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(Vision - Tomorrow's ideas, Today)

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(Sir Ken Robinson "Changing Paradigms" - recipient of the 2008 RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal)

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Ken Robinson: Thank you very much. Were you surprised when it was actually me who got the medal?

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Were you? You could feel the tension building, couldn't you? "Who will it be?"

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Thank you. I am genuinely humbled to have this award.

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I was thinking earlier that being humbled isn't a normal feeling, is it?

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I don't often feel humbled - disparaged, humiliated, you know, put down

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But humbled is a rather old feeling, isn't it? It's not a modern emotion.

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But I do feel it, and particularly to have this award in the name of Benjamin Franklin

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who was a most remarkable man. He lived nearby, in Craven street. The house is a few minutes away

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and I really recommend you go and take a look at it. It has just been renovated.

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It's a very powerful evocation of the life of this extraordinary figure,

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a man who was deeply involved in the growth of industrialism,

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a part of the Enlightenment, at the heart of the creation of the New World,

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and with a passion for education.

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A man who was also deeply invested in science, in the arts, in the humanities and in politics.

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A polymath, I think, a Renaissance figure in the heart of the Enlightenment -

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and one of the first significant members of the Royal Society of Arts.

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If you don't know this institution, I really encourage you to find more about it.

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It was founded, I think I'm correct in saying, in 1753, by William Shipley,

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and its full name is the Royal Society of Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

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And it's had a long history in the promotion and advocacy of appropriate forms of public education.

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I have had a long association myself with the RSA. I gave a lecture here

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- even Matthew may not know this - in July of 1990, in this very room.

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And I propose to repeat it word for word, if that's alright? (audience laughs)

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Don't you I should waste time thinking anything fresh for you, frankly?

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No, in 1990, I had been running a national Arts in Schools project

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and I had published a book on the arts in schools.

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I have a great passion for the arts, and we were meeting here,

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shortly after the introduction of the national curriculum in England,

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which profoundly misunderstood the place of the arts in education.

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So I was talking about how the arts could be made part of the main stream of education.

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And here we are, 17 years later - well it's all so different, I feel.

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So I want to say a few words about that, and I want to show you a couple of short movie clips,

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and then to have a conversation with you.

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One of the things that have happened to me since 1990 is that I have moved to live in America

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and I moved there 7 years ago, at the invitation of the Getty Center.

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I didn't flee Great Britain, but put yourself in my place:

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I had a phone call on the 3rd of January 1990, when I was living near Coventry.

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And this guy said: "Would you like to come and live in California?" (audience laughs)

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We left immediately. (audience laughs) I didn't ask what the job was, we just went.

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And - the phone is still swinging on the hook, actually, in the house,

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and we hope some day the children will track us down, but we don't care.

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But I now live in America, and I love it. Who has been to Los Angeles? Here, anyone?

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It's an extraordinary place.

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We were in Las Vegas recently, my wife and I. We've been together for 30 years

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and we decided last year to get married again.

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So we went to the Elvis Chapel (audience laughs). Now, I recommend it. You should do it.

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We had the Blue Hawaii package, but there are others. The Blue Hawaii package, you get the

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Elvis impersonator, 4 songs, the chapel, of course, a puff of smoke as you go in -

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you have to request that - and a hula girl, that was optional, but I opted for it,

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for reasons I was rather pleased about, frankly.

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For another 100 dollars, we could have had a pink Cadillac, but we thought that was a bit tacky.

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We thought that was lowering the tone of the whole occasion, frankly

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but I mention it, because Las Vegas is an iconic example of the things I would like us to talk about.

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Not Las Vegas in itself, but the idea that gave rise to it.

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If you think of it, every other city on earth has a reason to be where it is.

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Like London, you know, it's in a natural basin, so it's good for trade, or it's in a harbour,

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or it's in a valley, so it's good for agriculture, you know, or it's on a hillside, so it's good for defence.

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But none of this is true of Las Vegas. There is no physical reason for it to be there.

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The only reason it's there is the thing that gave rise to this organization,

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that affects every aspect of your life, which makes humanity what it is.

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The only thing, in my opinion, which is the extraordinary power,

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which is bestowed on human beings, that no other species has, so far as we can judge.

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I mean the power of imagination. We take it totally for granted.

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This capacity to bring into mind the things that aren't present,

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and on that base to hypothesize about things that have never been, but could be.

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Every feature of human culture, in my view, is the consequence of this unique capacity.

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Now, other creatures may have something like it, other creatures sing,

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but they don't write operas. Other creatures are agile, but they don't form Olympic Committees.

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They communicate, but they don't have festivals of theatre.

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They have structures, but they don't build buildings and furnish them.

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We are unique in this capacity, a capacity that has produced the most extraordinary diversity

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of human culture, of enterprise, of innovation, 6000 languages currently spoken on earth.

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And the great adventure which produced, among other things, the Royal Society of Arts

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and all of its works.

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But I believe that we systematically destroy this capacity in our children and in ourselves.

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Now, I pick my words carefully. I don't say "deliberately".

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I don't think it's deliberate, but it happens to be systematic.

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We do it routinely, unthinkingly, and that's the worst of it.

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Because we take for granted certain ideas about education, about children,

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about what it is to be educated, about social need and social utility, about economic purpose.

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We take these ideas for granted, and they turn out not to be true.

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Many ideas that seem obvious turn out not to be true. That was really the great adventure of the Enlightenment:

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ideas that seemed obvious that turned out not to be true.

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Ironically though, I believe, the legacy of the Enlightenment is now hampering

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the reforms that are needed in education.

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We have grown up in a system of public education which is dominated by two ideas.

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One of them is a conception of economic utility. And you can illustrate that directly.

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It's implicit in the structure of the school curriculum. It's simply present.

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There is in every school system on earth a hierarchy of subjects. You know it: you went through it.

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If you're in education, you have probably subscribed to it, or you have contributed to it, somehow.

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When we moved to America, we put our kids into high school, and it was recognizable.

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The curriculum is totally recognizable: Math, science and the English language at the top;

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then the humanities, down, and the arts way down at the bottom.

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And in the arts, there is always another hierarchy, art and music are always thought to be more important

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than drama and dance.

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There isn't a school in the country that I know of - a school system, let me be clear -

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there isn't a school system actually anywhere that teaches dance every day, systematically,

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to every child, in the way that we require them to learn mathematics.

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Now I'm not against mathematics, on the contrary. But why is dance such a looser in the system?

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Well, I think, one of the reasons is, people never say any economic point in it.

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So there's an economic judgment that's made in the structure of school curriculum.

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And I'm sure it was true of you: you probably found yourself benignly steered away

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from things you were good at in school, towards things that other people advised would be

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more useful to you.

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So effectively, our school curricula are based on the premiss that there are two sorts of subjects:

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useful ones and useless ones. And the useless ones fall away, eventually.

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And they fall away especially when money starts to become tight, as it always is.

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George Bush was in town, today, wasn't he? I just thought I'd share the pain, that was all.

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I just - I'm feeling it. No: President Bush, as I call him, was responsible, with others,

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for a cross-party piece of legislation in America, to reform public education.

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And I have had lots of conversations about it, now I live in America, which I shall keep saying, by the way,

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to make you feel bad, OK? I live in California and you don't. So there.

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No, when I got to America, I was told that the Americans don't get irony.

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This is not true. This is a British conceit. I feel OK about it, because there are other ones.

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When we went to America, we were given a guidebook

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of how to behave in America - honestly, by our removals agent. How to behave in America.

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I'm handing it out now to all the Americans I meet now, like: "You do it, you do it", you know

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"Let's all behave properly, shall we?" But one of the things that was said in it was:

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"Don't hug people in America. They don't like it." Honestly, it's explicit:

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"Don't hug them, they don't like it." This turns out to be nonsens. They love it.

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People in my experience love getting hugged in America, but we thought they didn't, so

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for the first year, we had kept our arms at our sides at social gatherings, for fear of committing offence

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and this all added to the idea that we tipified British reserve, you know,

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or that we were some refugees from River Dance.

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But I was told the Americans don't get irony. And then I came across this piece of legislation in America,

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called No Child Left Behind.

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And I thought, whoever came up with that title gets irony, because

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this legislation is leaving millions of children behind.

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Of, course, that's not a very attractive name for a legislation,

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"Millions of Children Left Behind"; I can see that, but give or take a twittle,

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it's the 1998 Education Act in this country.

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It was the manifesto, pretty much, that inspired the work of Chris Woodhead, I believe,

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during his time at OFSTED.

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Now I think this is important, because what it represents to me, is the ideology of education,

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written large, and that's the problem.

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So let me talk about changing paradigms. My firm conviction is that we have to do much, much more

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than is currently happening. Every country on earth, at the moment, is reforming public education.

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I don't know of an exception. Mind you, what's new? We've always been reforming public education.

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But we are doing it now consistently and systematically, all over the place.

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There are two reasons for it. The first one is economic. People try to work out

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how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century?

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How do we do that, even if we can't anticipate what the economy will look like

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at the end of next week, as the recent turmoil is demonstrating.

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How do we do that? The second, though, is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out,

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how do we educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity

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and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities,

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while being part of the process of globalization? How do we square that circle?

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Most countries, I believe, are doing what we were doing in 1988, operating on the premiss

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that the challenge is to reform education, to make it a better version of what it was.

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In other words, the challenge is just to do better what we did before, but improve.

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And we have to raise standards. And people say we have to raise standards, as if this is a breakthrough.

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Like really, yes, we should. Why would you lower them, you know?

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I haven't come across an argument that persuaded me of lowering them.

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But raising them - of course we should raise them. The problem is that the current system of education,

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in my view and experience, was designed and conceived and structured for a different age.

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It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances

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of the Industrial Revolution. Before the middle of the 19th century, there were no systems

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of public education - not really, I mean, you could get educated by Jesuits, you know,

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if you had the money. But public education, paid for from taxation, compulsory to everybody

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and free at the point of delivery, that was a revolutionary idea.

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And many people objected to it. They said: "It's not possible for many street kids,

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working-class children, to benefit from public education: they're incapable of learning

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to read and write, and why are we spending time on this?"

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So there is also built into it, the whole series of assumptions about

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social structuring capacity. But it was designed for its purpose, which why, as the public system evolved

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into the 19th and early 20th century, we ended up with a very broad base of elementary education,

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junior schools. Everybody went to that. My father's father, my grandfather, he went to that.

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He left school by the time he was 12. Most people did, then, at the turn of the century.

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And then, gradually, we introduced a layer above it, a secondary education,

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and some people went into that, but my father left school at 14, having gone into that.

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And then, a small university sector, set across the top of it.

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And the assumption was that people would work up and a few would get to the top,

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and would go to university. It was modelled on the economic premisses of industrialism,

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that is, that we needed a broad base of people to do manual, blue-collar work

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and, you know, roughly, they could do language and arithmetic;

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a smaller group who would go to administrative work: that was what the grammar schools were for;

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and an even smaller group who would go off and run the Empire for us, and become

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the lawyers, and the judges, and the doctors - and they were the universities.

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Now, I simplify, but that's essentially how the thing came about.

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And it was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it,

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was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the Enlightenment's view of intelligence,

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that real intelligence consists in this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning,

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and a knowledge of the classics, originally, what we come to think of as academic ability.

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And this is deep in the gene pool of public education, that there are really two types of people:

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academic and non academic; smart people and non smart people.

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And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not,

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because they're being judged against this particular view of the mind.

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So we have twin pillars: economic and intellectual. And my view is that this model

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has caused chaos in many people's lives.

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It has been great for some: there are people who benefitted wonderfully from it.

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But most people have not, and it has created a massive problem.

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I spoke at a conference a couple of - well, the TED conference that Matthew refered to.

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One of the other speakers was Al Gore, or Al, as I refer to him.

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Al Gore gave the talk at the TED conference - by the way, if you don't know the TED conference,

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I do recommend you visit the website, TED.com: it is fantastic.

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But Al Gore gave the talk that became the movie "Inconvenient Truth".

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Al Gore's view, which isn't his, he'd be the first to say it, it dates back to Rachel Carson

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and earlier. It actually dates back, if you look, even to the work of Linnaeus in the 18th centry,

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it dates back to Franklin, it dates back to the work of this society.

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A concern with the ecology of the natural world, and the sustainability of industrialism

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in the 17th and 18th century, they were concerned about them.

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But his work is an attempt to put the case back into a modern context.

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I believe he's right, and it's not just his view. A group of geologists have recently published a paper,

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in which they argue that the earth has entered a new geological period.

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Classically, the view is that since the end of the last Ice Age, about 12'000 years ago,

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we are in a period called the Holocene period.

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They believe we've entered a new period. And they say, if people were to - a future generation

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of geologists were to come to earth, they would see the evidence of it,

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of a change in the earth's geological personality. They would see it in the evidence of

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carbon deposits in the earth's crust, the acidification of oceans,

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the evidence of the mass extinction of species, the change in the earth's atmosphere,

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and hundreds of other indicators.

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They say it's unmistakably, in their view, a new geological period.

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A series of Nobel scientists have agreed to this view. They are provisionally calling this, not the holocene

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but the anthropocene. What they mean by that is a geological age created by the activities of people,

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as in anthropos. And they say there is no historical questioning of this.

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And this is really what I want to get to. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, William Shipley,

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the great figures of the Enlightenment, both in politics and science, and the arts,

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were conceiving public education, and civic structures, and politics of duty

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at a time of revolutionary turmoil. It was the age of revolutions in France, in America,

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not long after our civil disturbance here,

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at a time of extraordinary intellectual adventures and new horizons, extraordinary innovation.

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Before them, there was nothing, really, that ever lead to an age of such innovation

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and such extraordinary change - the rate of it.

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And it was a fair caracterization of the times.

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But there is every evidence to show now that what was happening then is as nothing

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to what is happening now.

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I believe the changes taking place on earth now are without precedent,

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in terms of their character and their implications.

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And our best salvation is to develop this capacity for imagination, and do it systematically

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through public education, and to connect people with their true talents.

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We simply can't afford this devastation anymore.

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So when Al Gore talks about this, I believe him. And I think that if you don't think that

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there is a crisis in the world's natural environment, then you're not paying attention.

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And I would take the option to leave the planet soon, right?

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You see, I believe that there is a parallel climate crisis.

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Now one of them is probably enough for you, honestly.

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You know: I think now I'm fine, one is good. I don't need a second one.

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But there is a second one, and it's what my work is about, and I guess what many of you

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will be concerned about, and I know, what Edge is concerned about,

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and what Matthew and the RSA's committee are concerned about.

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But let me put it in a particular way to you. I believe there is a global crisis,

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not only in natural resources, though I believe it - a global crisis in human resources.

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I believe that the parallel with the crisis in the natural world is exact.

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And the costs of clearing this up are catastrophic.

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I'll give you a couple of quick examples. In California, the State Government last year spent

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about 3 billion dollars on the State University system.

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These are public figures. They spent over 9 billion dollars on the State prison system.

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Now, I cannot believe that more potential criminals are born every year in California

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than potential college graduates. What you have are people in bad conditions going bad.

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I remember Bernard Levin, once, he wrote in one of his articles in the Times

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and he said he'd been at a dinner party, and he was asked - the question round the dinner table was:

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"Are people mainly good or mainly bad?".

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And he said, without hesitation, they're mainly good.

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He said I was astonished to find I was in a minority round the table, a minority of one.

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But he believed with Viktor Frankl, who survived the Holocaust

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and saw his parents die, that for all of that, people are fundamentally good.

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I believe they are fundamentally good, but there are people living in very bad circumstances and conditions.

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And if you put people in poor conditions, they behave in particular ways.

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So we spend a lot of our time remediating the damage.

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And meanwhile, I think that the other exact parallel is that pharmaceutical companies

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are reaping a gold rush from this distress.

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If you look at the growth of antidepressants, of prescription drugs to treat depression,

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to suppress people's feelings, this is a gold rush, I mean pharmaceutical companies

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don't want to cure depression, on the contrary.

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I mean also, one of the things I saw recently is that suicide rates among 15-30 year olds

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have increased over 60% globally since the 1960's.

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It's one of the largest causes of death among the young people.

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What is that? You know, people born with hope and optimism, who decide to check out,

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because they can't cope.

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Now, I don't say education is part of that, or responsible for it,

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but it contributes to it. That's really all I want to say.

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So this crisis of human resources is, I think, absolutely urgent and palpable.

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So the challenge, to me, is not to reform education, but to transform it into something else.

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I think we have to come to a definite set of assumptions.

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Now, I say this advisedly, because I have been involved in all kinds of initiatives

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over my professional life. I started out in drama work, I moved and began some school's project,

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some of the people in the room I've known for years and worked with for the years,

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and I've had a long association here.

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One of the great initiatives of the RSA, in the 1980's, was "Education for Capability".

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You should look at "Education for Capability", it said extraordinary useful and practical things,

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and there were wonderful people around it: Charles Handy, whom I got to know recently,

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well, not recently, but I've got to know well in recent years: he was chairman here, of the RSA;

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Tyrell Burgess, Corelli Barnet, Patrick Lutchens,

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I shared an appartment, when I was a student, with Patrick's son -

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and - a kind of galaxy of really powerful thinkers - John Tomlinson who was chairman here for a while,

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who was with me at Warwick University.

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There's been a long tradition of arguing for the change, arguing for the alternative.

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And yet successive governments come in and do what they did before

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And this really worries me - and I speak personally - you know, that after all the optimism I felt

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10 years ago, I feel that we've had, of the past 10 years - a kind of myriads of policies,

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but too few principles. I can't see what they've added up to.

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And I say that because I didn't see it before, and I don't see it anywhere else.

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I mean there are some countries, which I feel are getting this right, but we're not.

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And the reason is, because we're not fundamentally changing the underlying assumptions of the system,

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which should deal with intelligence, ability, economic purpose and what people need.

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We still educate people from the outside in. We figure out what the country needs

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and we try and get it to conform with it, rather than seeing what makes people drive forward

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and building education systems around a model of personhood, which is what I think we should come to.

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So let me - I just want to show you a couple of quick slides to - I don't have to,

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but as I've gone through the trouble of preparing them, frankly -

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I just want to give you an example of a couple of things, here.

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Oh, by the way, so many things that Matthew kindly said, are in this book.

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This book, by the way, is terrific. OK? You cound't do better than buying this book.

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That is, unless you buy this book,

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which is a new book, which is coming out in January from Penguin. I'm very excited about this book.

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This book is about the nature of human talent and how people discover it.

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It's based on the premiss that people do their best when they do the thing they love,

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when they are in their element. So I was trying to get to what that is. What is it to be in your element?

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And I spoke to scientists and artists and business leaders and poets and parents and kids.

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And it seems to me, the evidence is absolutely persuasive, when people connect to this

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powerful sense of talent in themselves, discover what it is they can do, they become somebody else.

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And that, to me, is the premiss of building a new education system.

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It's not about bringing force in the old model, but reconstituting our sense of self.

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And it happens to synergize - errh, is that a verb? I'm not sure - with the new economic purposes.

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There are 2 big drives of change, currently: one is technology, you know that?

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This is a brain cell. What I want to draw on it, what I want to underline,

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is that technology is moving faster than most people really, truthfully, understand.

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Can I ask you, how many of you here consider yourselves to be baby-boomers or older?

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I thought so. All of you - who is not? who consider yourselves to be a generation X or millenial? OK

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You boomer types or older - Actually, no. If you are over 30, would you put your hand up

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if you are wearing a wristwatch?

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There we go, thank you. Just curious. No, this is interesting.

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Ask a roomful of teenagers the same question. Ask them if they wear wristwatches. They mainly don't.

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And the reason is - I wanted to make 2 points - the reason they don't wear wristwateches

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is because they don't see the point. Because for them, time is everywhere.

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You know, it's on their iPhones, their iPods their mobiles - it's everywhere.

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No, why would you wear this? And my daughter comes on: "Why should I put a special device

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on my wrist to tell the time?" And she said, "Plus, it only does one thing." you know, like,

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"How lame is that? A single-function device, so you - have you cranked up?"

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But we take it for granted, don't we? You have other options, but this thing I mean about

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taking for granted is important. It's the things we take for granted that we need to kind of

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identify and question. I mean, did you think about putting your warch on this morning?

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Truthfully, was it like an agony? "Shall I" - you know - "Is it a 'watchy' day? I just don't know, really.

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I'll put it on to be safe, you know." You don't: you just do it.

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Our kids don't, and the point is of some importance. A guy called Mark Prensky made this point,

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that our children live in a different world. He made - talks about the difference between

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digital natives and digital immigrants.

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If you were born - If you're under 20, you're an immigrant - you're a native.

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You speak digital, you were born with this stuff and it's in your head, like a first language.

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We're less so. But the point is, this is getting faster and faster and faster.

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One of the new horizons is likely to be the merging of human intelligence with information systems.

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That's a brain cell, and that's a brain cell growing on a silicon chip.

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Well, we see. But there are things that lie ahead, for which there are no precedent.

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And the impact on culture promises to be extraordinary.

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This is the other thing I want to point to, which is the curve of the wold's population.

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You see, 1750, when the RSA was being established, and William Shipley was wondering

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what to do in the evenings, there were about a billion people on the whole of the earth:

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pretty evenly distributed, mostly in the far-flung parts of what became the Empire,

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but a lot of them in the industrialized - what would become the industrialized economies.

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About a billion people. London was a tiny place, by comparison.

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Now, if you look at this curve, we are at around 6 billion, and the big jump happened in 1970.

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Well, from 1970 to the year 2000, where the population on earth increased by over 3 million.

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1968, remember, was the Summer of love. It's probably a coincidence.

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Yes but - but we all did our bit, you know. That's all right.

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But this is interesting: the dot line is the growth of population in the developed economies.

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The real growth is happening in the emergent economies:

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Asia, Africa, parts of South America and so on. And it's heading to 9 billion.

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The other thing that's happening is that the world is becoming increasingly urbanized.

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At the beginning of the 18th century, until 19th century, most people lived in the countryside.

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About 3% of people lived in the cities. Of course, the great social movement of industrialism

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was the migration to the cities.

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But even so, at the turn of the 20th century, still, something less than 20% of the people lived in cities.

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Currently, 50% of the world's population lives in cities. 50% of the 6 billion,

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and we are heading to 60% of nine billion people living in cities -

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not here, not in UK, not in America, not in the rest of Europe, but in the emergent economies.

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Now, this massive migration is without precedent.

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So these aren't going to be groovy cities, you know, with information booths and property taxes and Starbucks.

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These are massive, sprawling, vernacular cities, probably more like this.

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This is Caracas, in Venezuela. A massive and rapidly growing metropolis.

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The greater Tokyo, at the moment, has a population of 35 million people, which is more

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than the entire population of Canada, in one place.

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Now about the middle of the century, there may be 20 megacities, over 500 cities over a million.

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You can see my point, here, that these are unprecedented circumstances,

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an unprecedented drain on the earth's resources, an unprecedented demand for innovation,

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for fresh thinking, fresh social systems, fresh ways forgetting people to connect with themselves

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and have lives with purpose and meaning.

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Education is a major part of the solution. The problem is, I believe, we are backing the wrong horses.

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Now, there was a report by McKinsey recently, which showed this

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These are American figures. In America, since 1980 more or less, spending on education

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has increased 73% in real money.

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Class sizes have gone down to historically low levels.

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But on this indicator, literacy, there has been no change in achievement.

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More money, smaller classes, no change.

387
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Drop-put rates are increasing, graduation rates are declining: it's a major problem.

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The problem is, they're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past.

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And on the way, they're alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school.

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When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which was that if you worked hard

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and did well, and got a college degree, you would have a job.

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Our kids don't believe that. And they're right not to, by the way.

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You're better having a degree than not, but it's not a guarantee anymore, and particularly not if

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the route to it marginalizes most of the things that you think are important about yourself.

395
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And one thing that sits right in the middle of this is this idea

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that there are academic and non academic kids, that something called vocational training,

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which is not as good as academic education, that people with theoretical degrees

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are inherently better people than those who can do real craft and the kind of work which

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previously would have been venerated in Guild systems.

400
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We have this intellectual apartheid running through education.

401
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And so, lots of people try to defend it or to repair it.

402
00:34:30,405 --> 00:34:34,667
I think we just got to reconize its mythical. And we have to strip it out of our thinking.

403
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This is one of the consequences of it. Let me ask you another question.

404
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How many of you who are not - how many of you over 30 have had your tonsils removed? Be frank with me.

405
00:34:49,948 --> 00:34:57,902
Come. OK. I ask you this for a reason, connected with things we take for granted.

406
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People of my generation, and I was born in 1950. Now, I know you don't believe that.

407
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I can see the sense of incredulity sweeping through the room, eh?

408
00:35:09,841 --> 00:35:13,115
"How could it be?", you're saying to yourselves. Well, I live in Los Angeles, you know.

409
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I have worked on it, what can I tell you? But er, no but people of my generation, in the 50's and 60's,

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and in the 40's, I guess. The minute they had a sore throat, somebody pounced on them

411
00:35:32,271 --> 00:35:38,110
and took their tonsils out. That's true, isn't it? It was routine to have your tonsils removed.

412
00:35:38,110 --> 00:35:42,479
You could not afford to have a ticklish cough in the 1950's,

413
00:35:43,125 --> 00:35:47,131
or somebody would reach for your throat, and hey pronto, would remove your tonsils.

414
00:35:47,792 --> 00:35:51,882
It was routine. Millions of tonsils were removed in that period.

415
00:35:52,098 --> 00:35:57,352
What happened to them? We don't know. I mean - I believe it's a scandal, I don't know, but -

416
00:35:57,475 --> 00:36:00,395
It's one of those things like Rockwell, you know, like area 56.

417
00:36:00,395 --> 00:36:03,982
Somewhere in America, in a desert, there is this stockpile. Anyway.

418
00:36:05,336 --> 00:36:10,515
Now the thing about this is this, that nowadays, people do have tonsilectomies,

419
00:36:11,885 --> 00:36:19,452
but it's not common. It's unusual to have it done. You have to have a chronic case,

420
00:36:20,621 --> 00:36:24,333
with no hope of it being repaired in some other way, to have your tonsils taken out.

421
00:36:24,671 --> 00:36:27,015
When I was growing up, they were thought to be totally disposable.

422
00:36:27,138 --> 00:36:29,975
We just wipped them out and let's not have anymore nonsense out them.

423
00:36:29,975 --> 00:36:33,198
And some people voluntarily had it done, so that they could get the ice cream.

424
00:36:35,229 --> 00:36:41,600
Our children, this generation, do not suffer the plague of tonsilectomies.

425
00:36:41,754 --> 00:36:48,067
Instead, they suffer this: this is the modern epidemic, and it is as misplaced, and it's as fictitious.

426
00:36:48,421 --> 00:36:57,092
This is the plague of ADHD. Now, this is a map of the incidence of ADHD in America,

427
00:36:57,092 --> 00:37:03,415
or prescriptions for ADHD. Don't mistake me: I don't mean to say there is no such thing

428
00:37:03,462 --> 00:37:08,379
as Attention Deficit Disorder. I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing.

429
00:37:08,533 --> 00:37:12,587
I know that a great majority of psychologists and pediatricians think there is such a thing.

430
00:37:13,525 --> 00:37:15,302
But it's still a matter of debate.

431
00:37:17,133 --> 00:37:24,802
What I do know for a fact, is it's not an epidemic. I believe that these kids are being medicated

432
00:37:25,048 --> 00:37:30,515
as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis,

433
00:37:30,654 --> 00:37:33,348
and for the same reason: medical fashion.

434
00:37:34,071 --> 00:37:41,013
Our children are living in the most intense, intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth.

435
00:37:42,029 --> 00:37:46,213
They are being besieged with information and calls to their attention

436
00:37:46,321 --> 00:37:51,429
from every platform: computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings,

437
00:37:51,429 --> 00:37:52,913
from hundreds of television channels.

438
00:37:52,913 --> 00:37:55,979
And we are penalizing them now for getting distracted.

439
00:37:57,179 --> 00:38:02,364
from what? you know, boring stuff at school, for the most part.

440
00:38:02,487 --> 00:38:06,838
It seems to me it's not a coincidence, totally, that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel

441
00:38:06,838 --> 00:38:08,400
with the growth of standardized testing.

442
00:38:09,508 --> 00:38:13,433
Now, these kids are being given Ritalin, and Adrol and all manner of things -

443
00:38:13,510 --> 00:38:17,464
often quite dangerous drugs - to get them focused and calm them down.

444
00:38:19,125 --> 00:38:21,748
Now, I know this is nonsense, immediately you see this thing,

445
00:38:22,256 --> 00:38:24,915
because the light areas are where there isn't much of it.

446
00:38:24,915 --> 00:38:31,831
Now I live in California and people there won't pay attention for more than a minute and a half,

447
00:38:31,985 --> 00:38:36,854
you know, so - but according to this, Attention Deficit Disorder increases

448
00:38:36,854 --> 00:38:38,538
as you travel East across the country.

449
00:38:38,708 --> 00:38:41,013
People start losing interest in Oklahoma,

450
00:38:47,721 --> 00:38:49,544
they can hardly think straight in Arkansas,

451
00:38:50,744 --> 00:38:53,400
and by the time you get to Washington, they've lost it completely.

452
00:38:54,615 --> 00:38:56,469
And there are separate reasons for that, I believe.

453
00:38:58,054 --> 00:39:03,441
It's a fictitious disease. I'm sorry, I don't want to say it's a fictitious condition,

454
00:39:03,441 --> 00:39:04,741
it's a fictitious epidemic.

455
00:39:04,941 --> 00:39:07,659
As I was saying earlier, I have a big interest in the arts

456
00:39:07,659 --> 00:39:15,356
And if you think of it, the arts - and I don't say it's exclusively the arts, I think

457
00:39:15,356 --> 00:39:19,629
it's also true of science and of math - but let me - I say about the arts, particularly, because

458
00:39:19,629 --> 00:39:23,367
they are the victims of this mentality, currently, particularly.

459
00:39:24,090 --> 00:39:30,448
The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience.

460
00:39:30,541 --> 00:39:35,333
An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak.

461
00:39:35,410 --> 00:39:40,138
When you're present in the current moment, when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing

462
00:39:40,138 --> 00:39:43,015
that you're experiencing, when you are fully alive.

463
00:39:43,938 --> 00:39:49,685
And anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what's happening.

464
00:39:49,885 --> 00:39:56,248
And a lot of these drugs are that. We are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them.

465
00:39:57,018 --> 00:40:00,292
And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn't be putting them asleep,

466
00:40:00,292 --> 00:40:03,167
we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves.

467
00:40:03,567 --> 00:40:09,715
But the model we have is this: its - I believe we have a system of education that is modeled on

468
00:40:09,777 --> 00:40:14,085
the interest of industrialism, and in the image of it.

469
00:40:14,715 --> 00:40:19,100
I'll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines:

470
00:40:19,208 --> 00:40:24,218
ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects.

471
00:40:24,925 --> 00:40:30,685
We still educate children by batches, you know, we put them through the system by age group.

472
00:40:30,915 --> 00:40:36,231
Why do we do that? you know, Why is there this assumption that the most important thing

473
00:40:36,262 --> 00:40:40,444
kids have in common is how old they are? You know, it's like the most important thing about them

474
00:40:40,444 --> 00:40:45,125
is their date of manufacture. I mean, well I know kids who are much better than an other kids

475
00:40:45,125 --> 00:40:49,064
of the same age in different disciplines, you know, or at different times of the day.

476
00:40:49,156 --> 00:40:52,698
Or better in small groups than in large groups. Or sometimes, they want to be on their own.

477
00:40:52,852 --> 00:40:57,067
If you're interested in the model of learning, you don't start from this production line mentality.

478
00:40:57,113 --> 00:40:59,556
These are some of the keywords in the industrial model:

479
00:40:59,556 --> 00:41:04,805
Utility, which shapes the curriculum; linearity, which informs choices and the assumptions

480
00:41:04,805 --> 00:41:06,567
of what matters and what doesn't.

481
00:41:06,567 --> 00:41:10,062
It's essentially about conformity, increasingly, it's about that, if you look at the growth

482
00:41:10,077 --> 00:41:14,364
of standardized testing and standardized curricula. And it's about standardization.

483
00:41:14,995 --> 00:41:17,195
Now, for reasons we'll come to before we're done,

484
00:41:17,195 --> 00:41:18,695
I believe we have to go in the exact opposite direction.

485
00:41:19,048 --> 00:41:23,585
That's what I mean by changing the paradigm. We have to question what we take for granted.

486
00:41:23,862 --> 00:41:27,052
The problem in questioning what we take for granted is that we don't know what it is.

487
00:41:27,267 --> 00:41:29,029
Let's have a quick read of this.

488
00:41:29,167 --> 00:41:32,085
(B Russell: man as 4 astronomer or 4 Hamlet or both?)

489
00:41:32,085 --> 00:41:35,948
I love this quote. As you can see, it's from Bertrand Russell.

490
00:41:37,564 --> 00:41:42,752
And it seems to me to be the quintessential question of Western philosophy, you know.

491
00:41:43,090 --> 00:41:49,967
When it comes to it, what is this? Are we all that Hamlet thought we were,

492
00:41:50,090 --> 00:41:53,198
or are we just a kind of cosmic accident of no importance?

493
00:41:53,475 --> 00:41:59,333
I got very interested in this first part of the question, this "small, unimportant planet".

494
00:42:01,702 --> 00:42:05,398
Well, how small, you know, how unimportant is this planet?

495
00:42:05,521 --> 00:42:10,148
It's hard to get an image of this, isn't it, because, if you think of it,

496
00:42:10,271 --> 00:42:14,254
the distances of space are so vast, you know, like for example, this is an image from the Hubble telescope.

497
00:42:14,454 --> 00:42:16,354
This is the Magellanic cloud.

498
00:42:18,046 --> 00:42:24,136
Well, you know, distance in space is measured in light-years, distance that light travels in a year,

499
00:42:24,382 --> 00:42:30,800
which is far, truthfully. I mean that's farther than Brighton, you know, really.

500
00:42:32,046 --> 00:42:37,631
Now that's 170'000 light years. I mean, can you get your head round them?

501
00:42:37,815 --> 00:42:39,315
It's just: oh, it's big.

502
00:42:40,346 --> 00:42:42,062
On Wednesday .... all of that

503
00:42:42,169 --> 00:42:45,387
The problem with getting any sense of how big the earth is, or small is, the distances are so immense

504
00:42:45,387 --> 00:42:49,267
that they blear our perception of relative size. So I came across this image.

505
00:42:49,513 --> 00:42:51,936
... it is on the internet, I just quickly want to show them to you.

506
00:42:52,198 --> 00:42:55,302
I think they are fantastic. I had them rerendered for your benefit.

507
00:42:56,441 --> 00:43:01,802
These are pictures of - somebody had the brilliant idea of taking the Earth out of the sky

508
00:43:03,233 --> 00:43:05,813
and lining it up with the other - with some other planets in the solar system

509
00:43:05,813 --> 00:43:12,871
for purpose of comparison of size. So it's like a team photo, you know, of some of the planets

510
00:43:12,871 --> 00:43:15,433
in the solar system and beyond. It starts with this:

511
00:43:18,733 --> 00:43:24,987
..... I love that image. ..... I think we're looking good, that's what the first example is.

512
00:43:27,341 --> 00:43:30,454
There are a couple of things I want to say about - a couple of things I want to say about this.

513
00:43:30,454 --> 00:43:34,764
The first is that I think we are less concerned than we were about being invaded by Martian hoards.

514
00:43:36,902 --> 00:43:43,341
Aren't we? I mean, bring it on, I feel, like, you and whose army - I think we are feeling.

515
00:43:45,818 --> 00:43:49,941
The second thing is that Pluto is no longer a planet. And frankly, we can see why, now, can't we?

516
00:43:49,941 --> 00:43:53,815
I mean, what were we thinking, you know, it's a boulder, frankly.

517
00:43:55,169 --> 00:44:01,175
So pull back a bit. though. And it's a bit less encouraging, isn't it?

518
00:44:05,498 --> 00:44:09,423
don't you think? A bit less encouraging. And Pluto is a kind of cosmic embarassment now,

519
00:44:09,454 --> 00:44:18,202
so we don't seem to (contr). But we know the sun is a big deal. But how big exactly is the sun,

520
00:44:18,402 --> 00:44:22,362
compared to the earth? So this is - I checked this with some astrophysicists, they said,

521
00:44:22,362 --> 00:44:26,033
yes, this would be about right. Here we are with the sun in the picture.

522
00:44:29,941 --> 00:44:34,213
Did you know that? But keep your eye on the sun, because that's not the biggest thing on the block.

523
00:44:35,905 --> 00:44:40,377
This the sun against some other objects not in our solar system,

524
00:44:40,377 --> 00:44:41,785
but that you can see in the night sky.

525
00:44:44,077 --> 00:44:50,056
So Jupiter is one pixel, now, and the earth is gone. So we ought to be friends with Arcturus.

526
00:44:53,395 --> 00:44:55,141
But keep your eye on Arcturus for a minute.

527
00:44:59,110 --> 00:45:01,121
So I think our bet is on Antares.

528
00:45:01,382 --> 00:45:04,064
I mean, that's extraordinary, isn't it?

529
00:45:04,818 --> 00:45:13,402
So, go back to that, and we are infinitesimally, pitifully tiny in the great cosmic scheme.

530
00:45:13,802 --> 00:45:15,656
Now, I just want to say a couple of things, quickly.

531
00:45:15,979 --> 00:45:24,402
The first is, whatever you woke up worrying about, this morning, really, get over it.

532
00:45:24,725 --> 00:45:29,279
Honestly, make the call and move on.

533
00:45:30,941 --> 00:45:40,048
But the second thing is this: that this may be, but we do have this extraodinary power.

534
00:45:40,279 --> 00:45:46,256
And I can put it this way: we have a power, which enables us to conceive

535
00:45:46,256 --> 00:45:47,664
of our own insignificance.

536
00:45:48,818 --> 00:45:54,518
No other species on earth is sitting around, getting anxiety attacks over these images, you know.

537
00:45:54,748 --> 00:46:00,590
You don't see other species, in little forest clearings, saying, "I have no idea that you have -

538
00:46:00,729 --> 00:46:07,290
I mean, trust me. I wasn't expecting this." They won't. And they didn't produce these images either.

539
00:46:07,290 --> 00:46:15,064
We have this extraordinary human power to conceive of objects outside of our current experience

540
00:46:15,279 --> 00:46:21,085
and to express them in conceptual, symbolic forms, in ways that other people can engage with and grasp.

541
00:46:21,454 --> 00:46:27,044
And we are therefore the species that did produce Hamlet and the work of Mozart

542
00:46:27,244 --> 00:46:30,933
and the Industrial Revolution, and this extraordinary building, with its amazing images

543
00:46:31,133 --> 00:46:37,354
and hip hop, and jazz, and quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity, and air travel,

544
00:46:37,354 --> 00:46:43,129
and the jet engine, and all the things that characterize the extraordinary ascent of human culture.

545
00:46:43,175 --> 00:46:48,615
But we destroy it in the way we educate, but I just want to end it and open up for some conversation

546
00:46:48,615 --> 00:46:54,787
by giving an example of something. There was a great study done recently of divergent thinking.

547
00:46:56,402 --> 00:47:00,715
It was published a couple of years ago. Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity.

548
00:47:00,931 --> 00:47:05,448
I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.

549
00:47:05,895 --> 00:47:12,818
Divergent thinking isn't a synonym, but it is an essential capacity for creativity.

550
00:47:13,310 --> 00:47:20,475
It's the ability to - to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways

551
00:47:20,475 --> 00:47:24,467
of interpreting a question, to think whatever de Bono would call laterally,

552
00:47:26,082 --> 00:47:29,882
to think not just in linear or convergent ways.

553
00:47:30,436 --> 00:47:34,210
To see multiple answers, not one. So I made a little test for this,

554
00:47:34,210 --> 00:47:37,169
I mean one kind of counterexample would be, people might be asked to say

555
00:47:37,431 --> 00:47:42,487
how many uses can you think of for a paper clip. That's routine questions.

556
00:47:42,841 --> 00:47:46,667
Most people might come with 10 or 15. People who are good at this might come with 200.

557
00:47:47,482 --> 00:47:51,815
And they do that by saying, well, could the paper clip be turned - could be made out of foam rubber,

558
00:47:52,177 --> 00:47:54,915
you know, like, does this have to be a paper clip as we know it, jim, you know.

559
00:47:56,100 --> 00:48:00,210
Now, there are tests of this, and I gave them to 1500 people, it is in a bok called

560
00:48:00,210 --> 00:48:05,048
"Break Point and Beyond". And on the protocol of the text, if you score above a certain level,

561
00:48:05,679 --> 00:48:08,648
you'd be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking.

562
00:48:10,002 --> 00:48:16,031
So my question to you is what percentage of the people tested, of the 1500,

563
00:48:16,031 --> 00:48:18,733
scored at genius level for divergent thinking?

564
00:48:19,041 --> 00:48:24,031
Now you need to know one more thing about them: these were kndergarden children, OK?

565
00:48:24,262 --> 00:48:27,264
So what do you think? What percentage at genius level?

566
00:48:27,448 --> 00:48:30,900
(from the audience: 80) KR: 80 - 80 OK?

567
00:48:35,162 --> 00:48:40,633
It's not correct. 98%. Now, the thing about this was it was a longitudinal study.

568
00:48:41,525 --> 00:48:46,648
So they re-tested the same children 5 years later, age of 8 to 10.

569
00:48:46,648 --> 00:48:47,941
What do you think?

570
00:48:50,000 --> 00:49:01,213
50? They retested them again 5 years later, ages 13 to 15. You can see a trend here, can't you?

571
00:49:04,782 --> 00:49:11,515
They tested 200'000 adults, 25 years and older, just once, as a control. What do you think?

572
00:49:12,931 --> 00:49:14,346
Yes, you know.

573
00:49:15,815 --> 00:49:18,492
Now, I always say, if you are in business, these are the people you're hiring, OK?

574
00:49:18,600 --> 00:49:26,038
So now, this tells an interesting story, because you could have imagined it going the other way.

575
00:49:26,408 --> 00:49:30,823
Couldn't you? You start of not being very good, but you get better as you get older.

576
00:49:31,162 --> 00:49:37,915
But this shows two things. One is, we all have this capacity, and two, it mostly deteriorates.

577
00:49:38,131 --> 00:49:41,485
Now, lots of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up, a lot.

578
00:49:41,823 --> 00:49:46,864
But one of the most important things out of them, I'm convinced, is that by now, they've become educated.

579
00:49:47,218 --> 00:49:50,700
You know, they've spent 10 years at school, being told that there's one answer, it's at the back.

580
00:49:50,915 --> 00:49:56,600
And don't look. And don't copy, because that's cheating.

581
00:49:56,815 --> 00:50:01,467
I mean, outside school, that's called collaboration, you know, but inside schools.

582
00:50:01,744 --> 00:50:05,833
Now this isn't because teachers want to do it this way. It's just because it happens that way.

583
00:50:07,156 --> 00:50:10,698
It's because it's in the gene pool of education.

584
00:50:11,467 --> 00:50:13,431
And to transform it, we have to think differently

585
00:50:13,431 --> 00:50:14,900
Well let me just quickly save this - about that -

586
00:50:15,054 --> 00:50:17,429
we have to think differently about human capacity

587
00:50:17,582 --> 00:50:22,095
This is what in my book "The Element" is about. We have to get over this old conception

588
00:50:22,395 --> 00:50:26,354
of academic, non academic, abstract, theoretical

589
00:50:26,508 --> 00:50:30,413
vocational, and see it for what it is: a myth

590
00:50:31,902 --> 00:50:35,082
Second, we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups

591
00:50:35,764 --> 00:50:41,756
that collaboration is the stuff of growth, you know, if we atomize people and separate them

592
00:50:42,029 --> 00:50:47,929
and judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment.

593
00:50:48,664 --> 00:50:53,148
And thirdly, it's crucially about the culture of our institutions, the habits of the institutions,

594
00:50:53,541 --> 00:50:58,125
and the habitats that they occupy. Let me just put my hand on it.

595
00:50:58,744 --> 00:51:03,425
A great quote recently, which seemed to me to capture some of this,

596
00:51:03,710 --> 00:51:08,440
about this distinction between ourselves and the species.

597
00:51:10,555 --> 00:51:19,995
and it says - just find it - probably in my other suit, isn't it? It's about - here we go:

598
00:51:21,925 --> 00:51:27,729
I rather like this, as a view. It says that when we come to assess people, we should be fairer with ourselves

599
00:51:28,513 --> 00:51:33,833
It says: "After all, human beings were born of risen apes, not fallen angels.

600
00:51:35,102 --> 00:51:41,177
And so what shall we wonder at? Our massacres? Our missiles? Or our symphones?

601
00:51:42,518 --> 00:51:47,410
The miracle of human kind is not how far we have sunk, but how magnificently we have risen.

602
00:51:47,633 --> 00:51:52,779
We will be known among the stars, not by our corpses, but by our poems."

603
00:51:53,848 --> 00:51:55,510
And I believe there's a fair amount of profound truth in that.

604
00:51:57,348 --> 00:52:02,305
We have it in our grasp to form systems of education based on these different principles

605
00:52:03,095 --> 00:52:10,587
But it means a shift from the industrial metaphor of education to what I think of as the - an agricultural metaphor.

606
00:52:10,918 --> 00:52:14,546
If you think of it, if you look at the organizational chart of most companies and organizations,

607
00:52:15,271 --> 00:52:21,969
it looks a bit like a wiring diagram, doesn't it, if you look at the structure, like boxes and things that are connected

608
00:52:22,982 --> 00:52:26,895
But human organizations are not like mechanisms,

609
00:52:27,105 --> 00:52:30,244
even though these charts suggest the metaphor that they are.

610
00:52:30,323 --> 00:52:32,795
Human organizations are much more like organisms.

611
00:52:34,138 --> 00:52:39,436
That's to say, they depend upon feelings and relationships, and motivation,

612
00:52:39,925 --> 00:52:44,552
and value, self-value, and a sense of identity, and of community.

613
00:52:44,877 --> 00:52:49,346
You know the way you work in an organization is you're deeply affected by your feeling for it.

614
00:52:51,144 --> 00:52:56,933
Therefore, I think, a much better metaphor is not industrialism but agriculture or an organic metaphor.

615
00:52:57,259 --> 00:53:02,864
I'm doing a whole project in the State of Oklahoma, where I'm trying to develop these ideas across the whole State.

616
00:53:02,864 --> 00:53:05,929
But I mentioned Las Vegas at the beginning. I want to show a last image of this now.

617
00:53:06,256 --> 00:53:10,615
Not far from Las Vegas there is a place called Death Valley.

618
00:53:10,746 --> 00:53:14,929
Death Valley is the hottest place in America. Not much rse in Death Valley.

619
00:53:16,136 --> 00:53:22,305
Because it doesn't rain. In the Winter of 2004, something remarkable happened.

620
00:53:22,305 --> 00:53:30,662
It rained. 7 inches. And in the Spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole flora of Death Valley

621
00:53:31,244 --> 00:53:36,675
was coated with Spring flowers. Photographers and botanist scientists came from all across of America

622
00:53:37,192 --> 00:53:41,829
to witness this thing they might not see again. What it demonstrated was that Death Valley

623
00:53:42,095 --> 00:53:47,713
wasn't dead. It was asleep. Right beneath the surface were these seeds of growth

624
00:53:47,941 --> 00:53:51,723
waiting for conditions. And I believe it's exactly the same way with human beings.

625
00:53:51,967 --> 00:53:56,910
If we create the right conditions in our schools - if we create the right incentives,

626
00:53:56,964 --> 00:54:01,995
if we value each learner for themselves and properly, growth will happen.

627
00:54:02,129 --> 00:54:06,836
And the growth always happens before - I don't know, I wanted to show you a couple of very short videos,

628
00:54:06,836 --> 00:54:09,398
that will demonstrate, but we are going to our discussion, ... just now

629
00:54:10,375 --> 00:54:15,059
But I think we need to shift from this industrial paradigm to an organic paradigm.

630
00:54:15,205 --> 00:54:19,721
And I think it's perfectly doable. We need to conceive institutions individually,

631
00:54:19,721 --> 00:54:26,990
not systemized, as ones that don't just value utility, but respect and promote living vitality,

632
00:54:27,121 --> 00:54:31,018
the energy of the organization and its potential to be transformative,

633
00:54:31,018 --> 00:54:36,077
that doesn't think in terms of linearity but thinks of creativity and multiple options and lots of possibilities for everybody in it,

634
00:54:36,246 --> 00:54:41,708
that's not about conformity but about diversity and is critically about customization.

635
00:54:41,867 --> 00:54:46,646
This is Death Valley in the Spring of 2005. I think all our schools could be like that.

636
00:54:46,810 --> 00:54:50,298
Somebody once said: "The problem of human beings is not that we aim too high and fail,

637
00:54:50,559 --> 00:54:53,744
it's we aim too low and succeed."

638
00:54:54,013 --> 00:54:58,475
And I think we owe it to William Shipley and Benjamin Franklin to aim high.

639
00:54:58,521 --> 00:55:02,795
Benjamin Franklin once notably said: "There are three sorts of people in the world:

640
00:55:04,069 --> 00:55:10,133
Those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move."

641
00:55:10,662 --> 00:55:19,762
And I encourage you, with the RSA, to move, and get a move on. Thank you. (Applause)