Footage from the 2011 SOS March. Matt Damon spoke. Matt Damon did interviews. Matt Damon defended teachers against a [expletive] cameraman!
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Thursday, June 30, 2011
A Question of Degree
The value of a college degree has come under scrutiny
http://www.trendcentral.com/life/a-question-of-degree/
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
How to Raise the Standard in America's Schools
National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states' traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local standards downward in order to pretend to satisfy federal demands by showing that their students are proficient.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1891468,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1891468,00.html
National Standards
Canada’s Education System and National Standards
Are National Standards Necessary?
Are National Standards Necessary?
Are national standards necessary for good quality, comparable social programs? Or can equal and comparable programs emerge without national oversight?
Sunday, June 26, 2011
The New Bottom-up Authority
The top-down, authoritarian model found in most classrooms today looks very different from the model many students experience when they learn online. The classroom’s hierarchical approach, with the sage on the stage, requires, (and, ultimately demands) passivity and deference on the part of the learner. Informal, interest-driven networked learning, with its access to large stores of information and variety of opinion, on the other hand, takes a much different view of authority. It’s usually peer based, largely democratic, meritocratic, often creates dissonance due to variety and demands evaluation. Knowing what we do about active learning, one would seem clearly superior to the other.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Maria Andersen: Where's the "Learn This" Button?
Learning needs to be more personalized. We all know this. But rarely does anyone describe a practical way actually to accomplish that goal. This presentation will delineate not only how we can (and will) do it, but will up the stakes, arguing that learning could be measured (gasp!) outside of educational institutions, with learners free to gobble up knowledge as they roam the Internet following their changing interests.
Maria Andersen is the learning futurist for The LIFT Institute at Muskegon Community College, as well as a professor of math. She has degrees in biology, chemistry, math, business, and is hoping to defend her Ph.D. in Higher Educational Leadership in March. Andersen's research interests lie in active learning, the study of higher education faculty, interdisciplinary studies, math education, and speculation about the future of education. She writes regularly about education, technology, eLearning, the scholarship of teaching and learning, play, and the future of higher education. Her latest musings can be found at
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
This new school discipline tactic is worrying
Restorative circles
This new approach to discipline may be coming to your school. Here’s why you should be wary
http://lifestyle.ca.msn.com/family-parenting/school/restorative-circles
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
How to Use Kidblog - A Video
If you would like to use KidBlog with your students, my students decided to make a How To video. The students cover how to post, how to be safe, adding images, leaving a comment, and how to change font. mY students wrote the script, directed and acted in this, oh how I love it when kids teach kids
Friday, May 27, 2011
Why Are So Many Students Still Failing Online?
Online learning has become the third rail in American higher-education politics: Step on it and you're toast.
That's especially true at community colleges, where many leaders have embraced online courses with an almost religious fervor. And we all know why. It's not because anyone is seriously arguing that online classes are consistently better than the face-to-face versions. And it's not even necessarily because students are clamoring for them (although they're clearly popular in certain segments of the population, such as stay-at-home parents, people with full-time jobs, and deployed members of the armed forces). It's because colleges can produce online courses much more cheaply while charging roughly the same tuition.
http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Are-So-Many-Students-Still/127584/
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Billionaire to Pay Kids to Skip College
Critic of college education believes part of "American Dream" is overpriced.
Monday, May 23, 2011
The Job Market: Is a College Degree Worth Less?
Employers and career experts see a growing problem in American society — an abundance of college graduates, many burdened with tuition-loan debt, heading into the work world with a degree that doesn't mean much anymore.
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1946088,00.html
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1946088,00.html
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
New York Times To Offer Online Accredited Courses
NEW YORK -- The New York Times Knowledge Network and New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University are teaming up to offer online courses in subjects ranging from homeland security studies to global health care.
The courses will be open to all students and they may be taken individually or used toward an academic certificate.
What Course(s) Would You Like to Take Online?
The courses will be open to all students and they may be taken individually or used toward an academic certificate.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Classroom 2.0
Saturday, May 7th, Kim Caise, Lorna Costantini and Peggy George will be hosting another Classroom 2.0 LIVE show. As an extension to the Classroom 2.0 Ning community, Classroom 2.0 "LIVE" shows are opportunities to gather with other educators in real-time events, complete with audio, chat and desktop sharing. A Google calendar of upcoming shows is available at
http://www.youtube.com/elluminated#p/u/1/fKQZM4slwzA
The topic will be "Mobile Motivation: Real World Learning with Mobile Devices” with Shelly Terrell. Shelly will share ways to use mobile learning to engage and motivate students. "Dip your toes in" the conversations until you feel comfortable enough to "jump in with both feet"! More information and session details are at http://live.classroom20.com/
On the Classroom 2.0 LIVE! site you'll find the recordings from our recent "Mission US” session with Kim Flack and Joanne Henning. Click on the
If you haven't used Elluminate before, we encourage you to view this tutorial to prepare for the Elluminate session:
http://www.youtube.com/elluminated#p/u/1/fKQZM4slwzA
If you're new to the Classroom 2.0 LIVE! show you might want to spend a few minutes viewing the screencast on the homepage to learn how we use Elluminate and navigate the site to find the archives of previous shows and resources. Each show begins at 12pm Eastern and may be accessed in Elluminate directly using the following link:
http://live.classroom20.com/archive-and-resources.html and recordings tab
Visit Classroom 2.0 at:Monday, May 2, 2011
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Budget Idea: Divert Money From Prisons to Schools
With a quarter of the world’s prisoners in American lockups, an unlikely coalition ranging from the NAACP to Americans for Tax Reform wonders if we might be smarter to divert some of that prison money to schools.
How Did Students Become Academically Adrift?
“Academically Adrift,” a new book on the failures of higher education, finds that undergrads don’t study, and professors don’t make them.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Clarity Not Always the Best for Learning
Impediments to easy understanding — hard-to-read fonts, hard-to-follow lectures and lessons that are all too soon forgotten — may be the key to really learning something.
... clarity is a hallmark of truly excellent teaching. There’s just one problem: It may not be true.
According to growing mountain of research, understanding isn’t enough. It’s the struggle that makes us learn. By making things too clear, teachers can inadvertently prevent students from learning. I explain below that teachers shouldn’t exactly be unclear either. But first, here’s some evidence.
... clarity is a hallmark of truly excellent teaching. There’s just one problem: It may not be true.
According to growing mountain of research, understanding isn’t enough. It’s the struggle that makes us learn. By making things too clear, teachers can inadvertently prevent students from learning. I explain below that teachers shouldn’t exactly be unclear either. But first, here’s some evidence.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Michael Fullan on what school reform is
Cheryl Jackson interviews Michael Fullan on how school must change
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Guns On Campuses
Arizona House Passes Bill Allowing Guns On Campuses
7 States Considering Allowing Guns On College Campuses
5 Things That Should Be Allowed On College Campuses Before Guns
College students get caught with all sorts of things they're not supposed to have -- alcohol, drugs, plagiarized papers... And up until now, guns would have been considered contraband, too. But at least seven states are currently considering revised policies that would allow professors and/or students to carry licensed firearms on campus. That's right: guns on campus. Whatever side of the issue you favor, it seems like there are some clearer risk vs. reward policies that states should amend first. Here are five.
(1) Christmas Trees
Some Oklahoma legislators think Sooner state students need guns. But what about garlands? Oklahoma State University strictly prohibits live Christmas trees in dorms, suites, apartments and corridors. In 2005, there were more than 30,000 U.S. deaths associated with firearms. In 2002, Christmas tree fires killed 23 people. Just sayin'.
(2) Waterbeds
New Mexico officials are big on arms support, but less concerned with therapeutic support for backs. Specifically, New Mexico State University doesn't want any waterbeds on the premises, which makes sense when you consider how pristine and plush the carpets are in most college apartments. Because undergrads are always taking off their shoes at the front door, investing in extra Scotchgard and avoiding activities that might precipitate spillage.
(3)
(4)
(5)
7 States Considering Allowing Guns On College Campuses
5 Things That Should Be Allowed On College Campuses Before Guns
College students get caught with all sorts of things they're not supposed to have -- alcohol, drugs, plagiarized papers... And up until now, guns would have been considered contraband, too. But at least seven states are currently considering revised policies that would allow professors and/or students to carry licensed firearms on campus. That's right: guns on campus. Whatever side of the issue you favor, it seems like there are some clearer risk vs. reward policies that states should amend first. Here are five.
(1) Christmas Trees
Some Oklahoma legislators think Sooner state students need guns. But what about garlands? Oklahoma State University strictly prohibits live Christmas trees in dorms, suites, apartments and corridors. In 2005, there were more than 30,000 U.S. deaths associated with firearms. In 2002, Christmas tree fires killed 23 people. Just sayin'.
(2) Waterbeds
New Mexico officials are big on arms support, but less concerned with therapeutic support for backs. Specifically, New Mexico State University doesn't want any waterbeds on the premises, which makes sense when you consider how pristine and plush the carpets are in most college apartments. Because undergrads are always taking off their shoes at the front door, investing in extra Scotchgard and avoiding activities that might precipitate spillage.
(3)
(4)
(5)
Education Will Bring Societies Together -- We Can't Depend on Governmental Diplomacy Alone
How ironic that in a time of rapidly increasing connectivity around the globe, we are still so far from understanding other cultures, especially those that observe religions and traditions different from our own. How unsettling to observe fear and, often, hate and to sense the widening chasm between Americans and people with whom we need to find common ground and common cause if there is to be any chance of a peaceful future.
Colleges Spend Less On Education Than They Say: Study
Think you're paying too much for college? You may be right, according to a new study that finds that most students spend more on their education than it is actually worth.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/08/colleges-spend-less-on-students_n_846347.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/08/colleges-spend-less-on-students_n_846347.html
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Teenage drug and alcohol abuse skyrockets
Teenage drug and alcohol abuse skyrockets
After years in decline, more U.S. kids are partying with drugs and alcohol, starting as early as age 12
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/06/eveningnews/main20051485.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.1
Survey: Teen substance abuse on the rise
A new survey reveals that substance abuse among young people is increasing, including alcohol, marijuana and ecstasy. Ben Tracy reports
After years in decline, more U.S. kids are partying with drugs and alcohol, starting as early as age 12
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/04/06/eveningnews/main20051485.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.1
Survey: Teen substance abuse on the rise
A new survey reveals that substance abuse among young people is increasing, including alcohol, marijuana and ecstasy. Ben Tracy reports
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Recession's High Schoolers Scale Back Life Goals
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/24/eveningnews/main6615750.shtml?tag=cbsnewsSectionsArea.6
For some Americans, the recession never really ended, and it's still hitting children especially hard
For some Americans, the recession never really ended, and it's still hitting children especially hard
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Teaching Literacy in the early years
Practical ideas, strategies and resources for teaching literacy skills in the classroom
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The U.S. Black/White Test-Score Gap
A U.S. Black/White test-score gap appears in every test of mental abilities that are important to success in Western culture. Here we look at eight hypotheses as to the cause. Five hypotheses have been disproved. Three are still in the running.
Link to Internet radio playing 24/7 audio-only lectures on the U.S. "race" notion, including this one: http://www.shoutcast.com/Internet-Radio/backintyme%20lectures
For more, visit http://knol.google.com/k/the-u-s-black-white-test-score-gap-e2#
What is Education?
What’s your answer?
Take a look at this one delivered by a five year old. Freebrook Academy founded by a PDS alum Monique Scott and open for students in September.
Take a look at this one delivered by a five year old. Freebrook Academy founded by a PDS alum Monique Scott and open for students in September.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Cooperative Learning
The Group and the Individual
how one form of CL called Complex Instruction really works to lift the academic achievement of everyone in a classroom of diverse learners
It asks the question, "Is it best for all students?"
Students share what they think of cooperative learning in the classroom.
Listen to students as they discuss multiple choice questions from a worksheet as a team and in partners.
Mrs. Stefanie McKoy's 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Quiz-Quiz-Trade for Kagan Online Magazine.
Mrs. Melissa Agnews 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Showdown for Kagan Online Magazine
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. Melissa Agnews 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Fan-N-Pick for Kagan Online Magazine
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. Stefanie McKoy's 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Traveling Quiz-N-Show for Kagan Online Magazine.
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. McKoy is demonstrating cooperative learning using a classroom response system. Students are engaging in structured discussions designed by Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures. Students are working to answer a variety of multiple choice questions on a predetermined worksheet.
how one form of CL called Complex Instruction really works to lift the academic achievement of everyone in a classroom of diverse learners
It asks the question, "Is it best for all students?"
Students share what they think of cooperative learning in the classroom.
Listen to students as they discuss multiple choice questions from a worksheet as a team and in partners.
Mrs. Stefanie McKoy's 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Quiz-Quiz-Trade for Kagan Online Magazine.
Mrs. Melissa Agnews 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Showdown for Kagan Online Magazine
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. Melissa Agnews 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Fan-N-Pick for Kagan Online Magazine
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. Stefanie McKoy's 3rd grade classroom demonstrates the Kagan Structure Traveling Quiz-N-Show for Kagan Online Magazine.
http://www.kaganonline.com/
Mrs. McKoy is demonstrating cooperative learning using a classroom response system. Students are engaging in structured discussions designed by Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures. Students are working to answer a variety of multiple choice questions on a predetermined worksheet.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!
In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning -- creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of… Full bio and more links
Transcript:
I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online; I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now.
(Laughter)
And actually Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk and he said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure."
And four years later, as I said, it's been seen by four ... Well, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
... don't you feel?
(Laughter)
So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is.
(Laughter)
Al Gore spoke at the TED Conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. So, as I was saying...
(Laughter)
You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously. And I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter) But I believe there's a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And I mean by this -- and you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis; I don't really need the second one." But this is a crisis of, not natural resources, though I believe that's true, but a crisis of human resources.
I believe, fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything.
Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world, those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." (Laughter) Well, I do. (Laughter)
I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it, rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you were talking about. Because it isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's certainly a minority of people. And I think there are many
possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them. They're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens. But too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment. And it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times during the course of the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
(Applause)
One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense -- things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done."
I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter) So, no doubt, something fascinating was happening in December 1862, which the Americans among us will be aware of.
But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."
I love that word, "disenthrall." You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them. And we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted.
So let me ask you something that you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what I think you take for granted. I'm sure you're familiar with that already. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing a wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't or they're not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is, you see, that we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And, by the way, you don't need to do it either; it's just that you've always done it, and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, "It's a single function device." (Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." (Laughter) "It has multiple functions."
But you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story, that life is not linear, it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting into college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college, certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go, and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.
And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. And I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fireman." And I said, "How long have you been a fireman?" He said, "Always, I've always been a fireman." And I said, "Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid." He said, "Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it, that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential, and I was wasting my talent to do that." And he said, "It was humiliating because he said it in front of the whole class, and I really felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted." And he said, "You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher," he said, "because six months ago, I saved his life." (Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." He said, "I think he thinks better of me now."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges -- (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem.
When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement, very well-intentioned, which said, "College begins in kindergarten." No, it doesn't. (Laughter) It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. (Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "You know, a three year-old is not half a six year-old." (Laughter) (Applause) They're three.
But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get to kindergarten, to get to the right kindergarten, that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes, (Laughter) flipping through and saying, "Well, this is it?" (Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" (Laughter) "You've achieved nothing, commit. Spent the first six months breastfeeding, the way I can see it." (Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception, but it attracts people.
The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
(Applause)
I think we have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time Eric Clapton got his first guitar. You know, it worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter) In a way, it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. It just wouldn't work.
But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.
So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.
So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones like KIPPs, it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.
Now, in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. but we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's where they choose to be educated with their families or their friends.
There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days. And I wanted to just very quickly -- I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W.B. Yeats, who's someone you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you."
He says this: "Had I the heavens embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet; But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of… Full bio and more links
Transcript:
I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online; I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now.
(Laughter)
And actually Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk and he said, "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure."
And four years later, as I said, it's been seen by four ... Well, it's been downloaded four million times. So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it. And as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
... don't you feel?
(Laughter)
So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is.
(Laughter)
Al Gore spoke at the TED Conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis. And I referenced that at the end of my last talk. So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly. So, as I was saying...
(Laughter)
You see, he's right. I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously. And I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter) But I believe there's a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with with the same urgency. And I mean by this -- and you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good. I have one climate crisis; I don't really need the second one." But this is a crisis of, not natural resources, though I believe that's true, but a crisis of human resources.
I believe, fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything.
Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now. Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, "There are two types of people in this world, those who divide the world into two types and those who do not." (Laughter) Well, I do. (Laughter)
I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it, rather than enjoy it, and wait for the weekend. But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. If you said to them, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you were talking about. Because it isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self." And it's not true of enough people. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's certainly a minority of people. And I think there are many
possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them. They're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves. And you might imagine education would be the way that happens. But too often, it's not. Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment. And it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need -- and the word's been used many times during the course of the past few days -- is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.
(Applause)
One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense -- things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done."
I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter) He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress. I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time. We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter) We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter) So, no doubt, something fascinating was happening in December 1862, which the Americans among us will be aware of.
But he said this: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion." I love that. Not rise to it, rise with it. "As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country."
I love that word, "disenthrall." You know what it means? That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are. And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them. And we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done. It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. And the reason is that you take it for granted.
So let me ask you something that you may take for granted. How many of you here are over the age of 25? That's not what I think you take for granted. I'm sure you're familiar with that already. Are there any people here under the age of 25? Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing a wristwatch? Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it? Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing. Teenagers do not wear wristwatches. I don't mean they can't or they're not allowed to, they just often choose not to. And the reason is, you see, that we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25. And so for us, if you want to know the time, you have to wear something to tell it. Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere. They see no reason to do this. And, by the way, you don't need to do it either; it's just that you've always done it, and you carry on doing it. My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20. She doesn't see the point. As she says, "It's a single function device." (Laughter) "Like, how lame is that?" And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well." (Laughter) "It has multiple functions."
But you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story, that life is not linear, it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting into college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college, certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go, and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.
And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing. There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s. And I said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm a fireman." And I said, "How long have you been a fireman?" He said, "Always, I've always been a fireman." And I said, "Well, when did you decide?" He said, "As a kid." He said, "Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman." He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman." And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously. This one teacher didn't take it seriously. He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it, that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential, and I was wasting my talent to do that." And he said, "It was humiliating because he said it in front of the whole class, and I really felt dreadful. But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted." And he said, "You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher," he said, "because six months ago, I saved his life." (Laughter) He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well." He said, "I think he thinks better of me now."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges -- (Applause) At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence. This linearity thing is a problem.
When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement, very well-intentioned, which said, "College begins in kindergarten." No, it doesn't. (Laughter) It doesn't. If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter) Kindergarten begins in kindergarten. (Laughter) A friend of mine once said, "You know, a three year-old is not half a six year-old." (Laughter) (Applause) They're three.
But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get to kindergarten, to get to the right kindergarten, that people are being interviewed for it at three. Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes, (Laughter) flipping through and saying, "Well, this is it?" (Laughter) (Applause) "You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?" (Laughter) "You've achieved nothing, commit. Spent the first six months breastfeeding, the way I can see it." (Laughter) See, it's outrageous as a conception, but it attracts people.
The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
(Applause)
I think we have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time Eric Clapton got his first guitar. You know, it worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter) In a way, it did not for me. I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it. It just wouldn't work.
But it's not only about that. It's about passion. Often, people are good at things they don't really care for. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely. My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end. You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes. If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour. And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.
So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.
So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. There are great ones like KIPPs, it's a great system. There are many great models. It's about customizing to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.
Now, in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. but we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life. Or at home, if that's where they choose to be educated with their families or their friends.
There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days. And I wanted to just very quickly -- I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems. I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W.B. Yeats, who's someone you may know. He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him. And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you."
He says this: "Had I the heavens embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet; But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams." And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet. And we should tread softly.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of… Full bio and more links
Transcript:
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. (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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." (Laughter) But if you ask 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 capacities 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. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter)
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 at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever 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." (Laughter)
When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four 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!" (Laughter) 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 I think they just went out of sequence, because 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, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in -- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter)
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 that 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 if 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 that was. (Laughter) 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? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? 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? (Laughter) "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." (Laughter)
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. (Laughter)
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 math 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? (Laughter) 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 that 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. (Laughter) 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 professors in my experience -- 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, don't they? (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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 -- around 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 won't 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. (Laughter) 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 that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. 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. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. 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. (Laughter) But you know, she's doing -- no, 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." (Laughter) Actually, 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 really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter)
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. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd 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 to 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. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that.
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 a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man 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 eight -- 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 -- 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 multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think ... (Applause) 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 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.
Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we're educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of… Full bio and more links
Transcript:
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. (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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." (Laughter) But if you ask 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 capacities 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. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter)
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 at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever 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." (Laughter)
When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four 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!" (Laughter) 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 I think they just went out of sequence, because 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, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in -- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter)
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 that 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 if 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 that was. (Laughter) 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? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? 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? (Laughter) "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." (Laughter)
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. (Laughter)
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 math 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? (Laughter) 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 that 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. (Laughter) 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 professors in my experience -- 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, don't they? (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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 -- around 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 won't 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. (Laughter) 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 that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. 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. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. 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. (Laughter) But you know, she's doing -- no, 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." (Laughter) Actually, 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 really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter)
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. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd 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 to 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. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that.
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 a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man 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 eight -- 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 -- 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 multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think ... (Applause) 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 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.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
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Khan: 'It depresses me how many people say they hate math'
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Viral math videos go global
The Gates Foundation and Google recently donated $3.5 million to help turn what began as one man's effort to help one student into a global classroom.
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Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Tardy students receive rude awakening
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States tangle with teacher tenure
Education Nation: As momentum for school reform grows, and state budgets continue to shrink, the system of teacher tenure in public schools is under increasing scrutiny. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Education Q&A with Geoffrey Canada
Geoffrey Canada on education: ‘We’re not doing enough’
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, answers viewers' questions about education reform.
Geoffrey Canada, CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone, answers viewers' questions about education reform.
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Improving Science Literacy
Question: What should be the standard for science literary in the US?
Heidi Hammel: My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don’t have a very high level of scientific literacy. People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that’s such a shame, because I don’t think it’s as hard as people seem to think it is. You know, people have this idea that if you’re not brilliant like Einstein, you can’t be a scientist. And that’s just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well. And so a lot of the work that I do is to try to dispel these myths about science being an arcane, hard field, and math being incomprehensible. I just think, you know what? We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that’s the language of science. And, you know, if I go to Sweden or Ethiopia, I can’t speak that language, and that doesn’t mean I can’t live in that country and function. I need to learn the language. It’s the same with science and math. You need to learn the language first, and then you can work in those fields. But it’s not mysterious and arcane. It’s a way of looking at the world, and a way of exploring the world, and trying to make sense of the world. It disappoints me that people are so frightened of science and frightened of math. I think the only way we’ll have a sea change in peoples’ appreciation of science, technology, engineering, math, is through a broad effort, partially part of the government, partially the work of scientists like me, who communicate to the public, partially the parents of young kids, not propagating myths about science is hard and, oh, I never did well in math, you know. You don’t need to do that. Yeah. It’s got to be a joint effort on everybody’s part. People need to realize that the world is changing. It’s a very different world than it was 20, 30 years ago, and we have to be aware of that as a culture, as a society, and recognize that the rest of the world is moving on and moving on pretty quickly. And if we want to maintain the level of comfort in our culture and society that we’ve become accustomed to, we have to really get in there, and we have to educate our kids, and bring them up to speed commensurate with what’s going on in the other countries, and I worry that that’s not happening.
Heidi Hammel: My sense, talking to the general public around the country, is that most people don’t have a very high level of scientific literacy. People seem to be afraid of science, and certainly people seem to be afraid of mathematics. And I think that’s such a shame, because I don’t think it’s as hard as people seem to think it is. You know, people have this idea that if you’re not brilliant like Einstein, you can’t be a scientist. And that’s just a myth. He was the one out of a million scientists, but there were 999,999 other scientists who were not as brilliant but who just do great science, as well. And so a lot of the work that I do is to try to dispel these myths about science being an arcane, hard field, and math being incomprehensible. I just think, you know what? We need to know math to be a good scientist, but math is a language, and we need to learn the language because that’s the language of science. And, you know, if I go to Sweden or Ethiopia, I can’t speak that language, and that doesn’t mean I can’t live in that country and function. I need to learn the language. It’s the same with science and math. You need to learn the language first, and then you can work in those fields. But it’s not mysterious and arcane. It’s a way of looking at the world, and a way of exploring the world, and trying to make sense of the world. It disappoints me that people are so frightened of science and frightened of math. I think the only way we’ll have a sea change in peoples’ appreciation of science, technology, engineering, math, is through a broad effort, partially part of the government, partially the work of scientists like me, who communicate to the public, partially the parents of young kids, not propagating myths about science is hard and, oh, I never did well in math, you know. You don’t need to do that. Yeah. It’s got to be a joint effort on everybody’s part. People need to realize that the world is changing. It’s a very different world than it was 20, 30 years ago, and we have to be aware of that as a culture, as a society, and recognize that the rest of the world is moving on and moving on pretty quickly. And if we want to maintain the level of comfort in our culture and society that we’ve become accustomed to, we have to really get in there, and we have to educate our kids, and bring them up to speed commensurate with what’s going on in the other countries, and I worry that that’s not happening.
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