Concept transcriptie van deze lezing door Ken Robinson gegeven in 2006.
Good morning! How are you?
It's been great hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing... in fact I'm leaving.
There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the extra-ordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had... and in all the people here. Just the variety of it, and the range of it.
The second is that it's put it in a place where we have no idea of what's going to happen in terms of the future.. no idea how this may play out.
I have an interest in education. Actually what I find is, everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting: if you are ever at a dinner party, and you say you work in education... actually, your not often at dinner parties, frankly if eh... excuse me... if you work in education. You're not asked, you know... and you are never asked back curiously.
But if you are. And you say to somebody: "What do you do?" And you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They think "O my god, why me? My one night out all week."
But if you ask people about their education they pin you to the wall. It's one of those things that goes deep with people. Am I right? Like religion, and money, and other things.
So, I have a big interest in education. And I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest, partly because it's education that is meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in twenty-sixty-five. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for past four days what the world will look like in five years time. Yet were meant to be educating them for it.
So the unpredictability, I think is extra-ordinary. And the third part of this, is that we've agreed nonetheless on the really extra-ordinary capacities that children have. Their capacities for innovation. I mean: Serena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do?
And she is exceptional, but I think she's not - so to speak - exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extra-ordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them...pretty ruthlessly.
So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy. And we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you.
That was it, by the way. Tank you very much. So... so fifteen minutes left. Well, I was born... no, the eh..
I heard a great story recently. I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was in the back drawing. The teacher said this little girl hardly paid any attention. But in this drawing lesson she did.
And the teacher was fascinated. And she went over to her, and said: "What are you drawing?" And the girl said: "I am drawing a picture of God!"
And the teacher said: "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said: "They will in a minute!"
When my son was four in England. Actually, he was four everywhere to be honest, I mean ... for being strict about it where-ever he went he was four that year. He was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it's big... it's a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it. Nativity two.
But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents and T-shirts: "James Robertson is Joseph".
He didn't have to speak. You know the bit where the three kings come in? Now, they come in bearing gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrhe.
This really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence. Because we talked to the little boy afterwards, and said: "Are you ok with this?" And he said: "Why? Was that wrong?" They just switched.
Anyway, the three boys came in... little four year olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said: "I bring you gold!" And the second boy said: "I bring you myrhe!" And the third boy said: "Frank sent this!"
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they will have a go. Am I right? They are not frightened of being wrong. Now I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is: if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original... if you're not prepared to be wrong!
And by the time they get adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes.
An we now are running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said: "All children are born artists." The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity we grow out of it. Or rather: we get educated out of it. #00:06:39.5#
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So why is this? I lived in Stratford on Avon until about five years ago. In fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what seamless transition - you know - this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you?
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Did you ever of think of Shakespeare being a child? Shakespeare being seven. I never thought of it. I mean: he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? #00:07:16.6#
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Must try harder... being sent to bed by his father. To Shakespeare: "Go to bed now!" "And put the pencil down!" And: "Stop speaking like that!" "It's confusing everybody..." #00:07:52.3#
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Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. I just want to say something about the transition. My son didn't want to come... I've got two kids, he's twenty one now, my daughter is sixteen. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life: Sarah... he'd known her for a month. Mind you: they'd had their fourth anniversary.. by then, 'cause it's a long time when you're sixteen. #00:08:19.0#
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Anyway, he was really upset on the plane. He said: "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly. Because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. But something strikes you when you move to America, and when you travel around the world. Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Everyone, it doesn't matter where you go. You think it would be otherwise but it isn't. #00:08:52.2#
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At the top are mathematics, and languages. Then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools, than drama and dance. #00:09:09.7#
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There isn't an education system on the planet, that teaches dance everyday to children like we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time, if we're allowed we all do. We all have bodies don't we? Did I miss a meeting? #00:09:30.5#
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Truthfully, what happens is - as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads; and slightly to one side. #00:09:39.0#
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If you were to visit education as an alien, and say: "What's it for - Public Education?" I think you'd have to conclude - if you look at the output - who succeeds, who has everything he should? Who gets all the browny points? Who are the winners? I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world, is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. I used to be one, so there... you know. #00:10:08.6#
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And I like university professors, but we shouldn't hold them up as the high watermark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. You know: another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. #00:10:21.2#
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There is something curious about professors. Not all of them, but typically they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings. #00:10:52.4#
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If you want real evidence of out of body experiences, by the way - get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics. And pop into to discotheque on the final night. And there you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably.... off the beat. Waiting to end, so they can go and write a paper about it! #00:11:19.3#
Our education system is predicated upon the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented around the world.. there were no public systems of education, really before the nineteenth century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is reached on two ideas. #00:11:32.2#
Number one: the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked on the ground you would never do a job doing that. Is that right? "Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician." "Don't do art, you won't be an artist." #00:11:52.2#
Benign advice. Now, profoundly mistaken! The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is: academic ability, which has really become to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image.
If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many high talented, brilliant, and creative people think they're not! Because the things they were good at in school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. #00:12:22.6#
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In the next thirty years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education, than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about: technology, and its transformation effect on work, and demography, and the huge explosion in population. #00:12:39.4#
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Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And, I didn't want one, frankly... so. #00:12:53.8#
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But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on video games. Because you need an MA where the previous, while the previous job needed a BA, and now you need a PHD for the other. It's aprocess of academic inflation. And it indicates that the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. #00:13:09.3#
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We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence: #00:13:11.9#
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One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, kinaesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. #00:13:23.4#
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of the human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations. Intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. #00:13:36.8#
In fact creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. #00:13:48.5#
By the way, there is a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum. It's ticker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are! Aren't you? #00:14:02.0#
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There's a raft of research. But I know of my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often.... thankfully... but you know, she's good at some things. But if she is cooking, you know - she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling... you know, she's doing open heart surgery over here. #00:14:23.5#
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If I am cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the pone's on the hook. If she comes in I get annoyed. I say: "Terry, please! I'm trying to fry an egg in here... Give me a break!"
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Actually, doing that old philosophical thing. If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen. You know that old chestnut. I saw a T-shirt recently which said: "If a man speaks his mind in the forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
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And the third thing about intelligence is: it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment, called "Epiphany", which is based on a series of interviews of people of how they discovered their talent. And facts on how people got there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman, which most people never heard of. She's called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have... #00:15:25.6#
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She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera. She's wonderful. I used to be on the Board if the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch from there, and said: "How did you become a dancer?" #00:15:40.6#
And it was interesting. She said, when she was at the school she was really hopeless. And the school in the thirties, wrote to her parents, that "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say say had ADHD, wouldn't you? But this was the nienteen-thirties ADHD hadn't been invented, you at this point. So it wasn't an available condition, you know. People weren't aware they could have that. #00:16:08.6#
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Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother. And she was led, and sat on the chair at the end, and sat on her hands for twenty minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. #00:16:22.9#
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And at the end of it, because she was disturbing people, homework was always late, and so on - a little kid of eight. In the end the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said: "Gillian, I have listened to all these things your mother has told me. I need to speak to her privately." So he said: "We'll be back, we won't be very long!" And they went, and left her. #00:16:41.4#
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But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room he said to her mother: "Just stand and watch her!" And the minute they left the room, she said she was on her feet moving to the music. And the watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother. And he said: "Mrs Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She is a dancer. Take her to a dance school!" #00:17:05.2#
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I said: "What happened?" Said: "She did. I can't tell you, sir how wonderful it was. I walked into this room, and it was full of people like me!" People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think... who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary. #00:17:23.2#
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She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet at school. She became a soloist. She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet. Founded her own company - the Gillian Lynne Dance Company. Met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for the most successful musical theater productions in history. She's given pleasure to millions, and she is a multi-millionaire. #00:17:41.3#
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Somebody else might have put her on medication, and told her to calm down. #00:17:53.4#
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What I think it comes to, is this. Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology, and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. #00:18:15.1#
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Our education system has mined our minds in the way, that we've strip mined the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.
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There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Sulk, who said: "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within fifty years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within fifty years all forms of life would flourish." And he is right. #00:18:49.8#
What Ted celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now, that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it, is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. #00:19:10.4#
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And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way, we may not see this future. But they will! And our job is to help them make something of it! Thank you very much!