sadhguru: By reproduction lot of people are thinking they’re being creative. Sir Ken Robinson: What’s that? Sadhguru: By reproduction, lot of people are thinking they’re creative. Sir Ken Robinson: Yes, yes, that’s right (Laughter). Well, that’s right (Laughter). You know, people taught us, saving the planet. And I think the general conclusion has to be you know, the planet’s going to be fine. You know, the planet’s been around for nearly five billion years, it’ll shake us off like a rash, you know (Laughter). We… We…We tried humanity (Sadhguru laughs), not so good, you know. We’re going to stick with bacteria, they’re fantastic (Laughter). But it’s a serious thing. There was a very good observation by H.G. Wells, you know, the science fiction writer who said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. And there’s some truth in that – education, in the sense of you know, developing our capacities, our awareness, and our understanding of ourselves and of each other and of the world around us. If we don’t find… If we don’t take seriously these principles, then we’re condemning our children to a very, very bleak future. And the idea that all this can be solved through fuelling the profits that are testing companies, is hard to comprehend, that anybody takes it seriously. It’s a… It’s a case of terminal myopia. And so, to me, it’s an… it’s an issue at every level – it’s personal, it’s about our children, it’s about ourselves, it’s about our communities, but it’s about the larger enterprise that humanity is part of. And it really couldn’t be more important. And the principles that I know you embody in the schools are exactly the right ones. It seems to me that that’s what this is about. But there isn’t a single way to do it. As you said, there’s no one perfect school, there’s no one particular way to do it, circumstances vary. But there are some principles – it’s about conditions, it’s about having a holistic view of humanity, of how chil… children’s growth and potential, recognize the power of teaching, and recognize that you need to get these balances right and that we can do it. But it couldn’t be more important that we get on and do it. Sadhguru: A lot of it has been articulated by Ken, but what I would like to say is, in terms of my experience of school, I… I went to school only when it was absolutely necessary (Both laugh). I had very innovative ways of staying away from school, because right from my childhood, one thing that somehow got stuck in my head was – if someone is saying something, which means something to them, however simplistic or stupid it is, I’m willing to pay full attention. But if someone is saying something, which doesn’t mean a damn thing to him or her, but it’s some big stuff, I am not interested in that. Because if you’re not interested in that, why I should I listen to something that you are not interested in (Laughs)? So essentially, this instruction business comes from this. When you think you need to instruct somebody, you have assumed that those whom you instruct are of a lower intelligence than yourself, which is a serious mistake. There is sufficient scientific data to show, everybody, every one of us, who are thirty of years of age, are not as intelligent as a six-year-old child, who has just come into the school (Laughs). There’s substantial proof to show that. Only reason why we’re looking out to be smart is because we have information and the child does not have information. So we’re just showing off this information in the form of instruction. Sadhguru: If… If we bring the teacher training process, completely take away this word instruction, and bring inspiration and transmission as a way of life for the teachers, every school system could become a fruitful process, whatever the thing. Because I don’t believe we can transform all the systems around the world, but in some way, if we bring inspiration and ability to transmit whatever really matters to them, then a child would sit up and listen for sure. As a part of this, in our schools, we made it… You know, our school is a seven-day school. There’s no holiday and no… no weekend. This may be shocking for America because “Thank God, it’s Friday” is the philosophy (Both laugh). If… If one knows the joy of learning, I don’t see why would they want to take a break. Well, activity needs to be adjusted according to, you know, the child’s ability to do things. So, in a month, we have four to five activity days, which are not determined. The… It’s always a surprise for a child. The child will never know when is the activity day. Today, when they come, today could be activity day. Suddenly, tomorrow you come, again it’s an activity day. Next fifteen days, it’s continuous academic day. But academics are very well woven with arts, music, everything, to such a point, I found that when they come to… In India system – I don’t know it’s the same here probably – they do first ten years, from first standard to tenth standard, and then there’s eleven, twelve, which is like a pre-university kind of thing. Sadhguru: Once they come to eleven, twelve, they all want to get into professional colleges. In India, you don’t get into a professional college unless you have 99.5 percentage, okay (Laughs)? The Delhi University has the legend of refusing children, who got hundred out of hundred, okay (Laughs)? Where are they supposed to go, I don’t know (Laughs). They got hundred and they’re refused because there’s no space for them. So, this marks madness will catch up and the parents will go on overdrive. And we have spent ten years bringing art, music, culture into their lives – everything will be dumped and just mathematics and science (Laughs) is being done, whether they like it or they don’t like it. So in the last two years, I made this eleven, twelve into three years. I said, “It’s three years. If you want to come, you come, otherwise you dr… leave it.” Because we invested so much in art, music, culture, everything; now the moment you come to sixteen years of age, you drop everything and go into professions. You are a doctor, who cannot sing – you are a dangerous doctor, believe me (Few laugh). Yes (Both laugh)? You are an engineer who doesn’t understand the engineering of your own body – that’s why you don’t dance. If you… If you did know the engineering of your body, very effortlessly you would know how to move. Sadhguru: So, we made this into… two years into three years. So people said, “One year later, my children will go. My neighbor’s children are already in engineering or medicine.” I said, “This is how it is. This is not a race. Education is not a race. One year later, what’s your problem? You are not in that condition, he has to earn a living at this age. One year later, he will go, more mature and more complete.” So, we did this and the amazing thing is almost ninety percent of the parents want their children back in the school. One year extra for the same education. But we brought many aspects of leadership, management, business, which are not in the curriculum, and above all, music, art, theater in a big way. And it’s working out wonderfully for the children, they’re coming out much more rounded out. And when the school started, the first question that came was naturally - me being who I am, because education is not my fulltime involvement, so people said - “So, Sadhguru, you’re going to give them a spiritual teaching?” I said, “Spiritual teaching is for the stupid, who’ve lost life sense – people like you…” I said to the parents (Laughter), “People like you, who lost the fundamental life sense, you need a spiritual teaching.” If you allow human intelligence, if you know how to nurture human intelligence without influencing it… Because teachers thinks they have to influence, parents think they have to influence, religious teachers of course they want to influence. Intelligence need not be influenced, it just needs to be inflamed all the time. But everybody wants to influence. This wanting to influence human intelligence comes from… I think, in these parts of the world, there is a religious thread in the education system, of very strong sense of opposites. Something is god, something is devil, something is heaven, something is hell, something is evil, something is good – this is so strongly set up in people’s minds, naturally they want to influence (Claps) because you think they will join the other party. Like how the two political parties in the country look like two religions, as far as I am concerned – the language that’s being used on the news channels. In my perception, the political parties look like two different religions to me, because it is such strong opposites. No, that’s not what a democracy was about. Democracy means today, you could vote for this, tomorrow, you could vote for that. As it was necessary, you would shift. No more shifting, people are already clearly identified, “This is me, that is you” finished. Maybe there… People were telling me only six percent travels, next forty-seven, forty-seven percent – ninety-four percent is fixed as two different religions in the country. Sadhguru: This is very much present in the education mechanism, that we have strong sense of opposites. This is where I think there is something, that education systems in the world can pick up from the East, where we don’t have a strong sense of opposites, because our gods are devils also (Claps), our devils are gods also, somebody who looks like this is… what is beautiful, what is ugly, you cannot determine in the East because everything is one big happening. I think if you want to nurture human intelligence, this strong sense of opposites have to go. There is nobody in this room, who is twenty-four hours good or twenty-four hours bad, isn’t it? You can confess it with me, it’s okay (Laughter). Participant: Yeah. Sadhguru: Yes (Laughter). Nobody is twenty-four hours good or twenty-four hours bad. It’s just when you’re conscious, you function in a wonderful way, when you’re unconscious, you may do something lousy. This happens to every human being. Now, instead of recognizing that fundamental quality of the human being and how to nurture this… Because the basis of our intelligence is just this, that we can do this or that. If you were another creature, which doesn’t have the same level of intelligence as the human being has… A tiger will do… only do that, we know exactly what he will do. A hyena will only do that, a buffalo will only do that – it’s all fixed. A human being can do just about anything. That is where the intelligence comes in, that an active intelligence would choose, an unconscious and a kind of a conditioned intelligence will tend to do a certain thing. The purpose of education is to decondition the intelligence, so that it becomes an active intelligence, adapting to the situations, doing the right thing for the situations in which we exist, not positions that we have already taken. That is the essence of intelligence. But today, in some way, int… education system is trying to condition the intelligence this way or that way, because I think there is a strong thread of religion in the background. Though it may not be spoken, I see that everywhere there is a strong sense of opposites – very strong opposites, which cannot meet. Speaker: I wanted to get back to something that you both have said, about creativity and curiosity, in order to not be too rigid in one way or another. And Sir Ken, you said that curiosity is the engine of achievement. And so, whatever happens to our curiosity (Laughs) as we grow older, and how do we get it back and sustain it, and how do we keep…? I mean, you both have different methods for reaching this, but in terms of… Sadhguru: People are blind-dating out of curiosity (Laughter) (laughs). Sir Ken Robinson: That’s one reason (Laughter). Speaker: ____ (Inaudible) Sir Ken Robinson: What’s that (Laughs)? Speaker: But in terms of future if… if creativity can be valued as literacy is valued, and if curiosity is… is kind of the fuel to keep us somewhat awake and aware… Sir Ken Robinson: Yeah. Speaker: How do we hold on to that? As in maybe you’re even out of school and just continue. And the children inspire us all the time, they’re… you learn from them all the time. But as adult learners, I mean, if you speak about it. Sir Ken Robinson: But yeah, I just want to come in, if I may, first on what Sadhguru says about the opposites. I think that’s absolutely right. You know, we’ve… what the Western rational view is very much that thinking is a process of making distinctions. What the whole logic enterprise is about, yes, it’s this, it’s that, it’s fine chopping, seeing differences between things and making things into categories. I remember writing you know, that the whole… and it’s been a brilliant success in all kinds of ways. I’m not (Laughs) saying it’s… it’s been without its benefits, of course not. We live off the fruits of rationalism all the time. But a really good example to me is… is… the whole taxonomic process that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the natural world, gave us an amazing system of classifying natural things into… into… into genus and into species and sub-species. Then I spent a long time figuring out all these different classifications. And if you go to a natural history museum, you see all of this at work. You know, if you go to into natural history museum, you can go into room on this, that’s got nothing but butterflies in it and it’s very impressive. You see all these butterflies in cases against the wall, pinned to the back, dead, you know, but they’re all in species, you know, the big ones at the top, small ones down at the bottom. Go to another room, you see the beetles – not The Beatles, other beetles (Laughter) – all classified. And it’s a very interesting way to think about it, it’s a way of studying these things. Sir Ken Robinson: But if you leave the natural history museum and go into the countryside, you don’t see all the butterflies flying in formation, with the big ones at the front (Laughter) and the small ones at the back and the beetles all in some separate part of the field, keeping their own company. In actuality, in life, these things all mixed up with each other. They cross-pollinate the environment that they all depend upon. That’s the principle of economy, it’s about relationships, it’s not about separate categories. And for example, you know, in schools, we divide the arts and the sciences. But it’s just a device because in the world, all the scientists I know are deeply affected by aesthetic interests. Look at the work of the engineers, look at the… I mean, I was going to… want to ask you later, if may, if we have time, about dance. I’m a big advocate for dance. And in most school systems, dance is out of the picture entirely there because we need to spend more time on math. And I think dance is as important as math, but it’s not separate from it. These things are integrated. You know, you can talk about your liver and your kidneys as separate entities, but they only function together. It’s the only way it actually makes (Laughs) sense. Sir Ken Robinson: You know, if… if you take your liver out and put it on the table, it’s not doing a very good job at that point. You know, is there something wrong with my liver? Yes, there would be (Laughs), it’s out of your body now. It’s about how these things connect that matters so much. So I think, you know, the better way is to see that thinking is also about making relationships and making connections and not seeing separation. So we end up, for example, with… in school, saying, “Are you an artist or are you a scientist? It’s going to be this or it’s going to be that.” It doesn’t have to be a choice. So when I talk about creativity, I often ask people… I mean, I ought to get a life already, but I do ask people how creative they think they are – you know large groups and… It interests to me how many people, who are creative, so to speak, will also say that… but they’re not really very smart. Or people, who think they’re intelligent, will say they’re not very creative. And actually, creativity and intelligence aren’t separate. They are… Functionally, it’s the same thing. creative is about having fresh ideas and that’s a function of intelligence. So, when I say creativity is as important as literacy, it’s… it’s not separate from it. But creativity seems to me to be the hallmark of human intelligence, how I would describe it. You know, there’s something prior to, which is imagination. Imagination is the power to bring into mind things that aren’t present. Creativity is putting that to work in… in some way. But the best evidence of the power of human creativity is that we all create our own lives. You know, every human life is a unique achievement. There have been a hundred billion people, we think, on the planet in the past 150 to 200,000 years and every single life has been different – every one – because you create your life, unlike most other creatures. And… And human beings don’t live as other creatures seem to, only in the direct physical world. We live in worlds of ideas and beliefs and values and cultural practices and traditions. We… know, we… Human beings invented virtual reality long before Oculus (Referring to an American virtual reality technology company), you know. We… We all live in virtual worlds. It’s what the great cultural conflicts are about, when people’s conception of the world come into conflict like this – the great religions tearing each other apart over ideas. And cultivating creativity and curiosity seem to me to absolutely be paramount, and it’s the starting point of education. We have to see… help people to see that many things we think are provisional, they’re contingent, they could be changed and we can think differently. We don’t need to be trapped into our own biography, we can recreate ourselves if we wish to. Sir Ken Robinson: And that’s what, as I understand it, a lot of this work is about. It’s seeing… giving people another sense, another realm of possibilities that they can come to occupy and inhabit. But it begins by enlivening the capacity to ask questions, the… the sense of intrigue about the world around us. And it’s that, that gets killed in schools when it comes down to direct instruction, testing and multiple choice, bubble tests. It’s the very thing that should give life to education that we kill off at the bottom. Questioner: This is so wonderful. I don’t feel crazy when I listen to you two (Laughs). I think there’s a couple of things. You know, this idea of you know, you have someone… Sadhguru: If she can have the microphone… Questioner: Yeah, like each of you… (Speaks with microphone) You know, I… I always think… I have two children and I think, you know, if we raised each child like they were the found Dalai Lama… You know, they go to find the Dalai Lama in some country and say or some village and say – “You’re the Dalai Lama” and you raise this child to think that they are this divine person. If we were to revere and raise each child in that way, I think they can be the next whatever. Don’t you think that would completely change the way … In other words… And what you said earlier about how we look at kids and we think they know so much more, but really, you know, I think we’re here to serve them. Sadhguru: Yeah, but if you had too many Dalai Lamas, what would you do (Laughter)? Questioner: Well, there’d be a lot more peace on earth, I think (Laughter). Sadhguru: No (Laughs). Questioner: Maybe. Sadhguru: The thing is… I know this is a common word used in this part of the world about raising children. You can’t raise children, you can raise cattle, you can’t raise children. This is an idea you must give up. Children grow up - as Ken pointed out in the beginning - you can only create a conducive atmosphere - they grow up. It doesn’t matter you have two children… How old are they? Questioner: One is almost seven, one’s nine. Sadhguru: Okay, you will see as they grow (Questioner laughs), though it is the same genetics, same food, same home, s… maybe same school, you will see one will go like this (Gestures), another will go like that (Gestures) because there are different ways to perceive the same thing. The receptivity in our mind is of different ways. If we have to get into technicality of this – in yoga we recognize ten dimensions of receptivity. I’ll talk about five because the other five are too esoteric. These five are referred to as centers of sleep, centers of memory, centers of imagination, centers of right perception, centers of perversion. It is there in all of us. If it comes… something… Let’s say the same information or a same aspect comes to all of us right now, somebody is little… little sleepy mode, some of them are little sleepy mode they will perceive it one way. Somebody is deep into their memory of whatever their experience of lives are, they will perceive it one way. Somebody is in a heightened state of imagination, they will perceive it one way. Somebody is in a state of equanimity they will perceive it one way. Somebody has taken extreme positions of right or wrong, they will perceive it another way. So, what… whatever I may give you, depending upon from which center you receive accordingly it becomes that. Sadhguru: So, you may have two children, same home, everything same, all inputs same but one will go like this (Gestures), one will go like that (Gestures) because every moment how they are receiving what is coming their way. So, now the important thing is as I said earlier – when you say picking up an young child and saying, “You’re Dalai Lama, you’re the spiritual teacher,” with all due respect to the institution of what it is I’m saying you’re trying to influence them powerfully. An intelligence should not be influenced, an influenced intelligence is a dangerous intelligence. An intelligence which is on but not influenced will always be a solution. An intelligence which is profoundly influenced by a this or that is always a divisive intelligence, it is me versus you. It will become strong sense of rights and wrongs, strong sense of this is it or that is it will always create conflict. However good it may look to you. Wa… See, right now I’ll take an ext… extreme example - an example, you are not supposed to speak in America. For example, right now there is an Islamic State, we need to look at this in reality what it is. There is somebody out there who believes in something, which is more precious to them than their life. Yes? When a man is willing to die for something that he believes, you have to at least recognize he’s genuine. All right (Laughs)? There’s no better proof. But the result of that what horrendous things happen is another thing, okay? The consequence of that firm belief is another thing but you have to appreciate, this man believes that there is something that he believes in which is far more precious than his own life. Sadhguru: When I say life, I want you to look at this – whether it’s an ant or an elephant, whatever life you take, every life holds its own life of highest importance. You try to catch a little ant, a little ant does not think, “Oh, I’m just a little ant, let me die.” He does everything possible to live. This is the nature of life, that is so for a human being also. This life is precious for this life, but I’m willing to throw this away for something that I believe in. I’m saying the g… belief is genuine, okay? But the result is horrendous. So, if you strongly influence your children whatever you think is right, don’t think the result will be good. Questioner: I’m not of this generation and I… I really appreciate what you’re talking about. Sadhguru: Something visually apparent, you don’t have to announce. Questioner: I know (Laughter). My question is… Sadhguru: But I am more ancient than you, you can see (Laughter). Questioner: My question is – in listening to both of you, I was wondering why the economic … didn’t… is… is not… is not part of what perhaps… This is what I feel… I feel children, who have economic wealth and more means are able to the testing, able to go to those private schools, able, able, able, and I think that’s changing the tenor of education certainly in our country, and I’m disturbed about it. And I don’t know how you guys think about that. Sir Ken Robinson: No, there’s no question about it. The… All the figures support that view, that kids from middle class and wealthier backgrounds do better at school, they do better at tests. Kids from impoverished backgrounds do much less well. Non-graduation rates are much higher in impoverished backgrounds, which there are many more than used to be. It’s true in certain ava… African-American communities, Hispanic communities. It’s also the case that although it’d be wrong to say, “If you don’t graduate from high school, you go to jail.” That’s not true, obviously not. People often have wonderful lives, they didn’t… just didn’t have to finish high school. What is true, is a very high proportion of people in jail – actually six… over sixty percent of people in the correctional system in America did not complete high school. So, there’s a very, very considerable and significant economic dimension to all of this. And it’s creating a chasm in the country that I think you… you know, it has to be addressed in… in an urgent kind of way. Sir Ken Robinson: America, you know, prides itself… it keeps telling itself, it’s the best country in the world. We have to watch this (Laughter). I live here, I lived here for fifteen years, I like… you know, that’s a reason that we like it here a lot. But nobody has a guaranteed place anymore. I mean, when… there’s a book written about the fate of empires by a guy called Jared Diamond. It’s a very good book, it’s called Collapse (Referring to the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed). If there’s a problem for Jared, it’s that he gives you too much on the cover. You know, he needs to come up with a more elliptic title if he wants to sell copies of his book, I think. You know (Laughs), what happens to empires? They collapse. We’re done, really. He should have called the book, “What Does Happen to Empires? Read On” (Laughter). Now, you see, I’m… I’m from England. I’ll keep mentioning it from now on, just so that… if… in the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had the largest empire in human history. That’s… That’s not jingoism, it’s just a matter of historical fact. We had the biggest military program, the biggest economy, the biggest colonial program. If you had gone to the court of Queen Victoria in 1870 and said, “This empire will be over within the generation,” you’d have been laughed at at the building. But it was. Sir Ken Robinson: By 1918, it was… we’d lost a generation of people in another foolish war, we were virtually bankrupted by it. In 1939, it all happened again, and in 1945, it was finished. I was born in 1950 in Liverpool and we played in bomb craters and we’re on rationing, we had powdered orange juice, powdered eggs and powdered milk on rations from the central government ration books. That’s how I grew up for the first ten years. It was over, completely gone, it collapsed. Now, what I’m saying is that you know, America is living a dream at the moment, which is that, all this is completely sustainable and can carry on in perpetuity. And it won’t. I’m not preaching for an empire either, by the way. It’s just that America is the most powerful place on the planet at the moment and it’s hemorrhaging generations of children with no economic hope, no purchase on a life that can add up to anything so far, wallowing in all kinds of crime and… and drug abuse. I’m going to Chicago next week, where they have terrible problems with the education system. And to say that this isn’t the consequence of America’s economic policy is… is just self-delusional, you know. It… it’s… It’s a bla… sort of flagrant disregard of the well-being of the people. That America is being hoist on its own petard (Referring to an idiom that means to be harmed by one's own plan to harm someone else, or to fall into one's own trap) economically. You know, with so much wealth concentrated in such a small group of people, and so… and I’m not wishing for it, argue for it, I don’t wish it on any country. It’s just that this is a very serious issue for this country. And as we’re in this country, we’re talking about it. And… But the good news is – as well – there are lots of wonderful people doing fantastic things. I travel around the country a lot. And I’m going to Chattanooga in the morning and they’re doing a whole thing to revive their education. Sadhguru: As you were saying empires and we’ve talked about England. Well, it was a changing situation in the world and there was a terrible war and whatever… Sir Ken Robinson: Yes. Sadhguru: But empires have closed down without any major disasters like World War II. For example in India many empires rose which spread right across subcontinent and they just closed down by themselves, without any war, without any external interference. And there is a significant if you s… look at the thing, there was a time when thirty-six percent of the world’s economy was India where everybody wanted to go to India and one guy made a mistake and landed up here, you know (Both Laugh). It’s a celebrated mistake (Laughs), a very wrong perception of which direction is which, all right? Sir Ken Robinson: Yeah. Sadhguru: He mistook the sunset for sunrise (Laughs). He went West instead of East. Anyway, but that economy which was over thirty percent of the world’s economy just closed down simply because they were doing so well and they decided they need to protect themselves. This is the biggest mistake they did. In trying to protect themselves what was a very transparent culture, they tried to become little introvert and they successfully did it and that just pushed it down, completely. Then came the invasions, then came all the other things. But one of the biggest undoing for India is they became introvert, they thought they had to protect themselves. Till then they never protected themselves, they embraced everything. The moment they thought they have to protect themselves it started going down. If you protect it you must understand the walls of protection that you build are also walls of self-imprisonment after some time. Questioner: So what was the worst thing about school for you, when you were a kid? Sir Ken Robinson: You’re asking me or him? Questioner: Ask you and maybe Sadhguru…well (Sadhguru laughs). Sir Ken Robinson: I didn’t have a terrible time at school I have to say, I mean the school I went to kind of broadly worked for me. The main thing was that, there were… let’s say I went to a grammar school, you know, and although I am very keen to qualify the importance of academic work, I always rather liked it. It worked for me because it’s meant to work for some people. And… But the thing I disliked most about it was we were put on a fast-track at school and it meant therefore we had to drop certain things. So I liked art at school and because we were supposed to be taking our exams at fifteen, I went to see the head teacher, I’d opted to do art and he said that it was either art or German. That’s an interesting conflict, isn’t it (Laughter)? And I said, “What do you think I should do?” He said, “Well, if I were you I would do…” that’s right actually, I wanted to do art and German, he said, “Well, the thing is you can’t do art and German” which baffled me, you know, because I’d seen films of Germany and there were pictures everywhere and you know I thought well (Laughter) presumably somebody in Germany is capable of doing art. And he said, “If I were you, I would do German.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It would be more useful.” And I was so… I was baffled by that, I thought why would German be more useful than art? I mean it is useful, I’m not saying it’s not, especially in Germany I mean it’s… (Laughter) it’s absolute bonus you know but… but the implication that art was useless, that’s what became clear, is that the school curriculum was divided into two groups of subjects, it still is. Well, the first problem is the idea of subjects but… but if you accept that for a moment most school curricula are divided into two groups of subjects, useful ones and useless ones. And the useless ones are you know, art and music and dance, and so on, things like that. Sir Ken Robinson: So I had to drop German… art to do German. It never worked out, I never got hang of German and the reason is, it’s impossible (Laughter). You cannot speak German, we know this to be true (Laughter). I mean I tried, but German’s like Latin, you know, you have verbs that conjugate, nouns that decline, the word order has to come in the same things, the verb has to be there in the sentence, they’re long sentences. You know so you can have a long compound German sentence with the verb at the end so if you talk to somebody in German, it could be ages (Laughter), you know, I mean, you know, I mean who was involved, where this thing happened but you’ve no idea what they did until the last word shows up, you know (Laughter). Verb occurs about fifteen minutes later. Oh, that was what they were doing, I had no idea (Laughter). Sir Ken Robinson: I went and gave a talk at… in Vienna when I graduated college, I went to go and speak at this education conference and I was picked up, you know at the airport in a taxi and the guy said to me in German, “Where are you from?” to which I replied, “Yesterday evening.” Which I now know is a mixture of French and German. And he said, “Oh you’re English. I said, “Yes. But I can do art” (Laughter). But it’s funny because when they called me about this thing in advance they said you’re going to give this talk to all these educators, “would you like to give your talk in English or German?” So on the phone I acted like this was a big dilemma you know (Laughter) because in Germany they all speak English anyway, that’s the thing, they all speak English to you so I… I acted like it was a real… kind of real tear and I said, “Look I think in the end, I think I’ll give this talk in English” (Laughter) because I should say I took my… my oral exam in German at school and I failed it twice, twice! And the reason is that, you know, it’s a very complicated language – it’s like Latin, but if you got a Latin translation to do, you’ve got till next Tuesday, you know and a pencil, you know, whereas in Germany they expect a reply immediately (Laughter). And I just couldn’t get the hang of this thing at all. So I did… I did the German oral exam and I failed it, the first one because I spent the whole exam standing up having misunderstood the instruction to sit down (Laughter). So fate had the right away. Sir Ken Robinson: So anyway, when they called me on the phone and said, “Do you want to give this talk in English or German I said, “Look, I’ll do it in English I think.” They said, “Why is that?” I said, “Well look, there are several reasons. One is it’ll be longer, you know, more… more than three minutes which is my conversational range in German currently. Secondly it will deal with more complicated issues the “my favorite things” you know (Laughter), which is what I’m largely confined to. And thirdly the audience won’t have to keep standing up and sitting down (Laughter) because I’m still annoyed about that.” So it was that, these choices you know I had to… I had to drop it to do something I didn’t want to do. I… We never did music at school because it wasn’t thought to be relevant to the academic track. So it’s that stuff you know that… I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t over-psychologize it but was the lack of those things on my own education that made me think hard about why they mattered. In fact I wanted to ask you if… you don’t have to answer now obviously, it’s entirely upto you, but one of the things I’ve often argued is that… is that dance in schools is as important as math and to most Western people that sounds like a bizarre exaggeration of something but it’s not, people are embodied, we are physical creatures. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a lot of dance companies, I’m the patron of the London School of Contemporary Dance, you know Margaret Rimes company in the U.S…. U.K. and to watch dancers at work is the most extraordinary thing you know it’s… it’s not just a physical activity, of course not, it’s… it’s a holistic activity and I know in one of your schools dance is a very central part of… Sadhguru: Hmm. Sir Ken Robinson: And I remember you saying in one of your talks that you equated dance with science, is that right? I’m not saying it is a science but the scientific nature of dancing which… Sadhguru: The way I perceive the world when… well, I’ll continue from the question that Max asked, “what is the most terrible thing about the school”, I don’t know because I was not there (Laughter). I didn’t suffer that. Sir Ken Robinson: Solves that (Laughter). Questioner: That’s why I just ____(Unclear) on you (Laughter). Sadhguru: So, I… I remember so well, I… which I’ve shared with many people. I remembered so well that you know this assessment that she was talking about, a big investment in the assessment, some sixteen billion in assessing children. We’re just unknowingly grading them and this grading, life does not respect, only schools and education systems respect. In the end, who does well in the world is not determined by how much marks they got somewhere but, they are given an extra advantage because they got so many marks. Sir Ken Robinson: Yep. Sadhguru: So, I remember these monthly tests and… or the monthly report cards that were given out. I would see some children strutting around because they are first, second, something and some children sitting and crying because there’re afraid to go home, I don’t know what they had in their report cards. As far as I was concerned, whenever it was given to me, I just took it and gave it to my dad. He would open and he would blow. I just didn’t know what’s happening – this is a communication between my teacher and my father. I never once opened and saw what is written in it (Laughs) because I thought this is something between the two of them (Laughter). Because as far as I was concerned every test paper I always gave it empty, didn’t write a word on it or I doodled something. If they insisted, I wrote my name, otherwise I wouldn’t write that either and every time, I would change the spelling of my name (Participants laugh), okay. Because the Germans pronounce ‘J’ as ‘A’ or ‘Y’ so my name starts with ‘J’. For some time I wrote it with ‘Y,’ sometimes I wrote it with ‘W’. I tried all kinds of spellings, they said in a… according to English language they said a proper noun can be spelt anyway you want it. So, every test paper I spelt it differently (Laughs) as I felt like it (Sadhguru and Sir Ken Robinson laugh). Sadhguru: Why I’m saying this is… And when the final test or exam came that I have to go to the next class my concern was I don’t want to be left behind with junior students, I want to go with my friends, so I always passed that one. So, people always wondered is… six zeros in every test, how do you get to pass this one? I wrote my paper only for thirty-five marks, which is passing mark. I… Right through my education, half-an-hour bell - till half-an-hour in India you can’t get up and leave - I’m just waiting for the thirty-minute bell, the moment the bell rings I’ll get up and leave because by then I’ve written and I’ve calculated I’m getting thirty-seven, thirty-six – I’m done. I’m out. Always, if you look at my report cards right through, everything is thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven – all subjects. Teachers would beg me, “You may know something else, please sit down and write.” I said, “That’s not the point, I got thirty-five, I’m moving to the next class and that’s all that matters to me.” That’s a only concern that I don’t want to be left with younger children, I want to move with my friends. Except for that I had no interest in anything. This doesn’t mean I had no interest in anything at all. Sadhguru: I paid enormous attention to every detail of what’s around me with which I developed a certain sense of geometry about everything. By the time I come to eighth standard my mathematics paper was divided like this, it is thirty marks for geometry, thirty for arithmetic and the remaining for algebra. I… I never bother… I don’t understand why alphabets and numbers are mixed up (Laughter). So, geometry I got thirty out of thirty, everything else, arithmetic I got five, that’s about it, I went on because my sense of geometry is about how everything stands. When I look at the body I look at the geometry not at the complexion, not at the shape and form. I look at the geometry how you’re sitting, if I just see how you sit and stand I will tell you in next ten years’ time what problems you will have with your body. Sadhguru: So, my sense of geometry came by simply paying enormous attention to anything and everything. It… It grew to such a point, if I just find a leaf I could sit like this for five, six hours at a time. This is one thing I feel we have to bring to our children, ability to attend to something, whether it’s important or not important is not your business. My father, being a very high level academic excellence in his life, being a physician, supposed to be a very sixt… strict disciplinarian which unfortunately or fortunately didn’t work on me – every day evening six… seven o’clock, nine o’clock we’re supposed to read our textbooks however uninteresting they are, it doesn’t matter. So, I would open the book like this (Gestures), I find a little speck on the paper, this speck would absorb me for the next two hours. Without reading a single alphabet I would sit like this (Gestures), for two hours. I wouldn’t read a single alphabet on the book but I would not be looking here and there, I’m totally with that tiny little speck on the paper. Sadhguru: I’m saying, this is a big mistake we have done, as I said earlier we have set strong opposites - this is important, this is not important. I think if human intelligence applies itself to every little thing, every little thing will explode into a new cosmos by itself. This is what a human being is here for - to enhance life in such a way that no other creature can do it. But unfortunately we’ve taken strong positions - this is important, this is not important, so, it’s going away. Right now the only thing that’s important is – what serves our economic engine is the only important thing. This whole dissertation about German and art is just this – what is important, what will earn you more bucks, what will not earn you money, that’s the question, that is the fundamental base question. If we do not remove this from our education system, there will be no education, there’ll only be one more manufacturing unit. Questioner: I’ve been hugging this microphone hoping that I would have power to ask you a question. Sir Ken, you’re still wearing your single function device, I hope your daughter is now ___(Unclear) multifunctional by this watch. My serious question is your… Sir Ken Robinson: Explain. Questioner: Your comment about flawed enterprise as an education is… is really resonating with me especially how the governmental regulatory policies are influencing our education system and America is really the most powerful country in the world but we have worse than some of the third world country education system but we also have the best Universities and best boarding schools and we have very flawed public school system as well as community colleges. If you were the single advisor to the new President, what policies would you recommend so that America becomes again the most powerful country in the world in our human capital and we can make the impact moving forward? Sir Ken Robinson: Well, just to say I think that there are brilliant public schools in America, and public education is one of the kind of jewels in crown of America’s achievement over the past two-hundred years. And you know I know there is a growth in charter schools and independent schools and all of that but for most kids, public school is not their best shot, it’s their only shot. And getting public schools right and not giving up on them I think is a really major priority which I’d want to say to any incoming President that there’s… there’s been a clear attempt to break up public education or at least to bring the profit motive into it. You know education worldwide is estimated to be, just on the economic front here, a five-and-a-half trillion dollar business. That’s why so many big publishers, independent entrepreneurs are getting into education, why so many tech companies are getting into it – it’s like another gold rush. And…I’m not against, you know, people with good interests and ideas getting involved in education as long as we keep remembering that it’s children that we’re dealing with and young people and they’re not there to make people profits. And, I do think it’s very important that any incoming President you know… that’s the first thing I’d want to say. The second is, by the way the community college system is fantastic. And more and more people are going to community college because of the costs of going to college - have become so ridiculous, I mean student debt is now, what? 1.3 Trillion dollars? More and more credit card debt. So I think… I think that’s the second thing, I think it’s an amazing asset in this country. But the third… the third is just the things we’ve been saying here, about the importance of getting teacher and learning right, I mean I’m not… and I don’t think any of us should be… shouldn’t have as our priority making America the most powerful country in the world. If I were in England, I wouldn’t want England or Great Britain to be the most powerful country in the world, I think the issues are bigger now than countries and… and nation… international competitions at least aren't terribly helpful. I think we need a much bigger, global and compassionate view of what we’re trying to get done, much more collaboration, much more integration of interests. Sir Ken Robinson: I mean for example, by common consent, the best education system in the world at the moment is Finland, and Finland set about revising its education system about forty years ago at around the same time that America did. You know, America got into all of this after the “Nation at Risk” report under the Reagan administration. And America went down the road of standardization and testing and narrowing the curriculum and it hasn’t worked. I mean billions of dollars been spent with no improvement to speak of, massive frustration on the part of teachers, principals, disaffection amongst kids, hasn’t worked. Finland meanwhile over the past forty years has created the best education system on earth, nationally, by student achievement, retention, satisfaction, engagement, fulfillment, professional respect for teachers, satisfaction of parents, stability of their communities – it’s become an exemplary system, and in so far as they matter at all these international league tables show that Finland is also close or near the top there too in the areas of being tested. It’s a fantastic system and it’s the exact opposite… The Finnish education system is not based on competition, it’s based on collaboration between… Schools work together, teachers work together, universities work with schools, with parents. There’s no standardized testing in Finland, as in none. Well, there’s one at the end of high school, and there’s almost a hundred percent graduation rate, and it works. Then people say well you can’t compare Finland to America. Well in population terms it’s hard to do that because Finland has a population of what, five-and-a-half million? America’s what, three-hundred-and-ten million now? But the fact is that education in America is organized mainly at the state level, and there are thirty states in America with populations smaller than or equal to Finland. I do a lot of work in Oklahoma, there are three-and-a-half million people, in Oklahoma. I think Vermont has less than a million? I was in Wyoming recently and I was the only person there (Laughter), just me. Just me and the driver looking for the entrance. Sir Ken Robinson: So… So it’s not that we should all try to be Finnish and, you know, call our capital New Helsinki, it’s not that, it’s that the principles apply and the principles are pretty straight forward. One of the things that I want to say is, we talked about the industrial revolution and the origins of education in the industrial revolution and it is, you can see it. It’s about conformity and compliance and… but the real, I think the real comparison is not with the industrial manufacturing, it’s with industrial agriculture which also developed during the nineteenth century and industrial agriculture completely subverted the old organic systems. It was based on mechanization which meant that you could cultivate single crop farms as far as you could see. And you know you go to the mid-west and it’s corn as far as the eye will take you or it’s potatoes as far as you can see to the horizon. That was made possible by mechanization. The other innovation was chemical fertilizers which made it possible for things to grow bigger and faster And the third innovation was pesticides because once you created these big mono-cultural farms they lack the natural protectiveness that makes farming crates. Sir Ken Robinson: So we have to soak these things in these pesticides to keep them from being infested with insects and it worked… has worked for a while. The problem is that it’s destroyed topsoils around the world which are eroding at a prodigious rate, its poisoned waterways, it’s polluted the oceans and it’s not sustainable. The whole world, we all depend upon a very narrow smear of topsoil, less than a few feet thick, that doesn’t cover the whole world, it just covers part of it. Most of the earth is rock or water, and wi… without this… and it’s taken millions of years for this stuff to accumulate and industrial agriculture has… is destroying it and you see it, you know, it’s what happened in the dust bowl in… in Oklahoma, it’s happened in other parts of the world too. The thing about this system, it’s been very successful but it’s completely unsustainable, it’s unnatural. Same thing with animals, now we’re keeping animals in these terrible compounds, we’re pumping them full of antibiotics and hormones to make them grow bigger and faster and because they live in these terrible conditions they cross-infect, so we pump them full of this stuff. The thing about industrial agriculture, it’s all been based on output and yield, and people will tell you that industrial agriculture, the interesting thing is the focus is on the plant or the animal, it’s getting it bigger, its yield and output. Organic farming is based on the opposite principle which is, they don’t focus on the plant, they focus on the soil, exact opposite thing. If you get the soil right through natural process of composting and crop rotation you don’t need all these pesticides and you don’t need to keep renewing the soil, it does that itself. And the organic farmers know that, if you get the soil right, the plant will be fine. Don’t focus on the flan… plant, focus on the conditions of growth. And the same thing has exactly happened in our school system I think. Sir Ken Robinson: We’ve had these industrial systems. We’ve been focused on output, on yield. We’ve created sterile, inhuman conditions in our schools where people are not learning even though we’re getting data and so on. And along the way, what we’ve done is eroded the culture of learning and all schools know, I’m sure it’s true in your schools (referring to Sadhguru’s schools), if you get the culture of the school right… get the culture right, you know, then things grow. and it’s applying those organic principles. And if… if we can get all schools to do that, then the problem will start to right itself. Sadhguru: I mean what Ken just said is the most important aspect, that is, education is not a production line. It’s an organic happening. At the same time, from the question she asked, see you cannot create an education system independent of the society in which we exist. Some ideal system… America is America, as he said, some principles from Finland you can take but Finland is protected by oceans on all sides and it is what it is, and cold also prevents lots of things (Laughs). America is what it is, children are not just learning from their teacher, they’re learning from the street, they’re learning from the culture around. So you cannot ever develop an education system independent of the eco-system that’s happening. Are we as a society willing to in some way cultivate the eco-system in the society which is suitable for a child to grow up in the best possible way, is a question that all of us should ask. Are we going to do what we like to do, or are we going to be conscious of how this will impact future generations every action that we are performing, is an important thing that we need to look at. Because educating a child is not just a teacher’s business, or school’s business or parent’s business – it is happening all the time. Sadhguru: So a more responsible attitude towards this, a larger consciousness about this, everything that you do our children are seeing and what will happen to them tomorrow if they start doing what you did at eighteen they do it at twelve what will happen? If what they do at twelve, somebody does it at ten what happens? This is something that all of us need to pay some attention to because education is not just happening in the school alone. Yes, a certain part is happening but I think child learns equally from outside, as he learns from the school. Sadhguru: Having said that, this entire approach of bringing creativity - I think the most important thing that schools are missing out is exposing children to more natural phenomena in the world. They’ve become an isolated information you know cocoons of their own. They’re living their cosmos through the phone. It’s very, very important I think every school invests in taking their children out, exposing them to natural phenomena and different thought process in the world, different cultures in the world so that there is a more homogenous approach to intelligence rather than “right-and-wrong” kind of intelligence. Why I’m saying this particularly specifically for American education system is, I see on the national news channel, people use words like, “good guys” and “bad guys”. If somebody says such a thing in India, he’s finished (Laughs). I’m sure even in UK you cannot say that but on the national news channel, major anchors referring to people as “good guys” and “bad guys”. I’m saying this has to go if we really want to cultivate an organic system where everybody grows to his full potential rather than being a product of a particular system. Thank you. (Applause)

Channel: Sadhguru

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Keywords: Sadhguru 2016, Sir Ken Robinson with Sadhguru, The Ideal Education, Los Angeles, In Conversation with the Mystic, May 2016, Sadhguru (Person), sadguru, satguru, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, wisdom, isha yoga, spirituality, mysticism, seeking, sadguru speeches in english 2017

Id: PAaWZTFRP9Q

Length: 103min 32sec (6212 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2017