Natural-born learners | Alex Beard | TEDxYouth@Manchester

Education expert Alex Beard has studied methods of teaching and learning around the world and concluded that the way in which we learn will be the key to meeting the unknown challenges of the 21st century. His insight into the incredible capacity of humans to learn has convinced him of the urgent need for education to undergo a learning revolution in order to fully prepare us for the future.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http:/ted.com/tedx.

So I'd like to tell a story
about the future of learning,

and it begins 10 years ago in a classroom
just off the old Kent Road in South London

on my very first day
as an English teacher.

And at first we struggled;

the kids didn't know much
about Shakespeare,

and I knew even less about teaching.

I was a fresh-faced university graduate

who'd been to this lovely
primary school in the countryside

and then onto a secondary school
that even had its own pack of beagles,

and I thought that teaching
was really simple.

You stood at the front of the classroom
and talked about ideas.

But it wasn't that simple.

The kids I taught faced real challenges:

about half of them
were on free school meals

and two-thirds spoke English
as a second language.

And all of them came to school
years behind where they ought to have been

in their reading and writing.

And it was frustrating.

The kids were smart and they were witty;

they just weren't doing well academically.

And around us, I was aware,
the world was changing really fast.

My students were using smartphones
and beginning to live in the future,

but I thought the methods
I was using as a teacher

might have been familiar
to the ancient Greeks,

particularly if their students
made jokes every morning

about their failure
to properly iron their togas.

And at the same time,

I felt pushed by the system
towards focusing on their exams,

helping the kids get that C grade
that they needed.

But by the time they left school,

it was being predicted
that by their 30th birthdays,

about half of the jobs
they were planning on doing as adults

were going to be automated by robots.

And if the robots were coming
to get all the jobs,

I thought we had to do a lot better.

I was hopeful, however.

I thought if we could take all
that we now knew about the human mind,

our neuroscience and psychology
and early child development,

and combine it with our new technologies,

our computers and the internet,
big data and AI,

that we might be able
to transform human learning

and get more out of our minds
than we ever had before.

But what is it that our minds
are capable of?

And what is it we should be learning today
to thrive in the future?

These were the two questions

that set me off on a two-year journey

around the world

and into the future that became my book.

And it took in visits
to ground-breaking schools

on six different continents,

meetings with trailblazing teachers

and explorations of the most
cutting-edge science and technology.

And it left me sure
of one thing above all:

that in this age of AI,

we've to turn our attention
away from our devices

and instead invest everything we have
in developing ourselves.

So I begin with this idea
that human intelligence is under threat.

In 1997, when the chess
grandmaster guy Kasparov

was beaten by IBM's computer Deep Blue,

it was seen as a sign

that computers were already becoming
more powerful than our human minds.

Some people predicted
that soon we'd see the singularity,

a moment when we could merge our minds
with superintelligent machines

and transcend our biological limitations.

But I wasn't sure we should be giving up
on our brains just yet,

and so first I traveled to South Korea

to see how much
we were capable of learning.

So on a warm Thursday morning in November,

I stood outside this concrete school hall

in Songdo future city,
on the outskirts of Seoul,

as all across the country

hundreds of thousands
of South Korean teenagers

were sitting down
to the eight grueling hours

of a Suneung,

an exam that takes place
on a single day each year

and is considered the world's toughest.

Afterwards, school leavers
are given a national rank

that decides their whole lives:

what university they'll go to,
what job they can do -

their whole health, wealth and happiness.

And I was there to hear
the story of Seung-Bin Lee,

who was a mild-mannered,
softly spoken 17-year-old

who at that moment
was sitting inside the exam hall,

his hands shaking,

about to get started.

The country was exam crazy.

Earlier that morning,

police on motorcycles
had lined the streets,

ready to accompany
any latecomers to the exam hall.

In the weeks leading up to the exam,

newspapers ran articles

about what you should eat
for optimum performance,

what clothes you should wear,

even what offerings you should leave
at the temple for the gods.

During the 45 minutes
of the English-listening exam,

all flights in the country were grounded

so as not to affect
the kids' concentration.

You see, Korean learning was all about
these kind of marginal gains.

Seung-Bin even confided to me

that he'd been worried
about overheating during the exam,

and so he'd sneaked off halfway through
to remove his underpants -

which begs the question

of what he did with them
for the rest of the exam.

But you see, success was in these details.

He said you had to get into the zone

and become an instrument
of pure exam-taking technique.

It was better, he said,
not to think at all.

Now, it's extreme,

but Korea actually shows us the power
that education can have on our minds.

Sixty years ago, the country was broke
coming out of the Korean War

and four in five Koreans were illiterate.

Today, its GDP has grown 40,000%

and it's one of the world's
top high-tech economies,

with companies like Samsung and Hyundai.

It's also now got the highest proportion
of university graduates, of population,

of any country in the world,

and in 2010, it's teens were ranked
the smartest teenagers in the world.

An education minister there I talked to

told me that you had to understand
that Korea has no resources,

just their minds and hard work.

But this hard work
is taking a heavy toll in Korea.

Before I left, Seung-Bin showed me
his revision time table.

In the three years
leading up to the Suneung,

he'd worked 14 hours a day,
five days a week,

and a relatively chilled out
12 hours a day

on both Saturday and Sunday.

He told me that to relax,
once a month he would watch a DVD.

Korea has the highest
teen suicide rate in the world.

Adults I spoke to cried
recalling their school days.

When I asked Seung-Bin
what he did to beat this stress,

he just looked at me and said,

"I know it sounds strange,
but I have to work even harder."

So, convinced of the power
of our minds to learn more,

I traveled next to Silicon Valley,
point zero of the tech tsunami.

I'd heard we might be able
to harness our computers

and make our minds
unimaginably more powerful.

I wanted to know if that was the case.

So at a place called Rocketship Schools

in San Jose,

I met my first robot teacher.

But it wasn't an android
with a human face;

instead, it was a bit
of intelligent software

inside an online learning environment.

So at Rocketship Schools,
they've got the "Learning Lab."

And I went there with
the head teacher, Miss Guerrero,

after I had watched her
lead 500 primary-school kids

in a sing-and-dance-along
to "Shake It Off" by Taylor Swift,

which she called
"morning coffee for the kids."

And they were certainly pumped up.

So then we went to this cavernous room

in which there are 120 five-year-old kids
sitting in long rows in front of laptops.

Each of them was wearing a purple
polo shirt and outsize headphones.

And the room was eerily silent

except for the sound
of soft fingers tapping on keys.

So each kid was using a program
called ST Math or Lexile,

and as they were using it,

the computer began to understand
their individual strengths and weaknesses

and adapt the experience to them.

So they were building on their strengths

or tackling errors
that they weren't so strong in -

personalizing the experience
to each individual kid.

And every student would spend
between 60 and 90 minutes

on their laptop each day,

and there were no teachers in the room,

just a pair of untrained
young adult supervisors.

And it worked.

At Rocketship Schools, the kids
do pretty well in their math and English

compared to their peers
from similar backgrounds.

But I was struck by this thought:

Did it really make sense for computers
to be teaching kids things

that the computers themselves
could already do so much better?

A similar thought
had occurred to Gary Kasparov

when he was defeated by Deep Blue.

And this new kind of chess competition
emerged, called "Advanced Chess."

In these competitions,

any combination of humans and computers
can play chess against one another,

and until very recently,

the winners of those tournaments

weren't the most powerful computers
nor the greatest human grandmasters;

instead, they were teams
of amateur human players

who had learned to coach their laptops
to play chess really well.

Our ability to learn to coach our machines

makes us more powerful
than machines can ever be alone.

Down the coast from Rocketship,
at a place called High Tech High,

I saw kids learning
to use technology in this way.

So at High Tech High,

they spend about half their time
in these big cross-disciplinary projects.

And in a single classroom of 16-year-olds,

they had divided themselves up
into three groups.

One group was experimenting
with making biodegradable seed pods;

another group was planning and scripting
a documentary they were going to film;

and a third group was building
their own drones, completely from scratch.

The class was going to end

with an excursion
into the California wilderness,

where they were going
to make an aerial survey

of the loss of plant species
due to drought,

replenish the ones missing
using the seed pods,

and the documentary crew
was going to film the whole thing

and put it up on YouTube

to raise awareness
of environmental issues.

And it showed me that although machines
do risk making us stupid,

they can be harnessed to make us smarter.

But to what end should we put
this new knowledge about the brain

and this new technology?

How can we develop
our full collective capacity?

To find out, I went to Finland

and visited the classroom
of one of its most famous teachers,

a guy called Pekka Peura.

So at the start of his class,

he put up a question
on the interactive whiteboard

that had the students beaming answers
using their smartphones,

A, B, C, D or E,

which he then displayed
in a bar chart on the whiteboard.

He didn't give them the answer,

but asked them to talk to each other.

What answer had they given and why?

And then got them to beam in
their answers for a second time.

And the bar chart
had shifted significantly;

the kids had taught each other.

Afterwards, Pekka Peura
explained to me

that he saw his role

as being one of giving students

the skills and attitudes they needed
to learn things for themselves.

He'd studied how Google creates
its most successful teams

and was using those principles
to guide the practice in his classroom.

So he'd give the students everything
they needed at the start of the term:

the textbook, the links
to online resources, the test,

even the answers to all the tests,

and he would simply coach them
individually and together

on their capacity to persevere, to learn,
to create, to imagine or to cooperate.

At the end of the term,

he even got the students
to choose their own grades,

which he would enter
into the school system.

When I asked him what he did
if students fell behind in this approach,

he looked at me strangely:

"What is behind?" he said.

He thought we had to delete this idea
of competition entirely from education

and allow young people
to fail continually in small ways.

That was how he thought
we would best learn.

So Finns love education.

The country has ten applicants
for every one place

on its primary-teacher training programs.

That training includes
learning how to play the piano

and learning how to ice-skate.

Finland also, by many measures,

makes more of its people
than any other country in the world.

It comes top of the World
Economic Forum's human capital index.

It's the happiest country in the world
according to a UN survey recently.

It's also a hive of creativity,

home to companies
like Nokia and Angry Birds,

and it's also home to unique sports
like hobby horsing,

which is an imaginary form
of show jumping,

which was invented by Finnish teenagers.

Finland also has more
heavy metal bands per capita

than any other country in the world,

and Pekka Peura, that teacher,
was the drummer in one of them.

So as I encountered these stories
around the world,

I thought often of my own students
back in South London.

We succeeded in the end -
at least in what we set out to do.

All of the kids got the C grade
that they needed, or better, at GCSE,

but the way that we'd got there,

with these long hours of exam practice
and extra English classes,

left me feeling like I'd failed them.

Today, I think that we risk failing
a whole generation of young people.

I'm not sure that we're setting up
our education systems

to give young people everything
that is needed to thrive in today's world,

let alone to take on
the big challenges of the future,

like the automation of jobs
or global inequality or climate change.

But we could.

Everybody is capable of learning as much
as kids do in South Korea or Shanghai.

Everybody is capable of learning
to use the latest technology,

like they're doing at High Tech High.

Everyone is capable of developing

their full human faculties
of creativity and cooperation,

like they're doing in Finland.

If we can harness all this understanding,

I think we can transform human learning.

So to date, there have been three
big revolutions in the way that we learn.

The first was cognitive.

About 100,000 years ago,
something changed in our brains

and language emerged,

with which we could share ideas

and pass knowledge down
between the generations.

About 10,000 years ago
came the schooling revolution.

Simultaneously in ancient China
and ancient Mesopotamia,

schools sprang up in which to teach
the new human technologies

of reading and writing.

About 500 years ago, then,
came a mass education revolution -

the printing press
and an opening up of religion -

and that literacy exploded
across the world.

Today, I think that you have the potential

to bring about
a fourth learning revolution.

Science now shows us that each of us
is literally born to learn.

In our heads are learning devices

which, when put together,
are more powerful

than any computer that's been invented.

To thrive in our digital future,
we need to learn to master our machines

by investing everything we have
in upgrading our own minds.

Thank you.

(Applause)