TED, February 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, haven't there, running through the conference, which are
relevant to what I want to talk about.
One is the
extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that
we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range
of it.
The second
is, that it's put us in a place where we have no idea 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're at a dinner
party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at
dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously.
That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they
say, "What do you do," and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face.
They're like, "Oh my god," you know, "why me? My one night out
all week." But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's
one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and
money, and other things.
I have a big
interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's
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 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise
that's been on parade for the past
four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for
it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third
part of this is that we've all agreed nonetheless
on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for
innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she, just seeing
what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole
of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary 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... Thank you.
That was it,
by the way, thank you very much. Soooo, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ...
I heard a
great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing
lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this
little girl hardly paid attention,
and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went
over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" and the girl said,
"I'm 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 4 in England -- actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we're being
strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year -- he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the
story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may
have seen it, "Nativity II." 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 in T-shirts:
"James Robinson IS Joseph!" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in.
They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold,
frankincense and myrhh. This really happened -- we were sitting there and
we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward
and we said, "You OK with that" and he said "Yeah, why, was that
wrong?" -- they just switched,
I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put
these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." The
second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." 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'll have a go. Am I right?
They're 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 to be 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. And we're now running national education systems where
mistakes are the worst thing you can make.
And the result
is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once
said this, he said that 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. 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 a
seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called
Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was
born. Were you struck by a new
thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you?
Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being
7? I never thought of it. I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? "Must try harder."
Being sent to
bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William
Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's
confusing everybody."
Anyway, we
moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the
transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids, he's 21
now, my daughter's 16; 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, because it's a long time when you're 16.
Anyway, he was really upset on the
plane, and 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. Every one, doesn't matter where you go,
you'd think it would be otherwise but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and
languages, then the humanities, and 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. There isn't an
education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way
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
they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
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.
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 really
succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie 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. And I
used to be one, so there. And I like
university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human
achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're
rather curious and I say this out of
affection for them, there's something curious about them, not all of them
but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to
one side. They're disembodied. They
look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? It's
a way of getting their head to meetings.
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 the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see
it, grown men and women writhing
uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and
write a paper about it.
Now our
education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a
reason. The whole system was invented… round the world there were no public
systems of education really before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of
industrialism.
So the
hierarchy is rooted on two ideas:
Number one, that 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 grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that
right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you're
not going to be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole
world is engulfed in a revolution.
And the
second is, academic ability, which has really come 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
highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because
the thing they were good at, at school wasn't valued, or was actually
stigmatized. And I think we can't afford
to go on that way.
In the next
30 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.
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.
But now kids
with degrees are often heading home
to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job
required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic
inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to
radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three
things about intelligence: One, it's diverse, we think about the world in all
the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically. We think in abstract
terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at
the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of
presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided
into compartments. 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. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two
halves of the brain called the corpus callosum, and it's thicker in women.
Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are
better at multitasking, because you
are, aren't you?, there's a raft of
research, but I know it from my personal life.
If my wife is
cooking a meal at home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's
doing (oh, she's good at some things) but if she's cooking, you know, she's
dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the
ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery
over here; if I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone'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." (You know that old philosophical
thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen,
remember that old chestnut, I saw a
great T-shirt recently that said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest,
and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?")
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 with people
about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a
wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she's called Gillian
Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. 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 of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and
Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how did you get to be a
dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the
school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a
learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn't been
invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. People weren't aware
they could have that.
Anyway, she
went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled
room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair
at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to
her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end
of it -because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so
on, little kid of 8 - in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and
said, "Gillian I've listened to all these things that your mother's told
me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here, we'll
be back, we won't be very long," and they went and left her.
But as they
went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and
when they got out 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 they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her
mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her
to a dance school."
I said,
"What happened?"
She said,
"She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in 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. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet
School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet,
she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own
company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
She's been
responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in
history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire.
Somebody else
might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think
-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.
Our education system has mined our minds
in the way that we strip-mine the earth,
for a particular commodity, and for
the future, it won't serve us.
We have to rethink
the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a
wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to
disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all
human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life
would flourish." And he's right.
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. 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.
Summary outline (for
those of you who would like to prepare a presentation)
- creativity: the process of having original ideas that have value
- creativity and literacy: same status
- kids take a chance at creativity - anecdotes: girl drawing + boy
playing 3 kings
- the stigmatization of mistakes: ‘Educating people out of their
creative capacities’
- education systems
- share the same
hierarchy of subjects
1 mathematics and languages,
2 the humanities
3 the arts
- focus on
academic ability (the needs of industrialization)
- suffer a
process of academic inflation
- intelligence is
- diverse
(visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, abstract, movement)
- dynamic
(interactive = the brain has no compartments)
- distinct (specific e.g. dancer)
- conclusion
We should educate children’s whole being to help them face the future
and make something of it.
Glossary and Notes
Sir Ken Robinson
A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government's 1998
advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into
the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and
was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion
Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was
published in January 2009.
blow sb away = to surprise or please someone very much =
encantar, deleitar
The ending will blow you away.
play out = when a situation plays out,
it happens and develops = desarrollarse
The
debate will play out in the meetings and in the media over the next week or
two.
you're never asked back = you're never invited again
the blood run from sb's face = they turn
white/pale
to pin sb to the wall = to immobilise sb,
to not let them go away
vested interest = intereses creados
not have a clue = have no idea, be puzzled
on parade = exhibited, shown
we're meant to = we're supposed to, expected to
nonetheless = however
so to speak = por así decirlo
contention = an opinion expressed in an argument; point
= argumento
It
is her contention that exercise is more important than diet if you want
to lose weight.
to squander = waste, misuse, throw away, spend recklessly, spend
unwisely, spend like water ANTONYM manage, make good use of, save.
ruthlessly =
mercilessly, cruelly, heartlessly, brutally, viciously ANTONYM mercifully
hardly (pay
attention) = almost not, scarcely
nativity play
= a play (= obra de teatro) about Jesus Christ's birth
to
be thrilled about sth = to be
excited, feel joy, be happy about
cram
sth full = to
fill something with a lot of things = rellenar
the bit = the part
gold, frankincense and myrhh = oro, incienso y
mirra
to switch = to change position
tea towel ALSO tea cloth ALSO dishtowel = a cloth used for drying plates, knives,
forks, etc., after you have washed them
to have a go = to take a
chance, try to do sth
seamless = without defects,
consistent = perfecto, consistente
were you struck
(by a new thought?) = have you started thinking about...
he was in somebody's English class
= he had a teacher teaching him English
annoying
= irritating, exasperating, difficult
'Must try harder'
= 'debes esforzarte más' (what teachers always say)
mind
(you) = sth you say to
make what you have just said sound less strong = créeme
He's very untidy about the house; mind you, I'm
not much better (to be)
upset = disturbed,
shaken, tormented, worried, agitated
hierarchy =
organisation (top-down)
'Did
I miss a meeting?' = LITERALLY '¿Me he perdido un encuentro? (between children and their
bodies) 'ironic commentary
waist = the part
of the human body below the ribs and above the hips = cintura
If you were to
= if you did sth, if you happened to do sth
the output
= the result, the consequence
earn/get/score brownie points = imaginary award =
reconocimiento
I thought I could score some brownie points with my mother-in-law by
offering to cook dinner.
to
come out the top = the be the best
so there
= ya ves
high-water mark
= the maximum recorded level or value
achievement =
accomplishment, performance, undertaking, triumph = logro
(I
say this) out of (affection for
them) = I say this because I like/love them
disembodied
= to be separate from one's body
to
pop into (a discotheque) = to pay a
short visit
The
pain was so unbearable that he was writhing in agony.
off the beat = out of tune, not
following the rhythm
to come into being = to come
into existence, start being applied or used
to be rooted on sth = to have
sth as an origin or cause
to steer sb (benignly away from sth) = guide, conduct, direct,
lead, take, usher
benignly = kindly, warmly, tenderly, gently,
lovingly
on the grounds that... = using sth
as justification for a belief
engulf
= to surround and cover something or someone
completely = rodear, apoderarse
The
flames rapidly engulfed the house.
The war is threatening to engulf the entire region.
in their
image =
made so that it looks similar to = a su imagen (y semejanza)
protracted = prolonged, lengthy
we can't
afford to do sth = we can't continue doing it, we can't carry on like that
degree = an academic rank
conferred by a university (= título universitario)
to head home = to go home, walk/travel towards home
to carry on doing sth = to continue, keep on, go on, persist in
BA
= Bachelor of Arts (= Licenciado en Humanidades) BS ALSO BSc = Bachelor of Science (=
Licenciado en Ciencias)
MA = Master of Arts MS ALSO MSc = Master of Science
PhD = Doctor
to shift = to
move, alter, change, reverse, turn on, slide
beneath = under, underneath,
below, at the bottom of
kinaesthesia = the senses used as a whole, especially
associated with movement
to come about = to happen, take
place
shaft = a bunch, a group = un puñado
multitasking = dealing with several things at the same time
a raft = a large amount
to do open-heart surgery = cirugía a corazón abierto (ironic comment)
on the hook = not ready to be used
an old chestnut = a joke, story that has
been repeated too much
to get to be there = to manage to be
successful
to be prompted = to be encouraged, induced
to be hopeless = very bad and incompetent
to fidget = play, fool around, fiddle,
mess around = moverse constantemente
ADHD (Spanish ADD) = Attention-deficit/hyperactivity
disorder (AD/HD or ADHD) is a neurobehavioral developmental disorder. It
affects about 3 to 5% of children globally with symptoms starting before seven
years of age. It is characterized by a persistent pattern of impulsiveness and
inattention, with or without a component of hyperactivity. ADHD is diagnosed
twice as frequently in boys as in girls, though studies suggest this
discrepancy may be due to subjective bias. ADHD is generally a chronic disorder
with 30 to 50% of those individuals diagnosed in childhood continuing to have
symptoms into adulthood. As they mature, adolescents and adults with ADHD are
likely to develop coping mechanisms to compensate for their impairment.
ADHD management usually involves some combination of medications,
behaviour modifications, life-style changes, and counselling.
ADHD and its diagnosis and
treatment have been considered controversial since the 1970s. The controversies
have involved clinicians, teachers, policymakers, parents, and the media, with
opinions regarding ADHD that range from not believing it exists at all to
believing there are genetic and physiological bases for the condition, and also
include disagreement about the use of stimulant medications in treatment.
oak-paneled = having panels
made of oak (= roble) on the walls
to sit still = to sit and not move
richness = wealth
to mine (sb's minds) = to destroy (with an explosive mine) = minar
to strip-mine = to obtain minerals by opencast mining = minería a
cielo abierto
commodity
=
raw material, useful things such as water, copper, coffee, wheat, considered as
marketable items
to avert = to avoid, turn aside from, prevent
their
whole being = su ser como un todo
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