I grew up unaware,
like many of you, I imagine,
that my heart was broken.
I had been an excellent student.
The kind that didn't need to open a single book
to get a bunch of A's.
I had loving, open parents
who never tried to tell me which way I had to go.
A grandmother that would hide chocolate bars under her bra cups.
Five brothers, a dog, two cats,
and a parrot named Paco.
It was a real madhouse.
I confess, I had a wonderful childhood.
But on reaching adolescence, things got complicated, of course.
I got full of zits,
and I began to devour literature
and to participate in all manner of poetry contests.
At school, I participated in a study done by the University of Psychology.
100 teenagers were chosen at random.
We were taken to the main hall and told to draw the human being.
So far, so good.
But don't ask me what was so special about my drawing.
Don't ask me
because to this day, I don't know.
All I can tell you is that they came back to me three times.
They'd make me do it over.
And as I was drawing,
I would hear them talking to the director of the Center,
saying that my view of the human being was worrisome.
I guess it was then that I stopped drawing.
And I was lucky.
I was 14 or 15 years old,
and up to then, nobody had critisized my drawings.
I had grown up in an environment that stimulated my creativity.
And yet, the good grades,
the poetry contests,
those excellent grades,
the psychological analysis of my drawing, and those good grades
all managed to convince me.
Convince me that I was not among the chosen.
So I set aside my creativity,
and dedicated myself to study and to work.
Most of us here today have grown up deceived.
Convinced that in a classroom of 25, 30, even 40 students
perhaps only two had been blessed
by that precious stone called "creativity."
As for the rest of us, we had to get educated.
During the schooling of my three children, I began to relive the whole process.
How could it be?
How could shool keep putting down their capacity to create?
My God, almost 30 years had gone by,
and in this aspect, I can assure you that nothing had changed.
Some time later,
I saw Ken Robinson's TED Talk about how schools kill creativity.
That talk changed everything.
I understood what I wanted and could contribute to society.
And I planned it all.
A job as Communication Manager,
an excellent team, and a good salary.
Once I'd made the decision, there I was.
Alone,
in a co-working space.
I don't know why we insist on calling it co-working
because there are few places in the world where you can feel so alone.
I was concentrated behind my computer screen
trying to give birth to the ideas
that would give shape to the project that was about to begin.
But I couldn't write a single line.
I couldn't
because before writing anything down, I needed to sprawl on the floor,
get giant sheets of paper, find my colored pencils,
and begin to draw and imagine all possible options.
Smudge, make mistakes,
and little by little, reconnect what formal education had broken in two.
I assure you that I was stuck on square one.
Stuck because my education had been compartmentalized.
And that made me believe
that before starting the project, I had to make a crucial decision.
A life or death decision.
I had to choose between art and literature.
Between drawing or writing.
And I couldn't.
I couldn't, because for me,
separating those two languages meant splitting myself, literally, in two.
Can you imagine the situation?
40 years.
And feeling exactly the same way that any child feels
who is asked to choose between the love of his father or the love of his mother.
It was then, at that moment, that the idea of PictoWriting was born.
Picto-Writing.
I decided then to design a method
that would let children learn to write without having to stop drawing.
On the contrary, it would use the potential that images have,
especially their own drawings,
as a tool to teach them how to write.
Once I knew the educational innovation that I wanted to accomplish,
I got to work.
I contacted a bunch of illustrators, writers, schools, teachers, linguists,
and we began to actively participate in classrooms.
Do you know what I found?
And what I keep finding day after day in all primary classrooms?
A bunch of kids.
A bunch of kids with broken hearts.
Clinging, like shipwrecked castaways, to their rubber erasers.
Don't be surprised if one of these days it's finally revealed
that it's the Pro-Fab manufacturers that stock schools with so many erasers.
I ask you to think for a moment of your own children.
Remember when they were 3, 4, 5 years old. Before they started school.
When children draw at that age, they're not afraid.
They enjoy what they're doing,
no matter what it is, or what anyone else thinks.
Mind you, their drawing in no way tries to be a photocopy of reality.
Rather, it's their unique interpretation of the world.
And the most important thing is that when they draw, they're connected.
If you ask them, they know very well what they're drawing and why.
We are born knowing who we are, and wanting to express it in drawings.
But suddenly we get to school.
To elementary.
And the only thing that matters is to learn how to write.
To have good handwriting, to not get out of line,
not make spelling mistakes ...
From one day to the next, we grow up.
And that's where the drama begins.
Drawing, that emotional, universal language,
stops being a learning tool.
If you're lucky, you get to draw during art class,
but mind you, the time has come to do it right.
The time has come to start erasing.
Welcome! Welcome, eraser!
You will start by teaching us to erase our mistakes
instead of learning from them.
And little by little you'll end up censuring
everything that was special about each and every one of us.
When a 6-, 7-, or 8-year-old child is learning how to write,
and for whatever reason their accompanying adult
prematurely corrects whatever the child is creating,
judges whatever the child is producing
before giving him or her time
to create the story he or she wants to tell us,
in that way inviting him to gain insecurity and begin to erase,
what message do you think the child receives?
We teach them too early to not be themselves.
And to desperately seek out the adult's approval.
In less than one year,
they will all be drawing and writing exactly the same.
Because as you can imagine,
drawing is the first language we take away from them.
But all the others follow.
Of course, the time has come to teach them to read and write.
But not at any cost.
I want to propose a simple change in the education of your children.
In the face of the visual bombardment that children grow up with today,
let's include gymnastics of imagination.
And for that, it's very important that they not stop drawing.
That they grow in both languages.
PictoWriting gives us that opportunity.
It allows us to teach them to write.
Yes, to write.
But at the same time we stimulate their creativity
and their capacity for reading and producing images
without all that emotional baggage.
PictoWriting is a method that above all, and most importantly,
respects the child's creative process.
Throughout these last five years,
we have given PictoWriting training to nearly 300 teachers.
And more than 3,500 children have already grown up using this method.
The results are spectacular.
Spectacular because of everything that gets transformed.
When you change the way you teach them to write,
you also change the way that teachers see their students.
Not long ago, a teacher was telling us,
"Thank you.
I thought I had five good students. Now I know I have 25."
97% of kids have loved PictoWriting.
And because of this, they write longer, richer, and better texts.
Now it turns out
that learning how to write isn't a chore or an insurmountable obstacle.
Instead, they don't even want to go to recess
because they're writing and drawing.
Oh, friend.
You see, creating stories is the closest thing to playing.
And 42% of those students have told us in their own handwriting
that this method has made them feel special.
What a difference could be made in the world
if we were to grow up knowing that each and every one of us
is unique and special with an amazing story to tell.
Thank you.
(Applause)