[marker squeaking on board]
(Ken Robinson) Every country on Earth, at the moment,
is reforming public education.
There are two reasons for it.
The first of them is economic.
People are trying to work out
how do we educate our children to take their place
in the economies of the 21st century?
How do we do that?
Even though we can't anticipate
what the economy will look like at the end of next week,
as the recent turmoil is demonstrating.
How do we do that?
The second, though, is cultural.
Every country on Earth, on earth is trying to figure out
how do we educate our children
so they have a sense of cultural identity,
and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities,
while being part of the process of globalization?
How do we square that circle?
The problem is they're trying to meet the future
by doing what they did in the past.
And on the way, they're alienating millions of kids
who don't see any purpose in going to school.
When we went to school,
we were kept there with a story,
which is, if you worked hard and did well,
and got a college degree, you would have a job.
Our kids don't believe that.
And they're right not to, by the way.
You're better having a degree than not,
but it's not a guarantee anymore.
And particularly not if the route to it
marginalizes most of the things
that you think are important about yourself.
Some people say we have to raise standards,
as if this is a breakthrough.
You know, like, really, yes we should.
Why would you lower them?
[laughter]
I haven't come across an argument
that persuades me of lowering them.
But raising them, of course we should raise them.
The problem is
that the current system of education
was designed and conceived
and structured for a different age.
It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment.
And in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution.
Before the middle of the 19th century,
there were no systems of public education.
Not really.
I mean, you could get educated by Jesuits,
you know, if you had the money,
but public education, paid for from taxation,
compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery,
that was a revolutionary idea.
And many people objected to it.
They said it's not possible for many street kids,
working class children, to benefit from public education.
They're incapable of learning to read and write,
and why are we spending time on this?
So, there's also built into it a whole series of assumptions
about social structure and capacity.
It was driven by an economic imperative of the time,
but running right through it
was an intellectual model of the mind.
Which was essentially the Enlightenment view of intelligence.
That real intelligence consists in this capacity
for a certain type of deductive reasoning,
and the knowledge of the classics, originally.
What we've come to think of as academic ability.
And this is deep in the gene pool of public education,
that there are really two types of people:
academic and non-academic;
smart people and non-smart people.
And the consequence of that
is that many brilliant people think they're not,
because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind.
So, we have twin pillars, economic and intellectual.
And my view is
that this model has caused chaos in many people's lives.
It's been great for some.
There have been people that have benefited wonderfully from it.
But most people have not.
Instead they suffer this.
This is the modern epidemic,
and it's as misplaced,
and it's as fictitious.
This is the plague of ADHD.
Now, this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America,
or prescriptions for ADHD.
Don't mistake me,
I don't mean to say there is no such thing
as Attention Deficit Disorder.
I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing.
I know that a great majority of psychologists,
and pediatricians think there is such a thing.
But it's still a matter of debate.
What I do know, for a fact,
is it's not an epidemic.
These kids are being medicated
as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out.
And on the same whimsical basis,
and for the same reason - medical fashion.
Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period
in the history of the earth.
They're being besieged with information,
and force their attention from every platform, computers,
from iPhones,
from advertising holdings,
from hundreds of television channels.
And we're penalizing them now for getting distracted.
From what? Boring stuff,
at school, for the most part.
It seems to me it's not a coincidence, totally,
that the instance of ADHD has risen in parallel
with the growth of standardized testing.
Now, these kids are being given Ritalin and Adderall,
and all manner of things,
often quite dangerous drugs,
to get them focused and calm them down.
But according to this,
Attention Deficit Disorder increases
as you travel east across the country.
People start losing interest in Oklahoma
[laughter].
They can hardly think straight in Arkansas
[laughter].
And by the time they get to Washington,
they have lost it completely.
And there are separate reasons for that, I believe
[laughter].
It's a fictitious epidemic.
If you think of it, the arts,
and I don't say this exclusively of the arts.
I think it's also true of science and of maths.
But let me, I say about the arts particularly
because they are the victims
of this mentality currently, particularly.
The arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience.
And aesthetic experience
is one in which your senses are operating at their peak.
When you are present in the current moment.
When you're resonating with the excitement of this thing
that you're experiencing.
When you are fully alive.
And anesthetic is when you shut your senses off
and deaden yourself to what's happening.
And a lot of these drugs are that.
We're getting our children through education by anesthetizing them.
And I think we should be doing the exact opposite.
We shouldn't be putting them asleep,
we should be waking them up
to what they have inside of themselves.
But the model we have is this,
it's, I believe, we have a system of education
that is modeled on the interests of industrialism,
and in the image of it.
I'll give you a couple of examples.
Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines -
ringing bells, separate facilities,
specialized into separate subjects.
We still educate children by batches.
You know, we put them through the system by age group.
Why do we do that?
You know, why is there this assumption
that the most important thing kids have in common
is how old they are?
You know, it's like the most important thing about them
is their date of manufacture.
Well, I know kids who are much better than other kids
at the same age in different disciplines, you know,
or at different times of the day,
or better in smaller groups then in large groups,
or sometimes they want to be on their own.
If you're interested in the model of learning,
you don't start from this production line mentality.
These are, it's essentially about conformity.
And increasingly it's about that
as you look at the growth of standardized testing
and standardized curricula.
And it's about standardization.
I believe we've got to go in the exact opposite direction.
That's what I mean about changing the paradigm.
There was a great study done recently of divergent thinking,
published a couple of years ago.
Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity.
I define creativity as the process
of having original ideas that have value.
Divergent thinking isn't a synonym.
But it's an essential capacity for creativity.
It's the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question,
lots of possible ways of interpreting a question.
To think, what Edward de Bono would probably call laterally.
To think, not just in linear or convergent ways.
To see multiple answers, not one.
So, I mean, there are tests for this.
I mean, one kind of cod example would be,
people might be asked to say
how many uses can you think of for a paper clip.
Those routine questions.
Most people might come with 10 or 15.
People who are good at this might come up with 200.
And they do that by saying,
well, could the paper clip be turned, and a foot tall,
and be made out of foam rubber.
You know, like, does it have to be a paper clip as we know it, Jim.
Now, there are tests for this.
And they gave them to 1,500 people.
It's in a book called Break Point and Beyond.
And on the protocol of the test,
if you scored above a certain level,
you'd be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking.
Okay?
So, my question to you is,
what percentage of the people tested,
of the 1500,
scored at genius level for divergent thinking?
You need to know one more thing about them.
These were kindergarten children.
So, what you think?
What percentage at genius level?
(Audience member) 80.
(Ken Robinson) You think 80, okay.
98%.
Now, the thing about this was, it was a longitudinal study.
So, they retested the same children five years later.
Age of eight to ten.
What do you think?
50?
They retested them again,
five years later, ages 13 to 15.
You can see a trend here, can't you
[laughter]
Now, this tells an interesting story.
Because you could have imagined it going the other way,
couldn't you.
You start off not being very good,
but you get better as you get older.
But this shows two things.
One is, we all have this capacity.
And two, it mostly deteriorates.
Now, a lot of things have happened to these kids
as they've grown up, a lot.
But one of the most important things that happened to them,
I am convinced, is that by now,
they've become educated.
They know, they spent 10 years at school being told there's one answer.
It's at the back and don't look.
And don't copy,
because that's cheating.
I mean, outside schools that's called collaboration, you know.
But inside schools...
And this isn't because teachers want it this way,
it's just because it happens that way.
It's because it's in the gene pool of education.
We have to think differently about human capacity.
We have to get over this old conception of academic, non-academic,
abstract, theoretical, vocational,
and see it for what it is: a myth.
Secondly, we have to recognize
that most great learning happens in groups.
That collaboration is the stuff of growth.
If we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately,
we form a kind of disjunction between them
and their natural learning environment.
And thirdly, it's crucially about the culture of our institutions,
the habits of the institution,
and the habitats that they occupy.