The fact that this is the most watched TED talk of all time should tell you a little about the inspired thinking contained in this video. In his first highly amusing and personal talk Sir Ken Robinson starts a revolution of thinking about one of the most important topics in the world, education.
TED's slogan is "Ideas Worth Spreading" and revolutionising education has to be one of the most relevant ideas in the world right now and one that requires radical adjustments to our way of thinking if we are to adapt our education system to serve the next generation in order to repair the damage we have done to a world we can no longer envisage in as little as 5 years. It's education that's meant to take us into this future we can not grasp yet our system refuses to acknowledge that we don't know what this future will look like. Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2076, some 11 years later than the children Mr Robinson refers to in his talk in 2007 but whether we're talking about 2065 or 2076 one thing is for sure, we do not have a clue what the world will look like. So as he says, how can we claim to know exactly what a child needs to learn when we can not picture the world he will be living in?
Sir Ken Robinson believes that in this day and age creativity is as important in education as literacy and should be treated with the same status but points out that every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects leaving little room for creativity. No matter where you go it's languages and mathematics at the top followed by humanities and then at the bottom, the arts which are also split to favour art and music above drama and dance. I personally found this quite shocking. To think that a world as vastly different and unique as ours can possibly have the same system of education is ridiculous, no two people are the same let alone two people from different sides of the globe, different cultures, different environments, different upbringings. Surely our systems should be catered to enhance the children they are serving, as individually as possible? There isn't an education system on earth that teaches dance to children every day as we do maths, why? As he frankly points out, we all have bodies, all children dance but it seems that as children grow up we start to educate them from the waste up and then we focus on their heads and slightly to one side. As a result if you look at the system from the outside it is geared to produce university professors, a group of people who more often than not live in their heads and look upon their bodies as a form of transport, a way of getting their heads to meetings. (😂 he really is hilarious) The whole system was invented in the 19th century to meet the needs of industrialism and what was needed to get jobs at that time. However we now find ourselves in a situation where many kids following the guidelines are leaving university jobless as what you previously needed a standard degree for now requires a masters and there are just too many people following the same route to accommodate them all.
He asserts we need to radically rethink our view of intelligence about which we know three things; it is diverse, it's dynamic and interactive and it's distinct. Using an incredibly inspiring story about Gillian Lynne, the choreographer behind performances such as Cats and Phantom Of The Opera amongst others, and how she was allowed to discover her talent at eight years old, he questions whether that same talent would be enhanced or subdued in our medicated and mainstreamed society today. It's a scary thought. Would she be encouraged to go to dance school or would she be told to sit still and perhaps put on Ritalin? Tragically, at my school at least, I think she would have suffered the latter. We need educators who are prepared to look for the diverse, dynamic and distinct forms of intelligence we all posses, not just those held up by our archaic system. I can relate to the idea of having to move to think, as Gillian did, I was in trouble throughout my school career for being disruptive or hyper active but to this day I can't do one thing at a time, apart from maybe writing but that in itself requires simultaneous thinking so isn't technically one thing. Nobody understood this when I was at school, including myself because it was never an acceptable option. I hope with all my heart that by the time I have children who are ready for school there will be a system in place that allows for their versatile intellect, one that aims to nurture all the different kinds, looking for the uniquely creative instead of the normal.
Mr Robinson ends this fascinating talk by saying that "our education system has mined our mines in the way we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity and for the future it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principle upon which we're educating our children. We need to nurture our imaginations wisely by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are" whilst educating their whole being, not just their heads and slightly to one side. This is an important and inspired talk that I believe everyone needs to see, especially those of you with children, so please share far and wide!
