Transforming the Future of Education - Sir Ken Robinson, at USI

[Music] I made it it's a long stage I was at a conference in Los Angeles about a year ago and there was a stage that was four times as big as this and when I came on as I walked across the stage the music they played was David Bowie let's dance that's cruel just cruel anyway it's a real pleasure to be here you will forgive me I hope if I speak in English it's gonna be a longer lecture as a result more interesting than if I speak in French if I speak in French I will only talk about my favorite things which takes two minutes actually I have learnt a lot of French over time when I was at school my favorite lesson was French when I was growing up in Liverpool I loved French actually I loved the French teacher I did yeah Monsieur Evans it's a long story but I was very impressed because this was Liverpool in the 1960s and England was a very different place in the 1960s in those days people in Britain didn't believe they were part of Europe for example so things have changed a lot you know since isn't isn't it ridiculous listen I have a problem I am from England and so I come from a country that recently voted by a narrow margin to pretend it is not in Europe but I now live in America I've lived there for 17 years this a country which just voted by a narrow margin to pretend it's not part of the world so I'm going to come in live in France I think at least I mean you know who you are and that you are in Europe so this is great no so I love French I love the French teacher I loved the culture that I learned about well I also found I could speak it I won't do it today maybe later on over a drink but I also at school I had to study German and I realized that it impossible to speak German nobody can speak German it's a fraud the whole thing and I know people pretend they can but I have tried it I was told at school and I'm telling this for a reason that I wanted to do art at school but I was told it was impossible to study art and German I thought they were making a conceptual point that it was mentally impossible to do art and speak German at the same time but it was because it conflicted on the school schedule and so I said to my head teacher what should I do and he said you should do German I said why he said it will be more useful now I want you to think about this as we go on because it struck me at the time when I was 14 as a ridiculous idea I don't mean that German is not useful it is very useful especially in Germany were even quite small children speak it but the idea that which is associated with it that art is not useful is something that permeates most education systems it sadly is true here in France is it not that there are certain certain disciplines taught in school which are important and other ones that are not important you can more or less divide education the experiences that you've had and that your children are having in education into two sort of subject useful ones and useless ones and the useful ones you know are the ones that are thought to be associated with academic work or with getting a job and the useless ones are the ones that are thought to be culturally interesting but unlikely to advance your life in any way now the reason I'm telling you this is that I was delighted to be asked to come and speak at USI because I think it's a very important gathering and I wanted to offer congratulations right at the beginning of the conference to Francois and the team because very often conferences as you know bringing together people from similar disciplines and domains and people talk to each other through the Ghana patois of their own professional interest one of the features of this conference is it brings together people across disciplines and from different sectors from business from education from technology and I think it's vitally important that these sorts of conversations happen and they happen more often and I think it's a great testament to transfer on the team to brought together you as a group and also the the panel of speakers that you have coming up what I also love about it is it's meant to be a conversation and we're going to have one shortly I gave it a spoken event recently it was it was a peace conference in Vancouver it was called The Vancouver Peace Conference they're very good at titles in Canada and the guest of honor was the Dalai Lama I hosted the opening session there were 13 people on the stage including His Holiness the Dalai Lama and I I facilitated it so Francois had to introduce me I had to introduce the Dalai Lama this is difficult because in the belief system of Buddhism the Dalai Lama is the same spirit who's inhabited that role for over 2,000 years so there's a lot to include you know in an introduction any night he said a couple of very wonderful things one of them was and I want to come back to both of them one of them was he said to be born at all is a miracle what are you going to do with your life he wasn't speaking to me you speaking to the room it amazes me how many people get locked into a track in their lives and go on to live lives they don't find very interesting or fulfilling and I always compare that to people I have met who love what they do and believe they're doing what they were meant to do and that when they do it they're at their most authentic the second is somebody asked him a question at one point and he took a very long time to answer it and then he said so this room full of expectant followers he leant forward and we thought here we go and he said I don't know we're a bit surprised honestly because we thought you're the Dalai Lama you know what do you mean you don't know and he said I'd never thought of that what do you think now the reason that matters to me is because it characterizes something that doesn't happen very often in education here is one of the world's great teachers who is quite prepared to say I don't know something and what it illustrates is that nobody does know everything no matter how learn that they are human knowledge is a densely woven fabric that draws together expertise from different lives different disciplines different perspectives and different cultures one of the great adventures currently in human understanding facilitated by Knology is wikipedia I had the pleasure of helping to launch a fundraising event in Los Angeles recently for Wikipedia it's the most astonishing achievement if you think of it there are millions of people involved working together like some great tapestry weaving together this enormous fabric of knowledge and correcting each other as we go there has never been a collaborative enterprise on this scale ever before not since the great libraries in Egypt were destroyed and what it makes clear is that knowledge is a collective possession that we all contribute to the other thing I liked about him saying this was that here is all the great teachers of the world saying I don't know what do you think and what he demonstrates is that teaching properly conceived an education is not a monologue I mean I forgive me this morning but it's not a monologue it's a conversation all the great teachers are great students and all the great students are teachers now none of these principles applies in the way we currently educate our children we give our children choices between useful and useless subjects we don't encourage conversation between disciplines we don't encourage an exchange between teachers and students and we don't bring together people across cultures and what I want to say just at the very beginning of the conference is that this conference does all of that and I think it represents principles that we should all of us be working collectively to build into our education systems there's no question in my mind that our education systems are no longer fit for the purpose that we intend for them and that all the things you're going to talk about over the next few days have to be associated with a transformative way of thinking about how we educate our children and how you educate yourselves and the people who work with you and for you a lot of people are persuaded by an old story in education the story is that you go to school to learn a series of subjects and you pass exams and with good fortune you'll go to a good university and then you'll get a degree and then you'll get a job and if we know anything now this is a model that was designed in previous times for other challenges and it doesn't work anymore so it's essential that we rethink it and having the business community and the technology community in the conversation is vitally important so I work a lot in education I work a lot with businesses I work a lot in the cultural sector and have done for a long time and there are three big propositions that underpin the work I do and have come to be very committed to that's roughly this one of them is and I think these will run through the whole conference one is that we all of is wherever we are whether we're in England or Europe America or the world that all of us whether we like it or not are caught up in a genuine full-bore full-throttle unmitigated revolution and I don't mean this figuratively I mean literally know that I don't need to harp on this it's literally true you know the world has had many revolutions in the past we've had at least three industrial revolutions so far we have had political revolutions cultural revolutions all of which are still playing out I remember years ago when a Richard Nixon first went to Beijing he was told at the Chinese premier journal I was a great student of Western history and evidently at the prompting of Henry Kissinger Nixon said to chew and I as the walk round the Forbidden City what you think has been the effect on Western civilization of the French Revolution and without pausing for breath Chu and I said it's too soon to say I think it's a wonderful observation isn't it well you know it's true the French Revolution still is reverberating through European culture these things don't end they just add the the mix we've always had revolutions but there's every reason to suppose that the revolution is happening now has no precedent in human history in terms of its scale implications and impact and there are two driving forces one of them is technology I think all the evidence is that as interesting as digital technology has so far proved itself to be what lies ahead of us is far more dramatic far more transformative than what lies behind us your children are heading into world that you don't understand you can't predict the nobody else can and it will be more tumultuous than the world that were currently living in and the second is the massive growth in human populations and its impact on the world's natural environment so there's a revolution the second is if we're to make sense of this revolution we have to think differently about our talents and our abilities and your children's abilities in particular and the third is if we do all of that we have to behave differently we have to run our institutions differently we have to rethink the principles on which we do business on which you run education and on which we do our politics I think it's as important and transformative as all of that now the good news is because time is short today so I have written a book about all of this so you have nothing else to worry about you simply need to buy this book which is entitled the answers now here it is you will notice that this is in French it wasn't in French when I wrote it otherwise it would have been a short pamphlet but it's a rigid the English title was creative schools transforming education from the ground up I wrote it in part because I've worked in education all of my professional life a lot of people came to know about the work I do because of some talks I gave at the TED conference years ago which the organizers cut the first talk they called it do schools kill creativity and I thought it's very important to explain that there they don't have to kill creativity they just do and that part of the great challenge an adventure for all of us with any collective interest in our lives our communities and our children is to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are running our education systems I'm going to explain a little bit more about it but can I ask you first how many of you here have got children okay all grandchildren great okay and the rest of you have seen such children small people well how many of you've got two children or more all right look I will make you a bet and I will win this bet my bet is if you've got two children or more I bet you they are completely different females each other don't they you would never confuse them what do you like which one of you remind me you know I'm constantly getting you confused the point is every child on earth just like you is a unique moment in human history unrepeatable unprecedented with a unique mix of talents abilities interests dispositions and possibilities and there are some features though that all children have in common one is all children are desperately curious there is a very important difference between learning education and school children love to learn they don't all like education and some have a big problem at school can ask you how many of you here really enjoyed your time at school and please know some people did how many did not okay about half and half how many of you here are now doing that exactly what you thought you'd be doing with your life when you were fifteen okay not so many I mean some of you may be what in the field you wanted to be and I wanted to be a doctor or a business leader and I am but even then it's unlikely that you're leading the exact life you had in mind if you had anything in mind and there's a reason for it which I'll come back to but I want to take you right back to the beginning here we've just by the way I'm not going to show you pictures don't worry but my wife and I have just welcomed our first grandchild she is two months old and by a happy coincidence she's the most brilliant and beautiful baby that was ever born which is great isn't it and it happened to us so I feel sorry for the rest of you who don't have this childhood anyway this is not a picture of her but I came across this I'm gonna tell you what this is and I just want to keep this in mind as we go through this is I came across this on the internet this is a little boy toddler and his parents give him a present this is just a random video from YouTube I just love it the his parents gave him a present and he opens I'll tell you what it is you don't have to wait for the surprise what I want you to look at is his reaction so he opens the present and it's a banana okay why his parents gave him a banana we don't know but they did but watch his reaction to the banana [Music] [Music] what do you say it's fantastic you know I think we should take another look at bananas honestly I think we're taking them for granted but but isn't that a wonderful reaction that's how curious young children are when they're born everything is wonderful and marvelous I mean it it eases off a little bit as they get older it gets less excited it's it's it's just as well honestly I mean going to a supermarket would be awful wouldn't it if if we're all still like this at the age of 35 from 40 you know you couldn't go to restaurants could hear oh I got a salad yes it's fine it's okay relax but it's gonna be okay honestly this is a thing human beings as a species you know they're this very little really that distinguishes human beings from the rest of life on earth is that and we make too much of the differences we are mortal organic creatures who depend on the planet to be here at all and for the brief lives that most of us have comparatively speaking but something clearly does set us apart and the reverse ways of describing it but I'm going to come to one of them in a minute but one of the foundational differences is that we are so deeply curious as creatures we are fascinated by the world around us I mean this child will go on within the next year or so to speak fluently in whatever language he's exposed to children do our granddaughter daughter will in ordinary circumstances you know barring some physical impairment and the interesting thing is they will learn to speak and nobody will teach them how to do it you know if you're a parent you did not teach your child to speak did you you didn't because you couldn't because you don't know how you do it either even if you did it's too complicated you don't sit your child down do you at the age of two and say we need to talk you know or more particularly you do and this is how it works and you explains them the fundamentals of grammar and how the subjunctive operates in the conditional sense you don't do that they just take it in through their skin learning is the most natural process that we inherit as human beings learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding this child will if this child is exposed to five or six languages he will learn five or six languages and there's no natural limit you don't reach a point where you think I can't take any more languages keep my grandmother out of here and and they have no problem distinguishing them children at a young age don't think am i speaking German now or French or English which is it they just know learning is the most natural thing the problem is with education a lot of kids start to lose interest in learning when we begin to educate them education is a more intentional process of learning it's a more organized process and it happens for a couple of reasons one of them is that we educate our children because we believe there are things they need to learn that we don't want to leave to chance there may be cultural ideas they may be intellectual propositions and secondly we educate them because we think there are some things they need to learn that are too difficult to to get the hang of just by yourself like calculus it's unreasonable isn't it to expect a child to go and invent calculus by the age of six since only two people in the whole of human history managed to do it in their adult years there are four reasons why we have education systems one is economic we educate our children so they will be suited to the world of work that they will be going into this is one reason to question the current education system it's almost now entirely unsuited to the world of work that you are helping to create there are social reasons why we educate our children so they understand the nature of the unit of the world and the social systems in which they operate there's a lot of evidence they're not holding together as well as they should do there are cultural reasons and their personal reasons every education system in the world including in France is currently in the process of being reformed and in my view it's not working and it's affecting your children your grandchildren and their children and it will continue to do so unless we do something about it the reason is that the reforms are being based on principles which are hostile to the kind of environment in which our children are growing and the sort of lives they're likely to lead it's why it's urgently important that we should reinvent them but let me just give you a quick example I'm sure you've come across something like this in your own let me go back you recognize this don't you this is familiar this is what happens by the time we get through education we start out being fascinated by bananas and in no time at all we're sitting here now I'm not saying all this is terrible don't get me wrong but the worldwide movement to reform education is based on two strategies essentially one of them is standardization now it's worth remembering that your child is different from every other child in the world but when they get into education what the schools tend to look for not because teachers want to but because the political system requires it is not what people can do individually but what they can do in common this is this is part of the problem and the second is competition our education systems become intensely competitive there's another way of showing you this picture let me explain what this is this is a picture taken in the Indian province of Bihar VI har I'm not showing you this in criticism of Bihar or the challenges they face this caused a big problem in Bihar when the picture was first put into the press a couple of years ago and let me tell you what this is though in this building there are young people who are taking an examination test which is essential to get sums the next level of their education I think they're 16 years old the people on the hanging on the wall are their parents the parents are climbing the wall and handing piece of paper through the window with the answers to the quiz it's the kids what you can't see because the pictures another four are the hundreds of other parents who are waiting to climb up to their children with their their paper now I show you this not because I think there's something especially terrible happening in Bella but because metaphorically we're doing the same thing here we're doing the same thing in America parents as it were are being driven up the wall in order to get their children through this competitive system so we have systems education which are based on extreme competition high-stakes testing and on standardization and they're very good reasons to suppose it won't continue to work in fact it's not working now what I want to do is explain what I think the alternative looks like there are really currently four or three key principles which underpin like the education system the first term is conformity when human life actually thrives on creativity I'm going to can i just conduct a quick quiz here for you I'm gonna ask you two questions and answer these as honestly as you can the first question is if you think about creativity how creative are you personally how creative do you think you are have a thing for that if you can think of that on a scale of one to ten okay with ten at the top the second question is how intelligent are you on a scale of one to ten okay now I'm going to ask you to put your hands up you don't have to even say I'm sorry this is not why I came out this morning I'm at the Louvre we we don't do this type of thing yet but let me assure you if you do put your hands up there are no social consequences I mean for me I mean it med is be a disaster whew I've no idea but let me just quickly check it okay think about creativity first how many of you would give yourselves ten for creativity thank you nine eight seven six five why we do look around because the the people at the front think all the really smart people at the back now so they already voted four three two one okay where was the top of that curve would you think hmm and seven six or seven okay how about intelligence now I know a settle certain modesty comes in now we are in France you should do this in America [Music] okay how about 10 for intelligent give so much 10 for intelligence thank you very much under the right constraint that's great thank you as intelligent as it's possible to be right there you can go now by the way we're just wasting your time 9 how about 9 from - thank you 8 7 6 5 4 3 it's getting tense isn't it - ok I never do one if you've got one you don't understand this anybody I said no idea what we're talking about have you you're still worrying about me learning French alright where was the top of that curve for intelligence I think about 7 ok now look I think you're all wrong about this but what I wanted to think about it well first one last question how many of you gave yourselves different marks okay that's the thing that interests me so the question is what were you thinking of when you gave yourselves marks for creativity what was in your mind what were you assessing the reason I say this is there are a lot of misconceptions about creativity a lot of people equate creativity with being artistic so there may hear you say if what you say are you creative they think you're being asked are you artistic you know did you play guitar or an instrument do you dance so you're in an opera company the point is that creativity is a function of human intelligence it's the capacity for having original ideas that have value and you'd be creative at anything at all that involves your intelligence so the second question is what did you have in mind when I asked her about intelligence what we were giving ourselves a mark for what you think intelligence is that you can give yourself a mark for it part of my argument here is that our education systems are rooted in a very narrow v of intelligence that's why I think of them as promoting conformity they offer a very particular view of intelligence based on the idea of academic ability the sort of intelligence you need to get into a good university but if all we had was academic ability most of human culture wouldn't have happened you wouldn't have a business there would be no practical technology there would be no architecture no design no engineering no practical business at all no love no relationships no social cohesion academic ability important though it is is a very narrow conception of the full breadth of human intelligence but we tend to conceive of education primarily in terms of promoting academic ability so maybe if you give yourself one or two or five for intelligence my question is what conception of intelligence are you working on so our current systems of Education are based on this narrow view of intelligence that's why I say they're about conformity when human life is characterized by diversity diversity of thought diversity of ability diversity of talent our communities and your businesses depend on a very wide range of intellectual capacities and not only those the yuka so check with verbal reasoning the second principle on which education is based is compliance if you have a conformist view of Education it's important that you get people to stick to it which is why there is so much emphasis on examinations and institutional conduct when our systems actually thrive on innovation and the third is that our systems the most part are based on the idea of linearity on supply and demand so a bit like agricultural a bit like industrial manufacturing it's why for example these days there's a big emphasis on the so-called STEM disciplines in schools science technology engineering and math when above all now we need to have a a more generous conception of the range of disciplines that we need to meet these various objectives so we have three principles conformity compliance and linearity and the ones I think we should be promoting in schools and the education generally are creativity and diversity and the idea that human life is not linear it's organic it's why none of you could ready and your lives out properly now the reason I say that this principle is important that the organic principle is this that there is as you know a profound difference between social systems and physical systems and between the physical sciences and the social sciences the physical sciences have been remarkably successful to date in analyzing and then of formulating laws about how the physical world operates in physics in chemistry and biology and so on the social sciences have had a dismal record not in analyzing and observing how people behave but in predicting how they might behave in certain conditions probably the worst case of it is economics you know economics is for years tried to pretend it's a physical sign you know and Natural Science and it's really a kind of intuitive game of prediction the great economist JK Galbraith once said the primary purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology seem respectable and you know that I mean every cash flow every business plan is an act of hope and a kind of a vague exploration of imaginative possibility is quite likely to be thrown apart by contingency most of technology is essentially unpredictable in its consequences you know that's to say technologies are invented for a purpose and but then people turn them to entirely different purposes which were never anticipated and the reason is that human beings behave in relation to each other's behavior and then act creatively on their own experiences so it's a constant vortex for example in 1898 I think it was there was a woman who occupies an odd place in human history her name is Bridget Driscoll she's the first person in history to being killed by a motor car it was at the Crystal Palace at the the grand exhibition in London and she went to see the an exhibition of the horses carriage as was then called in the UK it was travelling on at five miles an hour she couldn't get out the way it was all happening too quickly she was knocked down went to hospital and died of her injuries two later the London coroner returned a verdict of accidental death he said this was a freak accident and we must ensure this sort of thing never happens again well they didn't it more or less more people have died in motor car accidents than in all armed conflicts combined over the same period the toll of on human life of motor cars let alone the toll on the environment was not part of the original plan of Benz and Mercedes and of Henry Ford it's the impact of contingent and emergent qualities for example I was rewatching recently Steve Jobs launching the iPhone which you'll recall only came out in 2007 and think how that's changed the world since then when the iPhone came out and then the iPad it was simply seen as a much more efficient way of getting information and being a touch religion with each other the impact has been far-reaching in almost every field of life one of the one of the effective digitization for example has been this that we have now seen I'll just get this a bit let's go back to the beginning one in fact is on on the economy and of course we know the way jobs have been swept away one of the big challenges we face in education one of the consequence of this preoccupation with academic work is there has been a massive spike in youth unemployment there are about 1.1 billion young people around the world including well people between the age of 15 and 24 13 % of them are out of work or have never been in work that's about 75 million people youth unemployment runs at about twice the rate of adult unemployment that's the average to an adults alike and you know in parts of Europe youth unemployment is running at over 50% particularly in some of the Mediterranean states education is meant to be preparing people for the economy in some respects one of the reasons it's happening but the preocupes this is happening by the way while millions of jobs as you know what unfilled so in terms of the economic purposes our education systems are not fulfilling their promise in part because the the world of work has been changed so dramatically my digital code but there's some other intended consequences means Steve Jobs I just I just love this picture when I grew up in 1950 1962 say we didn't have any gadgets of any sort I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing but you know our kids now are spending most of their waking hours like this in front of gadgets none of this was mentioned in the job spec or the product specification for the iPhone or the iPad but this has had the most extraordinary tumultuous effect on social life social relationships and on levels of personal anxiety there's a mounting concern now of the effect of being engaged with digital technologies on the cognitive and emotional development of our children in particular the impact of social media on the the way it's impeding children's actual social development but again it's the law of unintended consequences this wasn't part of the plan it's just one of the things that that comes about bruh course this is before we even get serious without with artificial intelligence that's why I'm saying all the gadgets we've seen so far kind of a rehearsal for the great rimmel's that's probably heading our way in the next generation so one of them's we know about cultural life and social life is it's it's it's unpredictable it's driven by contingencies and by emergent qualities and yet our education systems are so based on that of linearity of supply and demand the idea that academic subjects the ones to get you through your life that if you get a degree life will do good and we can move forward confidently now I believe we have to reinvent the whole system it has to be invented on principles of collaboration it has to be invented on prints reinvented on principles of distributed expertise it has to become more localized more personalized and more customized the good news is we can do it let me just show you this quick puzzle you just gave recently gave yourselves marks for creativity I'm going to end with a comment on that in just a minute but how many of you here speak Dutch okay you have a small advantage here now as there is a there is a Dutch subtitle this is on Dutch television this is a puzzle see if you can solve it I'll tell you what the setup is you'll see here there's a room there's a table in the room in the middle of the table there's a plastic tube at the bottom of the tube there is a peanut people go in they have to get the peanut out of the tube that's it that's the whole quiz okay see if you solve it [Music] [Music] did you how many of you got that good I didn't when I first saw it look cook a quick comment on this the first is most people don't get that on the first look by the way the ape did the ape solve the problem you know so there's hope see if it all goes wrong we turn to the ape spell what the reason I show that too is this most people struggle to solve that problem not everybody but many people do and yet all the resources that were needed to solve the problem were right there in the room the problem was that people didn't connect the resources to the challenge you can see that most people thought well this is you know this is really very perplexing there was a bottled water at the back of the room a little bowl of fruit and you can see that most people thought well that's very nice of the people who've organized this this challenge to lay on some refreshments but they didn't connect it to the problem the people who solve it did they saw everything that was available as relevant to the problem they were trying to solve and it's one of the key dynamics of genuine innovation and transformative work that we are expansive in our understanding of the resources as well as open in our understanding of what the problem is and I believe that in education we are faced now with some deep problems but they are caused by the system itself not by the teachers not by the students not by you as parents or as professional leaders we have all the resources we need to deeply enrich improve and transform education as long as we understand what they are and the deepest resources are human talent human talent is very diverse it's highly dynamic and it's often hidden beneath the surface so our way forward here is to rethink the fundamental nature of human talent so when I asked you whether how creative you are or how intelligent you are the fact that many of you marked yourselves down to me is an illustration of the depth of the problem because like that child with the banana you were born with deep creative talents and possibilities the trouble is identifying them then knowing how to cultivate them so a better question for me is not how creative are you but how are you creative what are the areas in which you're at your mind most comes alive the things that stimulate your most and where they ever touched in education and the second is not how intelligent are you but how are you intelligent how what is the range of your own abilities I published a book a little while ago called the element which is about that very thing we'll talk about it maybe just before we're done but the fact is we have the resources we need providing we have the vision and the imagination to connect them with the problem and that means breaking out of the old model the old story that if you go to college you get a degree and we sacrifice everything for that the world will be fine the fact is it won't be we have to rethink the fundamental nature of human talent and resources beginning with that expansive sense of imagination creativity with which were born I think business has a huge role in that technology will help to facilitate it it won't be the whole problem to help answer it will be part of an answer that's still unfolding but there can't be a bigger challenge for us just now than to reconceive and reimagine how we educate our children by the way even when we do it if we do it we still won't be able to predict the future but we'll have a future and so will our children and they'll be grateful to us that we help them to create it thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: USI Events

Views: 33,803

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Keywords: USIEvents, USI, OCTO, Technology, talk, innovation, education, ken robinson, créativité, conférence

Id: qzvuJrVXNW8

Length: 44min 13sec (2653 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 17 2018