V.O. Complete. "Teaching is an art". Ken Robinson, educator and writer

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] that was it thank you we're done lovely to be here um I hope you don't mind but I'm going to speak in English because I don't speak Spanish my interest in education dates back to when I was at school myself I wasn't planning when I was at school to get involved in education I wasn't planning anything when I was at school can I ask you how many of you are doing now what you thought you'd be doing when you were in high school not one or two I'll ask you about that in a minute you see most people have no idea and even if they have an idea at school it doesn't work out that way I mean you may think well I definitely want to be you know an a writer or a lawyer or a technician or a chef or whatever you want neither you may have this idea at school and some of you may go on to do that but even if you're doing what you wanted to do and it's a minority people you still can't plan the life you have actually had this is a really crucial point to me because every human life is unique and unrepeatable and every human life is improvised our lives are a constant process of creative decisions and improvisation so when I was at school I didn't know what I was going to do I had no real idea I was a member of a large family I have five brothers and a sister one of my brother's is here John we're traveling together and at the age of four we grew up right next door to Everton's football ground you know there are two soccer grounds football grounds in Liverpool Everton and Liverpool and we grew up right next to the ground and my father thought that I was going to be a soccer player but by the age of four because he'd been one and I was very fit and agile and apparently had a kind of precocious talent it was a bit like Ronaldo it's a common comparison common comparison and but in the 1950s there was an epidemic of polio which was in Europe and in America and I got it at the age of four so I was in hospital for about a year and that was the end of my father's ambitions for me to be a football player so when I would I would I went to a school for kids of a handicapped and then I remembered there were two people who kind of crossed my path one of them was a fantastic man called Charles Strafford who came into our school that one day they're only about eight of us probably about ten of us in the room at the time I was ten and this man came in he was visiting the school and he talked to me and then a few other people and then he he went and spoke to the teacher and then a little while later I was asked to go and see the head teacher of the school though I'd only ever spoken to once and this man was sitting there with him it turned out that he was the inspector for Liverpool for special education and he spoken to me and he thought there was some saw something in me you know that interested him so I was given a series of tests at the school I now know that there were IQ tests and I was moved up a few classes this man Charles Trafford became a friend of our family a really and a patron of me we're a big working-class family and I got into hands or another teacher called Miss York who was very demanding and because I work with her I passed the public examination to go into the ordinary scores the grammar stores and I was on my way at that point I was the first person from that school ever to pass what was called the 11 plus to go into mainstream education and it was because two people saw something in me and demanded it of me that I should develop it and then I went into a regular school and they went on to into education and I've a lot of work in English and theater and but I still didn't know what I wanted to do but I had always been struck by the fact that people of all ages have many more abilities and possibilities than routine education ever allows them to discover all children are born with the immense capacities but I always feel that the human talent human talents are like the Earth's natural resources you know they're buried great the surface you have to discover them and you may never discover them I mean you all have talents you're probably not even aware of and you may never discover them for lack of opportunity I mean for exhausted example most children learn to speak in the first few years of their lives and interesting it nobody teaches them how to do it if you're a parent you know that no you did not teach your child how many of you got children okay well you know if you've got children and they in the first few years they start to speak do they're not but you don't teach them not in the sense that we think of take you don't sit them down at the age of two and say we need to talk you know or Oh or more specifically you do and this is how this works they just take it in how many of you speak two languages three four much bigger but I think that's what happens if you if you learn a couple of languages when you're growing up you your facility continues at most people if they're exposed to three or four languages in their childhood widget will just learn you don't have to be linguistically gifted to learn several languages if you learn them as a child you just have to be a human being and we all have that capacity but most of us end up speaking one or two or if you're English one I try to speak French in France and people just stop me don't do that it's that's horrible stick with English you can do that so but it's the same with musical instruments if you're exposed to music and early age you'll learn instruments if you're exposed to design if you're encouraged to dance if you're encouraged to build you know we all have a vast array of talents it's about whether or not we identify them and then cultivate the skills that are necessary for them and I've always felt this from a very early age I felt it about my peer group at school I mean in a half-formed sorta way and then I got him very involved at college in a theatre and I always thought theatre was very powerful way of getting people to connect communicate and explore you know their relationships with each other theatre is the art form of human behavior and it's in theatre the questions people ask are not what you think about this much but what do you do in these circumstances how do you feel how do you act how do you behave what does it mean for your relationships people and the actions that result and it interests me that this was not being used very widely in schools despite the fact it was clearly very important as a way of connecting and learning so I kind of wandered into the things I do but it was always driven by a belief that people had more talent that was being uncultivated than they knew and I knew if my personal experience that's the point and the more I got into it the more outraged I became by it for me this is a human rights matter you know that we all have one life that we know of and it's relatively short in the cosmic scheme of things and very many people spend their lives not feeling very fulfilled or feeling purposeful or feeling they've really discovered what they are authentically capable of achieving and this important because this relation between nature and nurture is highly dynamic and one of the process on which we depend for cultivating our natural sensibilities and talents is education so I began with an interest particularly in an art form and I got quite involved in thinking about it but then it seemed to me the whole array of disciplines and schools need to benefit this way and then latterly I became interested in the idea of creativity and the reason for that is that there are very few things that set us apart from life on Earth and I think we make far too much of the differences but something does clearly other species don't behave as we do we behave as they do very often but there are things we do they they don't seem capable of I mean they don't come out and sit in theaters surrounded by cameras you know they don't wear clothes that somebody else has designed not that they've made they don't go in for cuisine in quite the way we do they don't speak language that they don't seem to have theory is they don't have value systems they don't form competing cultures they don't build economies they don't build great civilizations we do but in every other respect we're just like them we're mortal were fragile dependent on the planet and what it gives us but what is this thing and to me it's captured by the idea of Hartley by the idea of creativity we have powerful imaginations and with that when we harness our imaginations to practical purposes we create virtual worlds that we live in so to me creativity like the concept of creativity in the practice strikes right at the heart of what it is to be a human being and it's me increasingly important that we cultivate these capacities in our education systems which have long neglected them because of our common humanity and also because we have now through these powers accidentally created all kinds of challenges to ourselves which are existential in character and to me there's nothing bleaker than listening to political debates about improving standards in schools and doing more testing and having more examinations and when the great agenda that we face as human beings is being left untouched by most of our education systems so the more I've got into education the more interest had become not just in the theory but the practice of it so when I should have pretend a few years ago to give a talk it was kind of there's quite a long background to it and that particular talk is some of you may have seen it was in 2006 and it's been seen now with what it's been viewed online about fifty three million times 57 while I was up all night doing but you know but it gets shown to group so it's probably some multiple of that and and I think the reason it's taken off is because I think people recognize there is there is a common sense to it and it's true and the other thing is it's been seen in hundred 50 countries which is the important thing it's not just a product of a particular cultural perspective so in short like most of us you know I have created my life I didn't plan it out I've tried to control it I've tried to bring some sense of purpose to it but there have been some guiding principles one of them is a belief and the fundamental goodness of humanity one of them is a sense of our abundance as people and things were capable of and the third is how vital it is that our public institutions cultivate these talents for ourselves and for the common good the thing that I just want to say about this is and I'm very conscious and all of work I do that these debates have been continuous you know one of the most important educators in in our recent history is Maria Montessori and many of the things that she talked about in early years education but it's she's an example of somebody who wrestled with these issues in the very difficult circumstances of what working-class children and developed a series of practices which are resonant with the natural rhythms of human growth and development she's not the only one the whole progressive move was based on the ideas of trying to address the whole child and create conditions for growth and development and this was true in the kindergarten movement Froebel not just Montessori and the rest John Dewey in the 19th century wrote a great deal about education and personal development he also wrote a lot about democracy and he once said that democracy has to be rediscovered by each new generation it's a very important observation that to me that we all of us tend to suffer from a kind of cultural amnesia that we have debates as if they'd never happened before it's like you know my kids believe that the Millennials discovered sex you know when I know that the Boomers discovered it I was there that weekend you know I lived by the way through the sexual revolution of the 1960s as you can see I missed it that shows I didn't go out that weekend but I could see there was something different on Monday when I went to work but my parents split they claimed to have invented it too so who knows who knows who did sex but a lot of these core principles of you know what it is to live a good life how democracies work how people need to become engaged in not just their own lives but in the common good these go right back to the two ancient times the beginning of our civilizations but each generation has to rediscover them it's a bit hard to discover them these days because we're so distracted by everything else that's going on but I look at what's happening the United States just now you know the country that proclaims itself as the leader of democratic principles when I lived I lived there for 17 years and I can tell you this is a bit of an exaggeration and if there's never to me being a more important time to engage properly with the core purpose of education I mean there are four I think education has economic purposes it has social purposes it has cultural purposes and it has personal purposes and for that we've need an expansive conception of how education works and we need to recognize that none of that will happen if we don't invest fully and properly and resolutely in the training development support of teachers on whom the sole enterprise depends so to me these issues aren't becoming less important they're becoming more important as we go on any thoughts comments observations questions hola que unos días soy Laura so if you drama estra amongst area preguntar take a como recuerda esto tapa la escuela y que si - vista algún drama a stroke a take a mia's la vida you know hello Lara did you all understand that well I mentioned a couple of the teachers I had it's hard to exaggerate the importance of teachers in your life I mean teachers you know show up it's one of the most demanding jobs I think anybody can do in a good way but it's so multi-layered and it really has always annoyed me that people who don't work in education find easy ways to be critical of how teachers do their job and you know if you're faced with 20 or 30 or more lives for 40 minutes or an hour and then they go then you have another lock event if you're in elementary or high schools but then you have another group come through these are all people living lives of hope and expectation but complex lives they're bringing all the agendas from home from the street from the culture around them into the classroom no the this is just a moment that you're sharing with them so to be a good teacher it involves all kinds of things one of them is clearly you need to know the material I say that you don't always need to know it depends what it is you're doing years ago I did an event in Vancouver it was a peace summit it was called the Vancouver the peace summit Hey anyway the guest of honor was the Dalai Lama so the I was hosting the opening session and there were I think ten on the panel including the Dalai Lama who was sitting on a throne I requested a throne today [Music] it's a cheap production I'm just saying cheap so the Dalai Lama was fantastic and at one point he was asked a question he's asked lots of questions there are two thousand people in the room so he was asked a question and he got very thoughtful there is say sitting cross-legged but he closed his eyes and was quiet for what seemed like a long time a bit too long I thought because I was hosting the meeting you know and I didn't know what was going on now I thought has he become enlightened you know don't do that now not today or not before the coffee break oK we've got another 40 minutes anyway um no he's charity he's been very thoughtful and then he's very funny too by the way he's got a very impish sense of humor but anyway he even asked this question it was might philanthropy or something and then he took a breath we thought here it is this is gonna be great and he leant forward and we all led forward and he said I don't know I thought well that's disappointing yeah I thought what do you mean you don't know Gaza Dalai Lama you know anyway he said I'd never thought of that you're saying this to the audience she said what do you think see what I loved about that was two things one that here's one of the world's greatest teachers the leader of one of the oldest faith traditions in our history who's quite prepared to say I don't know and what it illustrates is that which I spoke a bit about it afterwards there are some things he absolutely knows he's the world's leading expert in some areas of understanding he doesn't know everything nobody knows everything you cannot human knowledge and understanding is a densely woven fabric and we all know some part of it some of us know more than others but nobody knows more than a fraction of what's available that's one of the reasons that human culture has become so successful we are highly collaborative species and we're able to encode our understanding and share it in multiple forms in music and art in dance in literature they're in all of these different ways we're not each was born again into an empty void were heirs to the whole course of human history if we have the sense to connect her so he's just being honest I don't know I'd not that's outside my experience and I think it's very important because teachers these days fill themselves under pressure to be the person who knows and it's a perfectly honorable thing for teach say I don't know and not to pretend you do know I mean socially were all bit under pressure to pretend we know things we don't know you know but the second thing was and it was just very small thing he said what do you think and it just indicated that you know learning isn't a monologue it's a relationship it's a conversation and the great teachers to ancient times knew that but learning progresses by dialogue and conversation and interaction that the great teachers our students and the great students our teachers at the same time so to be a great teacher in a school I think that's part of it you have to understand that you're in a relationship you're not just transmitting things you know to people who don't know you're a catalyst for enhancing everybody's understanding there are things you need to know I mean it there wouldn't be a lot of point hiring me to teach Spanish you know it's better you know it there's a limit to learning by discovery you know but a great teacher knows their material and they know the limits of their understanding but great teachers are also great facilitators there are plenty of people who have deep specialist knowledge who are not good teachers if you doubt that walk through any major university and there they will be now I know that because I worked in universities for years and there are some brilliant teachers in universities and there are some people who teach because that's the price they pay for doing their research and it doesn't follow that because people know their material they're going to be a good teacher so to be a good teacher you need to also practice the art of teaching you probably conceived it's an art form knowing it's like being a great doctor you have all of these resources ideas techniques and strategies it's knowing what to apply here and now with this person like being a great therapist you know what would be the right thing here so my great teachers have have kind of demonstrated that now some of them are at college but one of the first teachers who really impressed me apart of the ones I mentioned will add a tier French teacher and I just loved this teacher as mr. Evans it's a long story but miss I grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s and 1960s and there was a time when Britain was apart from the rest of Europe you know strange to think of it now but there's a time when Britain didn't really want to be part of Europe and but I mean anybody of my generation you know if you went to England in the 60s and 70s it wasn't I mean it was always a good interesting place with its own culture but it wasn't European in the sense it's now become so when I was growing up no one that I was impressed with mr. Evans was he could speak French really well you know and that wasn't true of most French teachers you know just it was something they had to do he was chic and kind of suave you know and he smoked you tan cigarettes and he's had garlic this in 1964 I mean I thought garlic was a drug yeah I still do so he was into French in a big way he was European and those just when he came in the room something came in with him a whole sensibility and we just sat listened him you know he didn't have to do anything we just paid attention and and because of that I learnt French and got interested thirds on how the Latin teach you just really impressed me but it's a relationship that's the point that you don't have to like them they don't have to like you but there has to be something about a teacher that interests you or impresses you and you know a good teacher lifts you up and just like a bad one will knock you down and I can remember teachers who just with by raising an eyebrow made me feel terrible you know you ask you a question and then make you feel ridiculous for having that's the question that if you can put you off that subject forever you know you bet you bear heavy responsibility you need to carry it lightly but teachers are immensely influential and my life is peppered with great teachers like that and you will be one sorry ma ramadasu a maestra yo creo soy yo Timothy creo que que vamos a cambiar el mundo a travail de la educación y necesito el mejor de los consejos del mejor guru Quixote Y quiero saber si tu VSL poder de cambiar el sistema Luka TiVo que cambia Aria I porque ok um it's true by the way when will let me preface this by saying that people often feel that it's impossible to change the education system and I think it's important to understand what sort of a system it is you see it's not it's not a mechanical system there were some systems which are built to do something and they just do it predictably it's not an inert system or one that just runs on algorithms it's a human system it's what theorists called a complex adaptive system meaning you know it's it's made up of multiple elements now like I said I'm a simple mechanical system is like a lever what is it that is an example of a simple mechanical system you know a bar with a pivot closer to one end which amplifies the effort you put into an aeroplane is a complicated system it's made up of millions of simple systems but it doesn't change itself at the moment you know aeroplanes aren't don't have feelings about where they're going to and think I don't want to go to Karachi again that was it that was a real downer you know they don't do that they just do what they're designed to do hopefully human systems are different human systems are made up of like the education see it's made up of literally hundreds of millions of people in hundreds of thousands of organizations with countless interests countless points of interaction with each other and so it is highly complex it's made up of individual actions every day and they're all fluctuating they're our dominant feature of the system and how it works but it's it's a vibrant dynamic system even when it doesn't appear to be secondly it is constantly changing there are some things which seemed to be perpetual but even then there's a taken over time there's a big change there's also a lot of room in the system for innovation you can do several things with education with human systems you can make changes in the system a lot of what goes on in schools example in our countries isn't required by a law it's just what people have got used to doing it's habit for example in most school systems there's nothing to stop teachers trying new ways of teaching my wife used to teach in Liverpool she had 42 kids in that class there are 10 year-olds and the classroom she was in was like an Aladdin's cave and the reason is she got them all working together all the time in groups get mixing them up and make people say how can you teach 42 kids all day well you don't you get them to work together you teach them together her school became a very interesting base because the head teacher encouraged collaboration between all the different teachers so their works their strengths head teachers can do that it's not required by law that they have to keep the the ordinary trodden path you can make changes to the system in the system you can make changes to the system you can campaign for changes you can get out of the system and go to an alternative school but my point is there's more flexibility and the system is changing and it's changing partly that's the optimistic bit because there are disruptive forces happening around education one of them is we have a man I went to her mother's later on but there's a mounting problem of unemployment among young people you know the promise of education is being broken every day for tens of thousands of kids and that's a big and unsettling energy that's building up in our communities the promise a higher education is fading many kids I mean when I was in higher education and the idea was if you worked hard and did well and got a degree you had a good job people know that's not true anymore I don't mean it's never true but it's not a guaranteed truth and the way it used to be we also know that were about to face a massive wave of new developments in digital technology and artificial intelligence which is all in all likelihood going to start to erode many jobs that were thought to be uniquely the province of human beings so we're living in a world of constant flux and change this is before we even begin to talk about the climate and what's happening in our national political system so the system is flexing it is changing it's resistant to some changes but there is a lot of change going on so you've got some various options ready in this I think one of them is and I think it's an important principle that if you work in education then you are the system you and everybody else it's not about saying well if everybody else has to change what you do is partly if you have a classroom when the door closes and all those kids turn around and you get their attention what happens next is the education system for them they don't care what the Minister of Education is you know they don't care what who Pisa is they're never heard of Andrews Schleicher they don't mind what they know is you and what you do next and what you give them to do what you ask of them the way you respond to them is education for them so I always say the starting point is you you know it's Gandhi isn't there to be the change you want be the change you want to see and then work if you have the energy in the effort in the will with other people in the school to see if they want to see some changes to work with parents if you can there be clear about the sorts of changes you think are important in education it clearly there are big problems but you know it's like with the environment you know there are big vested interests to keep things as they are but it doesn't mean that there's no room for change I mean look at the me to movement at the moment that's been having it because it it's kind of ignited a tinderbox of anger and frustration that people have known were there but it needed something to create that spark and that's beginning to have a big impact so but I think that's just the first thing you know there is room for change if you have the will to do it and a determination to try and see something shift it doesn't have to change the whole world but what you do in for your kids does change the world for them a raised eyebrow can change the world for the kids you work with and I think it's important never to underestimate that you know that your power as a teacher in a school and if it all gets too much and you just can't be doing with it do something else I really mean that you know I mean I'm not asking people to desert the education system but you have to make your own call on this you know it's your life too I always feel it's important you know you like it's the old thing you know put your own mask on first you have to refresh yourself you know if you offer if you feel this is draining you you need to do something else for a bit or or or find some way of balancing that out I wrote a book a few years ago called the element it's in Spanish I shall now speak Spanish it's called El Elementor so but one of the ways that people it's about how when you know you're doing what's most authentic you know that doing the thing that resonates with you as a personal miked area my wife I would travel to Paris last week and we were just saying you know you don't I opposed long thought this I do not know how politicians do it you know on airplanes all the time showing up being taken from meeting to meeting you know cameras put in their faces microphones everywhere they say being waiting I who do this but what's clear is they love it and that's an important observation for me that if you are doing something your being in your element is two things it's finding things you're good at that you also love to do if you love something you're good at well you know you never work again that's Confucius said but you know you're doing summat you're meant to do offers right for you for a couple of reasons one is for example you find that time changes you know if you're doing something that you love yeah an hour can feel like five minutes can't it you look I mean you think where did that go if you're doing some of you don't care for five minutes feels like an hour you know you look at the clock you think when is this gonna move the other thing is that being in your element if you're doing same things you love to do it you get energy from it there's an important difference to me between spiritual energy and physical energy and you know what I mean by that you can be I mean I don't mean spiritual in the religious sense I don't not but I mean in the sense in which you're in high spirits or low spirits you know you can do an activity that you love you can be physically exhausted and at the point of collapse look at people doing marathons they keep going till across the line and then they keel over but you can be you know less dramatically can be doing things that you get you that exhaust you physically like I'm white but you can be buzzing whether you know you're kind of hearts pay exhilarated by it equally you can do things about care for you can be physically fine but completely down and desolate and what I find within the element is if you do something you love to do it doesn't take energy from you you get for energy from doing it it charges you up spiritually that you're doing it and it's true of activities it's true of people don't you find that I mean there are some people that give you energy I just hanging out with them you feel better you know you go out you go to work and you see if people come into what you think fantastic they're here you know you light up and equally you might see some else coming towards you and you think really what now you know can we reschedule you know because they just suck energy out of you and we knew that that's the way it runs so I'm saying I'm not talking to you directly I'm just using the opportunity to say teaching is a physically very demanding job it's emotionally a very demanding job and on the best days you're exhilarated by it a lesson might have gone really well some encounter with a kid some you plan to do just really worked but then there are lot of things that teachers do who which are innovating they're all the administration all the testing all the dealing with problems that come up every day and you have to look at the balance of that you're on balance is this feeding me you know or isn't it and or did it used to but it doesn't now and I just always want to say to everybody really about if you have the choice to do it that if you continue to love it keep doing it but if you need time to do something else or you need to give yourself time to be some somewhere else then you should try and do that yeah you know within the realms of what's possible I mean I find though people if people change track that they did it can happen if you change if you move to a different age group I mean teaching isn't isn't homogeneous I know people who love working with little ones and they couldn't bear to be in a room full of teenagers and other people who the exact opposite they know exactly up there with 13 15 year-olds but give them 10 three-year-olds now it completely lost I don't know what to do about that so so it's all of that so so I think that delay is it is not looking what your situation and then if you if you feel capable and in a position nor have an appetite the biggest social change get involved in that - well again mean embrace Jorge's music o-m parte de trabajo casi todos versa internal concentric rata Vida goodness int I muchas confusion a mucha gente que no lo entiendo en no Ito Alma's divas que que la escuela Mottola creativi de sig LeBron de serie MKS parati great yeah I don't know actually what's your name George George um I just I didn't I never said schools kill creativity but when I did the talk at Ted they put a title on it and and the title II actually put on was do schools kill creativity with a question mark they did change it a violation I got them change it back because I'm not saying all schools kill creativity automatically hits and it's unavoidable what I am saying is that schools that don't cultivate it in the way they should and if it's not cultivated it tends to dissipate so I think you're right to say that people are often confused by the idea I in the late 90s the chaired and National Commission in the UK on creativity in education for the government and I remember that we had a national literacy strategy in the UK and I and a lot of other people believed we also needed to have a creativity strategy for reasons we can talk about later if you'd like but the government asked me if I would put together a commission so I got together a group of about 15 people to help me put together a plan and a practical strategy to promote creativity in schools let me ask you if you were doing this if you were to get together 15 people to become advocates of and practical strategists for creative education who would you have in your group of 15 people I mean don't don't think about well you may think of particular names but what sort of people what categories of people would you have on that on a group like that my children yeah Oh child childish people gone artists teachers mums yeah so inventors what was that one grandparents entrepreneurs yeah psychologists fathers anymore yeah why because I think people with disabilities they face different challenges and adversity every day so maybe they are find in different ways to you know to go around basically yes yeah I think it's a good well um what's your did you like the word disability okay with the word disability perhaps is the best word I can use in English I mean I learn English just four years ago so already where are you from I'm from here for Spain yeah so what's your disability I'm blind and where you born blind over you know I think I'm blind when I will say to your souls right it was not an accent oh oh no just a disease yeah so was it progressive or sudden suddenly five circles ready yeah Jenna I'm sorry what was the disease tonight Nancy big local ma right and it happened that quickly yeah because the bats made redder than that okay yeah so literally like throwing a switch yeah yeah the reason I asked you is because the Secretary of State well firstly I went to special school as a kid as I mentioned earlier and me too so well you know the then we had kids with all kinds of apparent disabilities I say a parent for a reason but you know they were kids with polio there quite a few of us kids with cerebral palsy blind kids partially sighted deaf people with heart problems asthma there's quite a collection really you know of people and what interested me was there was one kid I sat next to for several years who had cerebral palsy cerebral palsy is a terrible thing to deal with because it's caused by usually by a damage to the brain a brain lesion of some sort and like with every other form of physical disability it doesn't follow that there's any kind of mental or emotional impairment it just it's a motor issue and in his you know within cerebral palsy what happens is that you know in order to do something simple like extend your arm like that some muscles have to contract and some have to relax and the net effect of some of these brain lesions is and the motor centers is that it doesn't coordinate like that so the muscles that are meant to relax aren't you know so you're it's uncoordinated so you fighting yourself you can't get the message through from the brains that directly to the muscles to behave in the way that other people find natural well you can imagine too that if that affects the muscles of your face you know to speak involves highly complex dance of the facial muscles so if they're not coordinating then you know your voice is muffled and yet often you're drooling and you would as well it's like when you've been to the dentist you know all your muscles suddenly get paralyzed if they so don't so it's a terrible thing for people with it because it sounds as if they've got some major mental problems as well which they may in all probably not have anyway this dis lad who sat next to me couldn't his arms are all crunched up and he couldn't hold a pencil so but he could hold a pencil in his feet between his toes so he used to bring his leg up and would write with a pencil grip between his toes he had very good writing it was better than my writing honestly I could never work out whether this was hand writing ya foot writing but he was good at it and but that the reason I mention it is because all the people that I knew there did not define themselves by the disability it was just something they were dealing with you know I'm sure I mean I don't want to presume in your case you know but you know but you know it wasn't that they were saying that I'm deaf that's everything you need to know there were also death I mean interesting among the deaf community there is often a culture that particular sort because there are sign languages you know one of the markers of a culture is that there's a distinctive linguistic code and they have one or they have several but it isn't that if you as you did I'm so what's your name again what's your name you know animate yeah it isn't that's I guess in your case it's not that's all you need to know I'm blind that's all that's what else can I tell you it's just something you haven't to deal with but you're also having to deal with all the other stuff people dealing with like being a person getting a job and working you know and some things are just much more difficult obviously and so you have to give more thought to it and you I'm sure you have emotional things around it too I mean as a kid it didn't bother me that I'd polio I mean I was it didn't really it was a nuisance but it wasn't as if it was stopping me doing something I wanted to do and for most of my life I didn't use a cane I mean it was only that's kind of read here recently it didn't bother me I was a lot fitter than I ran you know have much more a giant lease I hitchhiked all around Europe you know it didn't it wasn't the thing it's not like I wanted to do the Tour de France I didn't you know even in the best of circumstances I wouldn't have done it but all the people I knew you know they have complex interior lives just like everybody else does and the trouble with often with the the disability issues that people are be defined by it you know that's what that's all we need to know about you you know that that's presumably that's the big thing in your life and it may not be it may be something else entirely that some people's minds and it's absolutely what's true is people have all kinds of other abilities beyond the one that's attracted people's attention I think one of the issues is that for people in special needs education is that our system as a whole has a very narrow view of ability you know it's defined largely in terms of linguistics and mathematics and it's because we have such a narrow view of ability that we end up with such a big conception of disability but if you have a better more good generous conception of ability then what are perceived disabilities take a different place in the the constellation of things that people are capable of doing the other thing is I have enough not not found anyone in my life yet I mean there may be somebody here but I haven't found anyone yet it professional personally in my life that doesn't have special needs everybody does everybody sometimes you can see them sometimes it seems obvious what it might be it may not be that's all it might be a gender issue it might be an ethnicity issue it may be an emotional issue to do with their own background they were they're being treated relationships there in there may be something to do with their own section of their own abilities themselves some obsession about their appearance every you know you name it you read novels you know what I'm talking about everyone has stuff everybody has stuff to deal with and the problem I think with special needs very often is that people are corralled into one setting and put under this general category that they've got you know that what defines them is the disability actually I was involved for a while in the disability arts movement and you know they were fantastic it's what you're saying earlier that you know there are some fantastic examples of the way other abilities become highlighted and developed in ways they might not otherwise have been had it not been for the need to focus in some particular way but the other reason I'm struck by our example is the Secretary of State that we had in England at the time I did this commission was blind he had been sex state for education he had been born blind and it to a single-parent family in an industrial town in the north of England he didn't realize he was blind until he was four he had no idea that's an interesting thing isn't it that you know if you've never been if never been sighted you wasn't a word that he wasn't it's just by the time he was four he became a word that other people were doing something that he wasn't doing and it took him a long time to figure out what it was he still doesn't know what sight is that he's never had it but he went on to be the Home Secretary of the country one of the leading politicians in the cabinet of course he had to keep a ball the paperwork like everybody else did so it's an immensely complex issue in his case who had this national literacy strategy and I thought we needed the creativity strategy now remember this guy at the time saying to me and he commissioned the report he said of course the problem with creativity's you can't define it now I remember saying to him no I think the problem is you can't so we set out to define it now we had on this group artists no visual artists designers neuroscientists economists business leaders the full range and we had consultations all across the country the reason ask you the question is because there were misconceptions my creativity and I wanted to address them in the composition of the group you see if you ask people how creative they are a lot of people will say they're not very creative and the reason is adults the reason I think is that what they think you ask them is are you artistic and and so they think well I don't play the guitar you know or a dope to this or I don't pay until so no I'm not very creative a my point is that creativity is a function of intelligence and you can be created with anything at all that involves human intelligence science mathematics design engineering relationships running a business you know anything anything that falls using your intelligence is a scene of potential creative work so to me there are three terms the imagination creativity and innovation the imagination is where it begins it's the ability to bring into mind things that aren't present and so as we can see human beings have that in their much greater abundance than any other creature seems to have because with imagination you're not locked into here and now you can anticipate you can reflect you can step outside you can speculate hypothesize make suppositions creativity is a step on it's putting your imagination to work it's applying your imagination and the difference is you can be imaginative all day long but to be creative you have to do something it's a practical process of bringing something about it and it can be a new mathematical theory it could be you know and anything that's within the compass of human invention and ingenuity so we defined it in this way that creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value the process is important because it is it's not more often than not it's a process not an event I'm sure you know that as a musician if you're composing it's unusual it happened to Mozart a few times but it's unusual for the whole thing just a command unchanged more often than not all credit processes are draft listed constant drafting and you often end up with something that's different from where you began the finished product is not always what you intended so it's a process it's about originality it doesn't have to be original to the whole world but it has to be new to you to count you know I mean if you sit look at the five-year-old's drawings then it's original in the sense that they've never done this before this is pushing their boundaries but you can't reasonably compare a five-year-old's drawings to the roof of the Sistine Chapel you know it wouldn't be fair would it to drag a child to Rome and point at the ceiling and say check this out and don't waste my time and it's about it's about value creative processes involved critical judgment constantly so we set out to look at how that mapped onto different areas the curriculum and what it meant for teaching and learning for pedagogy so the misconceptions are that it's about the art it isn't it's about everything a second is it's about special people it isn't everybody has creative capabilities and the third is there's nothing you can do you're creative oh you're not and that's not true you can help people become more creative by understanding how it works and acquiring the skills to do it better Oh laughs Emily smiley says no no no sorry mother day they won't any other nobody knows you may but I won't talk soon di made me huh maybe say Kay kiri the harvest to the air come on I'm Kelly videos death I would have to know your nine-year-old trans the question we have two children they're not 9 anymore they our daughters 29 and our son is 34 you know but we have to raise them and like all other parents particularly for the first one it's not at all what you expect it's a constant process of improvisation and trial and error and there's a balance to be struck here isn't between providing the space for development of your children you have one or more responses to allow them the room to grow in developers as the unique people they are and anybody who danced that the kids are all different hasn't had children you know the idea that children are born as a blank sheet of paper is nonsense I mean children's personalities start to express themselves from the moment they're born our two children could Duma they love each other you know they are alike in lots of ways they come from the same gene pool you know they're raised in the same house they overlap they have a deep affection but in many ways they couldn't be more different no I'm one of seven kids and we're all different alike in some respects but totally different others so you'd have to know your child and why she wants to leave I mean if that you want to leave school or that school the other thing though about this as a parent is that be a part of the role I believe I mean there's a big debate about all of this but it isn't just about giving them freedom it's about setting boundaries and and also recognizing that in some ways you do actually know more than they do about some things and it there is a tendency sometimes I think but now I don't know you something up the psychics trophy but I would note from where we live in Los Angeles for parents have become overindulgent of their children and believe they know whatever they say is is just we just have to take this like we know nothing they're three and they know much more than we do or frankly they don't about everything and they're part of the care of duties of a parent is to try and let your best judgment about what's in their best interests doesn't mean you're always gonna be right but you'd have to weigh it up in the proper way and that's that's one of the great responsibilities and challenges of being a good parent it's not just trying to be their friend all the time and doing what they say they would like to do I know that I mean I think of my own parents and I mean I would not have focused on my education had it not been for the pressure of my parents I didn't want to do it a term announced at school leave even that after all I've said but this was in Liverpool in the 1960s the Beatles were playing down the street I didn't want to be at home doing Latin my one of John and aya one of our other brothers alien is in a rock band he was rehearsing in the next room to where I was doing my homework it's the last thing I wanted to do but he turned out to be the parents do also one of the roles of a parent is to try and take a longer view than a child can reasonably ask to have because you have the advantage of having lived longer and seen more and having some sense of of deferred benefits that may not be apparent to them when they're young that doesn't mean you ride roughshod over them but it's part of the after being a parent I published a book this year it's called you your child in school about this very thing you know how the parents handle their child's education this book by the way is terrific I'm just saying you should buy this book in fact go now no but it's about that's about different parenting styles so you you can't answer I couldn't ask that question but as a generality I'd say that if there are situations in which children may know what's best themselves and sometimes that's exactly true and other times where they don't it's part of the emotional maturity you know they've and over time in proper circumstances our emotional impulses start to be leveled out by our sense of planning and constraint and sometimes things that kids want to do are simply not in their their immediate best interests and so getting that balance right by the way there are some one of the areas of Education I'd be become very interested I talked a bit about it in this new book in his democratic schools and also alternative schools like Summer Hill and what the hell range other ones but schools in which young children themselves have a central and active role in running the school where they work together to make decisions in places like some well and some of the democratic schools not just about school rules but about hiring and firing staff but they are you know centrally and and in an executive way involved in the management of the school and what you find then is that if you if you seriously involve kids if you give them actual power in the school rather than a tokenistic sense at agnostic voice even from a very young age they exercise tremendously sensitive collective judgment you know may not be to these schools there's a wonderful book by a friend of mine called Jerry Mintz about democratic laws as a whole network of schools in Israel run or founded by a wonderful man called Yakov Hecht and his wife Shirley and these schools demonstrate all the time the kids are capable of very sensitive profound assessments and judgments if they know they have a responsibility and it rests on them to get it right but what happens then is you have an income from a very young age what but that sort of collective decision-making that sort of collective checks and balances counted aren't when the counter-argument that they're very capable of cheating it's a different sort of process than a single child being irritated and frustrated by their circumstances and want to know if they can get out of it you know that's all past the complexity of childhood so saying that you have a role as a parent isn't to say that children need to be told what to do all the time and that we shouldn't give them more responsibility if you don't know about democratical was my own choice and we do but some of you may know if I would definitely look at them because I think that the future mr. Robinson mi nombre es Francisco Mora medicina Complutense a aquel madre empezamos econo ser el papel importante de la nación en los processors cognitivist el cerebro me pregunta es que reflection lemur si el valor de la nación sobre el aprendizaje a llama Moria en los estudiantes en la enseñanza en los profesores muchas gracias es un placer Tenaglia que con nosotros thank you one of the problems I believe and in our education system broadly speaking is that certainly since the 18th century in western thought we've allowed excuse me a schism to open up in our thinking about intellect and emotion and we think of these things as unrelated and that intellect is about reasoned logic and evidence-based judgment and that feelings and emotions are somehow disruptive and they're to be contained it's why since the birth of psychiatry in the late 19th century most of the effort and most the literature for most the time has been focused on the negative aspects of emotion we talk about emotional disturbance emotional illnesses psychosis of people being distracted or being tortured by their feelings this isn't to say there aren't negative emotions clearly there are but you have to weigh against them the great spectrum of positive emotions that drive human community collaboration and achievement you know love and compassion and joy and delight and excitement and exhilaration and expectation these are not separate from human experience they there.what impellers in particular directions and there's an intimate relationship between what we think harbors our intellectual processes and the underlying feelings that drive them I mean for example if you look at what happens in most of our political systems people of accomplished intellectual capacities will argue from entirely different points on the political spectrum about issues that you would think if we're only driven by reason they would readily agree but when you dig down turns out that their arguments are driven by feeling which they're rationalizing so the I mean if I look at what's been happening in the American elections recently for example any reasonable assessment of what's been going on would judge most of these arguments to be baseless and without evidence but they're argued by reasonable people from an emotional position Oh case you'd like race and gender and immigration and all the rest not only but but often commonly and I think it's very important too that we try to reconnect the idea of feeling in it and knowing for a couple of reasons one of them is that feelings are forms of cognition they're not separate from cognition I mean for example if I mean our feelings are half their rise as our evaluations of our relationships two things so if I were to say to you that somebody had died perhaps somebody you knew I couldn't hadn't face-value make any call about what your feelings would be you know I might reasonably say that if if somebody that you know has died I'm not just talking to you and anyone that you'd be upset you might not be you might be delighted I'd be thrilled that that's happened it depends entirely on your relationship with them whether you like them whether you dislike them where they figured in your personal fortunes what your background experience of them was it doesn't follow at all our feelings our appraisals their evaluations of what's going on and and they're affected by what we know of the situation and what we think about it so for example you know racism in North multifarious forms is rooted in particular perceptions of other cultural groups what you think of their practice is our fear of difference sometimes sometimes it may be merited and sometimes it's not I worked for a long time in Northern Ireland as part of the peace process and we had there people from different religious communities who otherwise were the same in every way they'd been brought up in the same town similar cultural backgrounds there was no you if you look a bit across through me they seem to be the same in every respect but there were deep divides which often in a few cases turn to murderous activities because of how they perceived the ideas and values other people the peace process was about recalibrating how people saw each other and what they estimated each other to be and their value the way to address emotionally that the change is often this to help is to work with people's cognition of a situation but it doesn't help to Marge nice feelings if they don't matter they clearly do the good news is that there's been a big move as you in recent years in the direction of what's now called positive psychology the positive aspects of feeling and to recognize that they are a central part of the human experience but one of the ways I've been very keen to to show how these things are connected is to challenge the stereotypes that people have about the arts and the sciences you know in schools for example it's often thought that science is the kind of rigorous intellectual bit of learning and that the arts work people let off creative steam you know they can go and express themselves for better than and express their feelings and for while we've lived with that idea at all its being promoted the science of my intellect the arts are about the feeling and it's a bit like you can do intellect until lunchtime then do your feelings in the afternoon but the fact is that science is highly disciplined properly thought of scientific inquiry the scientific method is meant to be based in reason and evidence but scientists are highly passionate people they're driven by intuition by feeling Michael Polanyi in personal knowledge wrote very knowingly about this years ago where he talked about the intellectual passions of science you know that people are driven by a delight in what they do I mean you don't have to look at what the eruptions that break out in the control rooms of the space programs when they achieve their objective and they all that feeling comes out that they're driven by that and that what they try to do is not let their feelings cloud what they're doing but often it can you know the negative feelings may get in the way of that but the impulse for discovery the impulse for curiosity the excitement and passion that drives the the scientific process is fundamental to their achievement at the same time you know they're not bloodless conditional clinicians who go from experiment to experiment to a final conclusion very often and Palani talks about this a scientist will have an intuition that it's which is bound up in their hypothesis about what they're about to try and explore and then they'll and a backfill it with a method to see if that they can see if that's correct or not and sometimes like the Eureka movement it's it's a moment of you know as he says crossing a heuristic gap where you see the solution but you then have to find a way to see if you can substantiate that at the same time work in the arts is deeply disciplined and objective I mean you know that meaning you watch the hours of study practice discipline application that anybody puts in to mastering a musical instrument if you look at it as I have done that worked with dancers for a long time I'm on the you see on the board of the Royal Ballet I'm a patron of the London School of contemporary dance so if you look at the rigor and objectivity and an a mathematical precision that drives work in the Performing Arts these are just terrible caricatures and it's not to say that the that that all of these things are the same they're clearly not but the processes in the arts and science are very similar just the outputs different and I think the sooner we get away from this either the feelings are bad that science is always right that that these are one processes just rigorous and logical the others are creative that one is full of feeling the other is devoid of it the sooner we can get away from that and kind of heal this bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism I thing we'll have a much more holistic sense of our futures of species hola Senor Robinson mi nombre save us o e parodist escritura y tambien tengo los hijos de cría preguntar AMS la creatividad che habilidades necesitan Mastro's jimenez nuestros Nino's para el futuro que viene voila c'est rien parce de las tres mmm Avila Dolly's club a para para nuestros hijos there's a lot to talk about 21st century skills so the thing is some of the challenges we face now are without question they're unique to the times we live in no generation ever before has been raised in the sort of digital culture that this generation is now living in I mean people of my generation kind of moved into the digital world but no we began squarely in an analog world you know with TVs and books and that and digital culture has changed everything there's no doubt or affected everything I should say it's a it's a fact that when I gave the talk to Ted in 2006 I remember saying and there that nobody knows what the world would look like in five years time you know you don't have to be a clairvoyant to say that but it is interesting that the smartphone particularly the iPhone there wasn't available and it didn't come out till 2007 and if you think of the impact that the iPhone and you know it's alternative versions has had in just over ten years on work socialization habits of mind relationships it's it was impossible to imagine it even the people at Apple had no idea what they were letting loose in 2007 I know they didn't because I know them but all that's like to be dwarfed by what's about to hit is without sufficient intelligence in its various forms seems likely anyway but even so I mean so there are some things that we need to learn that that are new to our times but some of things that we need to have in education are what we always needed to have an education you know ancient principles and practices that are just common humanity what does seem probable is that the rate of change will continue to accelerate it'll be as unpredictable if not more so than ever before and that the impact of machine intelligence will be to colonize all kinds of roles that previously we thought only human beings could take on service roles roles and the professions in law in medicine in the caring professions I mean the likely there's a lot of those things what we certainly changed if not actually swept aside the reason I say it's unpredictable is is these things always are new technologies have all kinds of refractory effects and they often generate jobs that nobody ever thought of before either so it's very hard to say how these things will evolve but what I do think we can say is that in future what we will we are to be focusing on much more what are the capacities which are distinctively human and what is it about human beings that we need to cultivate since most of for the most of the time during the Industrial Revolution we were focusing on getting people to do things that machines could adequately do now in fact we'd be humanized people in order to fit in with the industrial economies and I think we have to Ryu Minh eyes ourselves now through education rather if you doubt a list so much I'm sure you don't but it interests me just go back to the question about feelings emotions according to the World Health Organization the second largest cause of illness among human beings by 2020 and mortality will be depression depression this is at a time when the world is more affluent than ever before another gap it's also spread but if I think of the lives we lead now compared to the lives most people led a hundred years ago and one living in a fantasy world of abundance compared to them then my parents couldn't haven't dreamt no of this sort of luxuries we take for granted now when they were kids but we haven't seen a dividend in terms of well-being or spiritual growth or satisfaction people are is depressed and angry and belligerent toward each other as they ever were you know I mean we're seeing now a Europe and America gripped in a populist movement where people are pitching themselves against each other again and we know how that ended last time it happened you know and I think the fact is that we are developing more quickly technologically than we are spiritually you know our technologies are running our capacity to deal with them so education has a role to play here I think in trying to ground us again in some ways in this book for parents and also added the book called crater scores I talked about various competency as I thought we should focus on I mean companies using is a word that people are happy to use these days you know it means a a set of practical capabilities and I'd I have eight of them in that thing because I just got carried away but if I had to pick some out the matter I do think that creativity for all the reasons I've said is important kids have tremendous natural capacities but they need to be cultivated they need to cultivate them so that they're not locked in to a particular future of their own so they can have access to their capabilities to create a life that means something for them but also collectively we need to have all our faculties amount as we have major problems to solve locally and globally and we need to be able to think quickly and adapt ourselves to them compassion is a set of capabilities it's not just having nice feelings towards people there's a difference between empathy and compassion I think you know I mean empathy is important you know but we know how this is it it's long been said that you know you know there's a few here that as a child in fact there's a piece of news yesterday in in England and and a very tragic thing that mother and a daughter Annette joerger will walk along the beach in the South of England and a freak wave whipped up an 8-foot wave and when the mother picked herself up the daughter had disappeared and she was found later on but she died and I mean it's it's hard to as a parent to think of that and not be distraught by it we all would be the then you know we get news of 2,000 people being killed by a tsunami on the other side of the world and yet it's an item on the news I think it's not terrible it's it's a phenomenon we all have we have a limited range of compassion you know somebody once said you know one death as a tragedy 3,000 is mystic and it's very hard for people to move beyond a certain range of emotional empathy but feeling bad about something or feeling good about something isn't really enough we need to be active and so I think if compassion is the practical wing of of empathy you know that it's the practice of empathy and there's a lot of pressures now which are militating against people feeling those sorts of things towards other people at the time when we really need to social media for example is is is having a toxic effect I think on a lot of children's emotional growth don't you well it'll impact oh the internet De La Strada sociales nil mobile alacrity vida yo creo que se le when it's Ock LaMotta I like the RVT down no lo creo state yeah it can be and in some respects is I I always thought think that social media is a misconception it's an ironic name and because they're not social at all you know the anti-social and there's a lot of evidence to show it the kids are feeling very anxious and awkward in ordinary settings because of the you know the whole dynamic of social medias very odd so that compassion collaboration is a very important set of practical skills for people to learn I'm focusing on skills rather than things they need to theoretical knowledge they need to have because education should be much more than sitting down at desks and studying propositional ideas I mean philosophers would make a distinction here and I think it's an important one between knowing that knowing how and knowing this knowing that is what we tend to teach in our schools it's know what philosophers think of as propositional knowledge some that something is the case you know historical dates and events and circumstances know the periodic table things that are readily verifiable as a factual or which are kind of it that are known independently of an in one one person knowing it with theoretical ideas as well as factual information knowing that something is the case so it doesn't mean it's true but but it's a certain type knowledge and that fills up most of our academic curricula and it's important but it's not everything we also need to know how to do things that there's a difference between being able to study a painting in art history and produce a painting there's a difference between be able to listen to music and playing it there's a difference between be able to get into a car and be able to strip the engine down and then the world depends upon practical knowledge knowledge how to make things now to make things happen our skills tend not to be very good at that and particularly because of the emphasis on getting to universities we've tended to cut away at vocational programs in schools and they're seen as second-tier you know so if you you know if you go into a degree in university you're thought to be very clever if you're go and do a practical program for a trade it's thought you're just not as smart as the people who go to university and the world depends upon people who can do things and and also knowing this you know which is what empathy is about does you human being what's this that's what the arts trade in a lot by the way not only that but also that heard this is the nature of this experience and what this means this is how we experience this thing so I would say creativity compassion and collaboration because the third the reason I say collaborations because the emphasis in scores is on competition and competition has a place but our communities our cities our families our neighborhoods depend on people working together a great city like Madrid is a highly compliment to what we're saying here there's a highly complex and changing system you know it I mean every time I get on an aeroplane I'm reminded of collaboration you know when you think of what it takes for that aeroplane to be built in the first place to take off I don't just mean the laws of physics but the massive orchestration of activities schedules to make sure the right crew is on the plane that it doesn't crash into other planes when it takes off that it gets the right place in the airspace it lends the foods on it you know you know all these things we just glide through it there's just that yeah and we get annoyed if our baggage is late coming off it's a miracle it's there at all I think human beings are highly collaborative creatures but we don't teach you in schools we teach people to compete and you know and this isn't this isn't an abstract idea we just need more teamwork practical working scores which help people to practice working together and learn from each other and so I thought if I had to pick out three from the side you know the antisocial hola Senor in Sana'a sir mi nombre es Alicia Banderas so I see : madre y me preocupa la st louis overstimulation a que estamos viendo an ostrich Nino semanas para que aqui sassy imagine telecentres no gustaría saber si que usted que cada vez más las personas or so no somos machine telecentres como de la Festa Flynn que cada generación de camões comenta suka sentient electron which are about yes and I have some anxieties about IQ you know IQ has an interesting history you know this is a psychologist just for information the the origins of the IQ tests go back to the late 19th century and it was a cousin of Charles Darwin who originally got interested in inquires that became the IQ test he had become interested in the idea of natural selection in the animal world and and he wondered listen Charles Darwin it's his cousin he wondered if something similar operated in the human world he noticed for example that the human world was made it were very successful and less successful people rich people and poor people and he wondered if this was because of a different genetic disposition I think what do you ever looked is that rich people could afford to educate themselves and perpetuate their circumstance wasted poor people couldn't but anyway you start to develop these tests they were eventually elaborated in some form by the French psychology French woman's name now we did the work in Paris in the early 20th century on kids with special needs and the basically it was a series of questions to try and get some objective measure of intellectual capacity and growth the thing is that the IQ tests have a rather limited range that move classically though their test for certain sorts of deductive reasoning certain types of logical reasoning but IQ tests typically don't embrace all the things for example they're covered by the arts they don't pay much attention to the things we associate with creativity but they coincided with the growth of mass education and so they became handy tools to sort people into different categories for schools and also in America they coincided with the growth of the military and the need to select people for the military so they have an interesting economic and sociological history but we've tend to think or people too often tend to think I think wrongly that IQ tests offer some objective reliable and absolute measure of how smart people are so people will say of course I have an IQ of this particular number as if that again told you everything they need to know about him and I've always been skeptical about it I know a lot of very smart people who are particular good at IQ tests they're not very good at crosswords I'm either you know people can be good at all kinds of things and not not good at other things I mean I know brilliant poets who are dyslexic you know have who actually have trouble writing but they have a wonderful gift for words I know brilliant musicians who can't read music so human intelligence is much more textured and isn't it and complex and nuanced then can be captured in a simple 20 minute test however many numbers that it helps to generate and one of the interesting examples of it is that this this idea that Kutesa going up year-on-year well I'm not a psychologist you'd probably have to help us out to understand why that's seems to be happening but but the IQ test itself has all sorts of odd things in its history for example when people arrived at Ellis Island in America in wartime in the early part of the 20th century they were given an IQ test in wartime and they were assigned to places in the military in America sometimes people would land at Ellis Island immigrants and was sent straight to the military didn't even get to where they were headed you know so Danny were they given these tests and I wrote about this in the book I did a while ago called out of our minds the power of being creative and what was interesting to me about this was that if you scored above a certain level on the IQ test you'd be sent off for officer training in the American military if you scored below a certain level you'd be sent to the infantry but we know what happened to most infantry soldiers you know in the First World War for example and there was a category on the assessment paper for the military intelligence test when it got the score it said if you fell below a certain level it said it was a chilling thing it said of low military value of low military value well you know what that meant you know just your machine gun fodder at that point so the IQ test became literally a matter of life and death for some people in America I say America as America's become obsessed with IQ in America if you have an IQ score below a certain level you're held not to be responsible for your crimes so if you commit a murder you can't be executed in some states if your IQ is too low because they'll say well you're not competent to be responsible for your actions well there have been several cases I quote them in out of our minds of prisoners in fact one one who was sent for life imprisonment because he wasn't smart enough to be executed and he took prison education programs and over the course of ten years his IQ level increased until eventually it crossed the threshold and he was now judged to be smart enough to be electrocuted not quite as smart as he thought I think if you weigh it up but there was a big debate about this so you know what does this mean can we now go ahead with the execution because he now qualifies well I say it's a matter of life and death but if if this was some fixed amount of intelligence what which is what some people believe it is and thought it was that your IQ test is a bit like your blood group you know that you this tells you how smart you are if it were that then it wouldn't improve in one person over time it shouldn't improve generation by generation should it unless there's something in the water no that's contributing to it well what it all points to is that mixed up in all of this our cultural practices cultural presumptions and evidence of the adaptability and potential for growth in human minds when they're properly exercised and undeveloped so I don't know what I don't know enough about you know why people believe in in the in the world of IQ tests the Flynn effect is continuing but I know it is continuing I'm part of my responsibilities you know can we can we just take it on advisement Mike my interest is not has always been not about whether we get more people to get higher scores and IQ tests but that we should have a much richer conception of intelligence to start with because if you end up with a narrow view of intelligence as I said earlier you end with a big view of inability and I know all kinds of people who've been hampered in their lives by believing they're not very clever because they were told at a school or because they didn't measure up against the general standard of what people believe to be intelligence and outside of Education there's every sort of evidence that that intelligence is a much richer conception then it was friends Frances been a who developed that his tests even began to think thinking of interns daily Frances been a development tests and Charles Darwin's cousin was Sir Francis Galton he developed those tests in France because he was trying to help kids with special needs education he want to get some measure of where they were in terms of their growth in developed it was the fact they were turned to these math systems of sorting and filtering that became the problem I think in some ways it pretty clear that there isn't evil it released at here you know we get better at things that we practice more so that may partly count for it what do you think are they Sophia laughs animal obsession que tenemos the stimuli on us Tracy horse para cualquier mejoras habilidades de-stresses LSS podemos upon Talia's my temprano para corrientes haciendo para para maybe rural mental essentia cognate Eva or incluso también NOS ponemos supremacist es mucho mas complejo spur a los que porra das su stereos no estan preparados enters me preocupa messiest hecho Duty Lisa in Madeira intelligentsia para que tenga machete bono de nuestros hijos alguien telecentres medication personas con satisfaccion si la vida okiya como usted antes otro tipo de capacidad es como la creativi de la Culebra feel empathy el sentimiento de la vez en er de cosas que Kisa son mejor es para la intellisense e emotional que este en para que los señores upon como las cosas Oh mrs. bonnet areas no mm para que tal como es cuando cientos yeah I grew that and sorry I didn't answer that second part of the question I was talking about just about the IQ thing because it got me going but on that broader conception I do think it's true that well firstly you get better at things clearly if you practice them in the right way and I'm saying that kids have all kinds of capacities that we often neglect and but but what's also true is I think that some parents are falling into a trap here of putting their kids under far too much pressure to be good at everything and do too much and that's coming back to what was saying earlier this is a real balance for parents to strike and to use proper judgment about I mean for example can I ask you how much time did you as kids spend outdoors playing just playing a lot a lot same with me so I grew up in Liverpool in the 1950s we come home from school and we go out in the street and we play or the local park for hours hours we didn't like to go home really we just we just went home for food you know we were like cats if there's food we went back to the house if not we cook to where the food was to some other somebody else's house children these days don't play like that as much I'm chairing an international initiative called dirt is good which is about promoting the importance of children's play we asked 12,000 families around the world as part of a survey that we've just done how much time their children spend outdoors playing and they on average and this is true most parks the world kids spend very much less than we did usually less than an hour often not anything like an hour sometimes not no time playing outdoors at the same time schools in many parts of the world are reducing time for play and they're doing it in schools because the focus on competition and testing and because they think play is trivial presumably or somebody does in the reason that children are playing outdoors is because parents are often frightened to let them out it's because they have too much homework that they have to get done it's because there isn't there aren't enough places to play and also there's a lot more going on to distract them inside than outside a lot of kids we found on the server would rather for example play football on a video game than go outside and play football well the reason we have a campaign about this is because play isn't trivial players vitally important in children's growth and development it's important socially cognitively emotionally and physically children have always played and it's vitally important that they do play for all those reasons but one of the reasons as well at times being cut back is because parents are over programming their children so when they do go outside it's often for some team activity the parents are supervising you know they're holding their coat and screaming at them you know from the touchline because they want the kids to be more and more competitive and for all these routes I think it's really important that we recognize that childhood is a very important time and we should allow our kids to be children I mean our children now are from a very early age is suffering from depression as well as adults they're suffering from all kinds of emotional disturbances which are created by the system children in schools are being diagnosed with attention problems and giving medicate given medication for it in fact if we just let them go out and play a lot of these problems disappear so I mean that's that's part of it I do think we have to relax a bit around our kids I mean I know for example we've we've done the same you know to some degree even when our kids were young you try and give them every opportunity but yeah but you never know how whether there's a a negative return on getting to do much I think we just need to I think we should encourage and spend less time on these devices I say encourage them I think sometimes we should just stop them spending so much time that's part of role of a parent you know not enough turn it off but yeah but for all those reasons I think that's that's the balance the strike Olesya Robinson minami-san philosophy professor at a secondary al trabajo como si Saranya toriel en los libros analisa las escuelas de las de del pasado y me gustaría preguntar lei como imogena que son la Salle's invent a train tonneaus no que le gustaría en contra ready okay well I should say right away I'm in favor of schools I mean some people aren't you know there's a whole movement to get rid of schools and unschooling but I think schools are very important I'd I make a distinction in you your child in school this fantastic book I mentioned earlier let's just been published that is great that one that there's a difference between learning education and school what I mean is that kids love to learn human beings are the most curious creatures will ever encounter I think but we have a granddaughter now she's five months old and like all babies she is fantastically interested in what's going on around her you can't stop her and she'll just get more curious that's the big driver of our achievement kids love to learn they don't all like education and some have a hard time with school the difference is that education as I see it anywhere is a more formal program of learning it's a more intentional program where the assumption is there are some things that we want our children to learn that we don't want to leave to chance or cultural or of the reasons all there are some things which are too difficult we feel for them to find out on their own so we need to help them but for those know the reasons we have formal systems of education and some people love it and some people don't get on with it the reason and a lot of them have a difficult time with school and the reason I think is that sometimes they're required to learn things they don't find very interesting or they're not taught in very interesting ways and and sometimes it's because our schools don't work with the natural conditions of learning like for example making people sit down all day breaking the day automatically up into the same chunks of time having somebody stand at the front and talk to you having to do things when you're tired having to do things with people you don't find very engaging there all kinds of ways and and often when you're going through a very difficult emotional time yourself but you still have to do it and then the threat of an exam at the end and if you fail you're in trouble through all kinds of things about schools and education systems which militate against the appetite for learning not always not inevitably but often so the reason I think it's important that we have schools is because what I was saying earlier what we learned we learn with and from each each other we don't live in a vacuum it's important that we see that learning is social and cultural as well as personal so what I want to do is help to redefine schools and get rid of things in schools that stop people wanting to learn and have more things in scores that make them want to learn not just on their own but from from one with other people so you see if you think of it if you cut back to as it were the basics about what is a school now we tend to think of schools these days as particular sort of institutions but if you forget that for a minute a school is at heart it's a community of learners people who come together to learn with and from each other and you can have a school anyway have a school in a park you can have a school in your apartment this is a kind of school you know we could reorganize this whole thing if we were staying here for the rest of the day and do this differently move doing it now because that's the way this was set up but a school is people coming together to learn with them from each other it could be two people ten people it could be a thousand people so the challenge is not to get rid of schools it's to reimagine how schools could be in ways that would encourage and cultivate the appetite for learning and feed it properly rather than as they so often do now staunch the appetite for learning and make people lose interest and on the contrary become antagonistic to the whole process as some people do they fall out of school they just don't finish it and they they they think of it as something to be throat and to get over with so what would that be well if you think of it again there are some elements you'd want to have I mean I think schools need a curriculum I mean a curriculum is what it is we want people to learn well again I think it's perfectly reasonable that we should collaboratively figure out what is it that we want kids to learn these days and I think a better framework than a group of subjects is to start with this idea of competencies and say well what sort of things will help those competencies evolve and then begin to think I think not of subjects but of disciplines you see music isn't a subject in the straight literal sense of it it's not just a lot of content music is a set of intellectual emotional physical technical and cultural skills and sensibilities you know you know if you listen to music from a strange culture you know one you're not familiar with you may not make any sense of it at all I know the first time I went to China at a Hong Kong and I listened to Chinese opera I had no idea what they were doing to a European ear it sounded like it was just out of tune you know it did it just sounded jarring and unpleasant but then you then you and then you don't know what they're doing anyhow you know but then you get into and then you think because this was in a stadium it's like a football with that people loved it you know I just didn't understand the code well music music is often like that so so mathematics isn't a subject in the sense it's just a set of propositions to be learned math McMath ematic is a highly creative beautiful discipline with deeply contentious arguments at the heart of it about the nature and structure mathematics and how it works and it's a multi-faceted set of different disciplines and fields of study but I'd want to see mathematics the arts the humanities physical education and languages co-equal and interacting in a curriculum you think about teaching and learning that's part of it it's it's group coming together to teach and learn I the best schools I know are highly interactive and where you have teachers working together and students helping to plan what's going on you have regular rhythms for example in Finland there are regular breaks in the school day in every 45 minutes kids get a 10-minute break they'll do something else they go and run around they come back they don't have a problem with the tension because they know kids need to get up and run around and be active and busy in terms of coach you wanted to be highly collaborative you know that's why democratic schools are so good you want a very flexible schedule in a school so people can drop some in do something else they find more interesting much more self-determination in a school rather than kids being told to sit down and do something that with no choice there's some things they need to learn but that there should be much more freedom and when they choose to and who they choose to do it with and I say this not because these are theories I can take and show you schools that are doing it right now scores which are reinventing the rhythms of institutional life and getting much better results for doing it and you know you want to school where assessment is seen not as a challenge but as a support to learning which is what it should be and the new technologies allow us to do that by they're in a much better way now we can ask portfolios we can have much more in divide individualized learning plans I know schools now where kids have their own timetable every day you know definite and and a lot also mixed age teaching and learning there's no reason why we should keep kids behind it and teach them by age group we don't do that in families we don't need to do it in schools that's not an educational principle that's an administrative convenience it's actually rather inconvenient vivint's that's why we do it so if we refer to rethink how schools work and look at what gets in the way of learning and replace it with things that facilitate it we should keep schools but have them reimagined and we won't come up with one way of doing it any more than we've come up with one way of doing music or one band or one sort of restaurant but they'll all be good if we think differently [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: enseñanza, profesorado, creatividad, innovación, escuela, arte, discapacidad, sistema educativo, pedagogía, formación profesional, tecnologías, creativity, sir ken robinson, sir ken robinson ted, school, teachers, school life, art, education, disability awareness, Ken Robinson, talk

Id: gGSoWoTlElQ

Length: 109min 7sec (6547 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 17 2018