Good morning. How areyou?
00:04
(Laughter)
00:05
It's been great,hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'mleaving.
00:12
(Laughter)
00:18
There have been threethemes running through the conference which are relevant to what I want totalk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity inall of the presentations that we've had and in all of the peoplehere. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is thatit's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going tohappen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.
00:45
I have an interest ineducation. Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest ineducation. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're ata dinner party, and you say you work in education --Actually, you're notoften at dinner parties, frankly.
01:00
(Laughter)
01:04
If you work ineducation, you're not asked.
01:07
(Laughter)
01:10
And you're never askedback, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say tosomebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you sayyou work in education, you can see the blood run from theirface. They're like, "Oh my God," you know, "Why me?"
01:24
(Laughter)
01:26
"My one night outall week."
01:27
(Laughter)
01:30
But if you ask abouttheir education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those thingsthat goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and otherthings. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we alldo. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it'seducation that's meant to take us into this future that we can'tgrasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will beretiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that'sbeen on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like infive years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. Sothe unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
02:12
And the third part ofthis is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the reallyextraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities forinnovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she?Just seeingwhat she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so tospeak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there isa person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And mycontention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them,pretty ruthlessly.
02:45
So I want to talkabout education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention isthat creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and weshould treat it with the same status.
02:58
(Applause) Thank you.
03:00
(Applause)
03:05
That was it, by theway. Thank you very much.
03:07
(Laughter)
03:09
So, 15 minutes left.
03:11
(Laughter)
03:14
Well, I was born...no.
03:16
(Laughter)
03:19
I heard a great storyrecently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawinglesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and theteacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawinglesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. 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, "Butnobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "Theywill, in a minute."
03:45
(Laughter)
03:56
When my son was fourin England -- Actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.
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(Laughter)
04:03
If we're being strictabout it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativityplay. Do you remember the story?
04:09
(Laughter)
04:10
No, it was big, it wasa big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.
04:14
(Laughter)
04:16
"NativityII." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilledabout. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the placecrammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!"(Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where thethree kings come in?They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense andmyrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think theyjust went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterwardand we said,"You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why? Wasthat wrong?" They just switched. The three boys camein, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put theseboxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." Andthe second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boysaid, "Frank sent this."
04:58
(Laughter)
05:10
What these things havein common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'llhave a go.Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't meanto say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we doknow is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up withanything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by thetime they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They havebecome frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies likethis. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national educationsystems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And theresult is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
05:54
Picasso once saidthis, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remainan artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't growinto creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out ofit. So why is this?
06:10
I lived inStratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved fromStratford to Los Angeles.So you can imagine what a seamless transition thatwas.
06:20
(Laughter)
06:22
Actually, we lived ina place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is whereShakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? Iwas. 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? Shakespearebeing seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at somepoint. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?
06:43
(Laughter)
06:50
How annoying wouldthat be?
06:52
(Laughter)
06:59
"Must tryharder."
07:00
(Laughter)
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Being sent to bed byhis dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now! And put thepencil down."
07:10
(Laughter)
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"And stopspeaking like that."
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(Laughter)
07:17
"It's confusingeverybody."
07:18
(Laughter)
07:23
Anyway, we moved fromStratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about thetransition.My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, mydaughter'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.
07:46
(Laughter)
07:47
Mind you, they'd hadtheir fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Hewas really upset on the plane, he said, "I'll never find another girllike Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly --
07:59
(Laughter)
08:07
Because she was themain reason we were leaving the country.
08:10
(Laughter)
08:16
But something strikesyou when you move to America and travel around the world: Everyeducation 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 itisn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities,and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in prettymuch every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and musicare normally given a higher status in schools than drama anddance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teachesdance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is veryimportant, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowedto, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?
08:59
(Laughter)
09:02
Truthfully, whathappens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressivelyfrom the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly toone side.
09:11
If you were to visiteducation, as an alien, and say "What's it for, publiceducation?" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at theoutput, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that theyshould, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- Ithink you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of publiceducation throughout the world is to produce universityprofessors. Isn't it?They're the people who come out the top. And Iused to be one, so there.
09:37
(Laughter)
09:40
And I like universityprofessors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-watermark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, anotherform of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affectionfor them. There's something curious about professors in my experience-- not all of them, but typically, they live in their heads. Theylive up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, ina kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transportfor their heads.
10:10
(Laughter)
10:16
Don't they? It'sa way of getting their head to meetings.
10:19
(Laughter)
10:25
If you want realevidence of out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residentialconference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the finalnight.
10:34
(Laughter)
10:37
And there, you willsee it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.
10:43
(Laughter)
10:45
Waiting until it endsso they can go home and write a paper about it.
10:49
(Laughter)
10:51
Our education systemis predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's areason. Around the world, there were no public systems ofeducation, really, before the 19th century. They all came into beingto meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on twoideas.
11:07
Number one, that themost useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steeredbenignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things youliked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is thatright? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't doart, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundlymistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
11:30
And the second isacademic ability, which has really come to dominate our view ofintelligence,because the universities designed the system in theirimage. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around theworld is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequenceis that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they'renot, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, orwas actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
11:55
In the next 30 years,according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating througheducation than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's thecombination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and itstransformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion inpopulation.
12:12
Suddenly, degreesaren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if youhad a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because youdidn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But nowkids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing videogames,because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and nowyou need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academicinflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education isshifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view ofintelligence.
12:45
We know three thingsabout intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world inall the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound,we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think inmovement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at theinteractions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number ofpresentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brainisn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define asthe processof having original ideas that have value -- more often than notcomes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways ofseeing things.
13:22
By the way, there's ashaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpuscallosum.It's thicker in women. Following off from Helenyesterday, this is probably why women are better atmulti-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft ofresearch, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking ameal at home -- which is not often, thankfully.
13:45
(Laughter)
13:47
No, she's good at somethings, but if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on thephone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she'sdoing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, thekids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I getannoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg inhere."
14:07
(Laughter)
14:14
"Give me abreak."
14:15
(Laughter)
14:17
Actually, do you knowthat old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hearsit, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirtrecently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and nowoman hears him, is he still wrong?"
14:32
(Laughter)
14:39
And the third thingabout intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at themoment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series ofinterviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'mfascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by aconversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have neverheard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's achoreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and"Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be onthe board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and Ihad lunch one day and I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?" Itwas interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. Andthe school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said,"We think Gillianhas a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. Ithink 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 availablecondition.
15:35
(Laughter)
15:37
People weren't awarethey could have that.
15:39
(Laughter)
15:42
Anyway, she went tosee this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with hermother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she saton her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about theproblems Gillian was having at school. Because she was disturbing people;her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight. In theend, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian, and said, "I'velistened to all these things your mother's told me, I need to speak to herprivately. Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," andthey went and left her.
16:15
But as they went outof the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. Andwhen they got out, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watchher." And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet,moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned toher mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's adancer. Take her to a dance school."
16:39
I said, "Whathappened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful itwas. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. Peoplewho couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had tomove to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; theydid contemporary.She was eventually auditioned for the Royal BalletSchool; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the RoyalBallet. She eventually graduated from the Royal BalletSchool, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew LloydWebber. She's been responsible for some of the most successfulmusical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions,and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her onmedication and told her to calm down.
17:21
(Applause)
17:28
What I think it comesto is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and therevolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hopefor the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one inwhich we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of humancapacity.Our education system has mined our minds in the way that westrip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, itwon't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles onwhich we're educating our children.
18:02
There was a wonderfulquote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappearfrom the Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If allhuman beings disappeared from the Earth,within 50 years all forms of life wouldflourish." And he's right.
18:22
What TED celebrates isthe gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that weuse this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we'vetalked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creativecapacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for thehope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, sothey can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, butthey will. And our job is to help them make something of it.
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