TSPC a_ted_talk

Top a_ted_talk_11

title	Subtitle data from Ken Robinson at TED2006: Do schools kill creativity?
date	2006/02
source	TED talk subtitles
link	Available from https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.
terms of use	Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution Non-Commercial License.

1	Good morning.
2	How are you?
3	It's been great, hasn't it?
4	I've been blown away by the whole thing.
5	In fact, I'm leaving.
6	There have been three themes running through the conference which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
7	One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here.
8	Just the variety of it and the range of it.
9	The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future.
10	No idea how this may play out.
11	I have an interest in education.
12	Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education.
13	Don't you?
14	I find this very interesting.
15	If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education --
16	Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.
17	If you work in education, you're not asked.
18	And you're never asked back, curiously.
19	That's strange to me.
20	But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do?” and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face.
21	They're like, Oh my God,” you know, “Why me?”
22	“My one night out all week.”
23	But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall.
24	Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?
25	Like religion, and money and other things.
26	So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do.
27	We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
28	If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.
29	Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time.
30	And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.
31	So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
32	And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation.
33	I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she?
34	Just seeing what she could do.
35	And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood.
36	What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent.
37	And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents.
38	And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.
39	So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity.
40	My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
41	Thank you.
42	That was it, by the way.
43	Thank you very much.
44	So, 15 minutes left.
45	Well, I was born... no.
46	I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson.
47	She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did.
48	The teacher was fascinated.
49	She went over to her, and she said, “What are you drawing?”
50	And the girl said, “I'm drawing a picture of God.”
51	And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.”
52	And the girl said, “They will, in a minute.”
53	When my son was four in England --
54	Actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.
55	If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year.
56	He was in the Nativity play.
57	Do you remember the story?
58	No, it was big, it was a big story.
59	Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.
60	“Nativity II.”
61	But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.
62	We considered this to be one of the lead parts.
63	We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts:
64	“James Robinson IS Joseph!”
65	He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in?
66	They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh.
67	This really happened.
68	We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, “You OK with that?”
69	And he said, “Yeah, why? Was that wrong?”
70	They just switched.
71	The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, “I bring you gold.”
72	And the second boy said, “I bring you myrrh.”
73	And the third boy said, “Frank sent this.”
74	What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.
75	If they don't know, they'll have a go.
76	Am I right?
77	They're not frightened of being wrong.
78	I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.
79	What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong.
80	And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.
81	They have become frightened of being wrong.
82	And we run our companies like this.
83	We stigmatize mistakes.
84	And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
85	And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
86	Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists.
87	The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.
88	I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it.
89	Or rather, we get educated out of it.
90	So why is this?
91	I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago.
92	In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.
93	So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was.
94	Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born.
95	Are you struck by a new thought?
96	I was.
97	You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you?
98	Do you?
99	Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?
100	Shakespeare being seven?
101	I never thought of it.
102	I mean, he was seven at some point.
103	He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?
104	How annoying would that be?
105	“Must try harder.”
106	Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now!
107	And put the pencil down.”
108	“And stop speaking like that.”
109	“It's confusing everybody.”
110	Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition.
111	My son didn't want to come.
112	I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16.
113	He didn't want to come to Los Angeles.
114	He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England.
115	This was the love of his life, Sarah.
116	He'd known her for a month.
117	Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16.
118	He was really upset on the plane, he said, “I'll never find another girl like Sarah.”
119	And we were rather pleased about that, frankly -- Because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
120	But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world:
121	Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.
122	Every one.
123	Doesn't matter where you go.
124	You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.
125	At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.
126	Everywhere on Earth.
127	And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts.
128	Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.
129	There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.
130	Why?
131	Why not?
132	I think this is rather important.
133	I think math is very important, but so is dance.
134	Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do.
135	We all have bodies, don't we?
136	Did I miss a meeting?
137	Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up.
138	And then we focus on their heads.
139	And slightly to one side.
140	If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What's it for, public education?”
141	I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners --
142	I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.
143	Isn't it?
144	They're the people who come out the top.
145	And I used to be one, so there.
146	And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement.
147	They're just a form of life, another form of life.
148	But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them.
149	There's something curious about professors in my experience --
150	not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads.
151	They live up there, and slightly to one side.
152	They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way.
153	They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.
154	Don't they?
155	It's a way of getting their head to meetings.
156	If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night.
157	And there, you will see it.
158	Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat. Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
159	Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.
160	And there's a reason.
161	Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century.
162	They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
163	So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.
164	Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.
165	So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.
166	Is that right?
167	Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist.
168	Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken.
169	The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
170	And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image.
171	If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance.
172	And the consequence is that many highly - talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized.
173	And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
174	In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history.
175	More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
176	Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.
177	Isn't that true?
178	When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.
179	If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.
180	And I didn't want one, frankly.
181	But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other.
182	It's a process of academic inflation.
183	And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.
184	We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
185	We know three things about intelligence.
186	One, it's diverse.
187	We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it.
188	We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.
189	We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
190	Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.
191	If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive.
192	The brain isn't divided into compartments.
193	In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
194	By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum.
195	It's thicker in women.
196	Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking.
197	Because you are, aren't you?
198	There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
199	If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often, thankfully.
200	No, she's good at some things, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here.
201	If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed.
202	I say, “Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here.”
203	“Give me a break.”
204	Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen?
205	Remember that old chestnut?
206	I saw a great t-shirt recently, which said, “If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”
207	And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct.
208	I'm doing a new book at the moment called “Epiphany,” which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent.
209	I'm fascinated by how people got to be there.
210	It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne.
211	Have you heard of her?
212	Some have.
213	She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work.
214	She did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera.”
215	She's wonderful.
216	I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.
217	Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, “How did you get to be a dancer?”
218	It was interesting.
219	When she was at school, she was really hopeless.
220	And the school, in the'30s, wrote to her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.”
221	She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting.
222	I think now they'd say she had ADHD.
223	Wouldn't you?
224	But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point.
225	It wasn't an available condition.
226	People weren't aware they could have that.
227	Anyway, she went to see this specialist.
228	So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about the problems Gillian was having at school.
229	Because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight.
230	In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said, “I've listened to all these things your mother's told me, I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long,” and they went and left her.
231	But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk.
232	And when they got out, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.”
233	And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music.
234	And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
235	I said, “What happened?”
236	She said, “She did.
237	I can't tell you how wonderful it was.
238	We walked in this room and it was full of people like me.
239	People who couldn't sit still.
240	People who had to move to think.”
241	Who had to move to think.
242	They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary.
243	She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.
244	She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber.
245	She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multi-millionaire.
246	Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
247	What I think it comes to is this:
248	Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.
249	I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.
250	Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity.
251	And for the future, it won't serve us.
252	We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.
253	There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.”
254	And he's right.
255	What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.
256	We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about.
257	And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are.
258	And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.
259	By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will.
260	And our job is to help them make something of it.
261	Thank you very much.