RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

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(Sir 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, given that 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 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 you 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.

And 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? [audience chuckles]

You know, 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 a knowledge of the classics, originally.

What we 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 who've benefited wonderfully from it,

but most people have not.

Instead, they suffered this.

This is the modern epidemic,

and it's as misplaced and it's as fictitious.

This is the plague of ADHD. [crowd murmurs]

Now, this is a map of the incidence 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 pediatrician 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 caught their attention from every platform:

computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings,

from hundreds of television channels.

And we're penalizing them now

for getting distracted.

From what? You know, boring stuff.

At school for the most part.

It seems to me it's not a coincidence, totally,

that the incidence of ADHD

has written in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.

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. [audience erupts in laughter]

They can hardly think straight in Arkansas.

And by the time they get to Washington,

they've lost it completely.

And there are separate reasons for that, I believe. [laughs]

It's a fictitious epidemic.

If you think of it, the arts.

And I don't say this exclusively 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.

An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses

are operating at their peak,

when you're present in the current moment,

when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing

that you're experiencing,

when you are fully alive.

An anaesthetic 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 anaesthetizing 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,

or at different times of the day,

or better in smaller groups than in large groups.

Or sometimes they want to be on their own.

If you're interested in a model of learning,

you don't start from this production line mentality.

These-- 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, whatever 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's tests for this.

I mean, one kind of common example would be,

people might be asked to say,

how many uses can you think of for a paperclip?

All those routine questions,

most people might come up with 10 or 15.

People who are good at this might come up with 200.

And they do that by saying, well,

could the paperclip be 200 foot tall

and be made out of foam and rubber?

You know, like does it have to be a paperclip as we know it, Jim?

You know.

Now, there are tests for this, and they gave them to 1500 people

in a book called "Breakpoint 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?

Now, you need to know one more thing about them.

These were kindergarten children.

So, what do you think, what percentage at genius level?

-(audience member) 80%.

-(Ken) 80? 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 8 to 10.

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?

Now, this tells an interesting story

because you could have imagined it

going the other way, could 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 happend to them,

I am convinced, is the by now they have become educated.

They've 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.

When outside schools, that's called collaboration. [audience chuckles]

Not inside schools.

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 atomized 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 institution

and the habitats that they occupy.