WEBVTT

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Good morning. How are you?
(Audience) Good.

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It's been great, hasn't it?

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I've been blown away by the whole thing.

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In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter)

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There have been three themes
running through the conference,

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which are relevant to what
I want to talk about.

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One is the extraordinary
evidence of human creativity

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in all of the presentations that we've
had and in all of the people here;

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just the variety of it
and the range of it.

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The second is that it's put us in a place

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where we have no idea what's going
to happen in terms of the future.

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No idea how this may play out.

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I have an interest in education.

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Actually, what I find is,
everybody has an interest in education.

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Don't you? I find this very interesting.

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If you're at a dinner party,
and you say you work in education --

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actually, you're not often
at dinner parties, frankly.

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(Laughter) If you work
in education, you're not asked.

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(Laughter)

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And you're never asked back,
curiously. That's strange to me.

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But if you are, and you say to somebody,
you know, they say, "What do you do?"

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and you say you work in education,
you can see the blood run from their face.

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They're like, "Oh my God. Why me?"

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(Laughter) "My one night out all week."

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(Laughter) But if you ask about
their education, they pin you to the wall,

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because it's one of those things
that goes deep with people, am I right?

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Like religion and money and other things.

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So I have a big interest in education,
and I think we all do.

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We have a huge vested interest in it,

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partly because it's education that's
meant to take us into this future

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that we can't grasp. If you think of it,

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children starting school this
year will be retiring in 2065.

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Nobody has a clue,

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despite all the expertise that's
been on parade for the past four days,

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what the world will look
like in five years' time.

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And yet, we're meant to be
educating them for it.

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So the unpredictability,
I think, is extraordinary.

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And the third part of this is
that we've all agreed, nonetheless,

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on the really extraordinary
capacities that children have --

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their capacities for innovation.

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I mean, Sirena last night
was a marvel, wasn't she?

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Just seeing what she could do.

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And she's exceptional, but I
think she's not, so to speak,

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exceptional in the whole of childhood.

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What you have there is a person
of extraordinary dedication

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who found a talent. And my contention
is, all kids have tremendous talents,

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and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

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So I want to talk about education,
and I want to talk about creativity.

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My contention is that creativity now
is as important in education as literacy,

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and we should treat it
with the same status.

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(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

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That was it, by the way.
Thank you very much.

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(Laughter) So, 15 minutes left.

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(Laughter) "Well, I was born... "

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(Laughter) I heard a great story
recently -- I love telling it --

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of a little girl who
was in a drawing lesson.

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She was six, and she
was at the back, drawing,

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and the teacher said this girl
hardly ever paid attention,

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and in this drawing lesson, she did.

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The teacher was fascinated.

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She went over to her, and she
said, "What are you drawing?"

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And the girl said,
"I'm drawing a picture of God."

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And the teacher said,
"But nobody knows what God looks like."

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And the girl said,
"They will in a minute."

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(Laughter)

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When my son was four in England --

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actually, he was four
everywhere, to be honest.

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(Laughter) If we're being strict about it,
wherever he went, he was four that year.

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He was in the Nativity play.
Do you remember the story?

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(Laughter) No, it was big,
it was a big story.

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Mel Gibson did the sequel,
you may have seen it.

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(Laughter) "Nativity II."

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But James got the part of Joseph,
which we were thrilled about.

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We considered this to be
one of the lead parts.

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We had the place crammed full of agents
in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!"

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(Laughter)

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He didn't have to speak, but you know
the bit where the three kings come in?

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They come in bearing gifts,
gold, frankincense and myrrh.

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This really happened.

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We were sitting there, and I think
they just went out of sequence,

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because we talked to the little
boy afterward and said,

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"You OK with that?" They said,
"Yeah, why? Was that wrong?"

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They just switched.

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The three boys came in, four-year-olds
with tea towels on their heads.

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They put these boxes down, and the
first boy said, "I bring you gold."

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And the second boy said,
"I bring you myrrh."

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And the third boy said, "Frank sent this."

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(Laughter)

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What these things have in common
is that kids will take a chance.

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If they don't know, they'll have a go.

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Am I right? They're not
frightened of being wrong.

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I don't mean to say that being wrong
is the same thing as being creative.

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What we do know is,
if you're not prepared to be wrong,

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you'll never come up
with anything original --

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if you're not prepared to be wrong.

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And by the time they get to be adults,
most kids have lost that capacity.

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They have become
frightened of being wrong.

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And we run our companies like this.

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We stigmatize mistakes. And we're
now running national education systems

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where mistakes are
the worst thing you can make.

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And the result is that we are educating
people out of their creative capacities.

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Picasso once said this, he said
that all children are born artists.

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The problem is to remain
an artist as we grow up.

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I believe this passionately, that we don't
grow into creativity, we grow out of it.

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Or rather, we get educated out of it.

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So why is this?

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I lived in Stratford-on-Avon
until about five years ago.

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In fact, we moved from
Stratford to Los Angeles.

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So you can imagine what
a seamless transition this was.

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(Laughter) Actually, we lived
in a place called Snitterfield,

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just outside Stratford, which
is where Shakespeare's father was born.

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Are you struck by a new thought? I was.

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You don't think of Shakespeare
having a father, do you?

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Do you? Because you don't think
of Shakespeare being a child, do you?

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Shakespeare being seven?
I never thought of it.

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I mean, he was seven at some point.

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He was in somebody's
English class, wasn't he?

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(Laughter)

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How annoying would that be? (Laughter)

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"Must try harder." (Laughter)

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Being sent to bed by his dad,
to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now!"

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To William Shakespeare.
"And put the pencil down!"

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(Laughter) "And stop speaking like that."

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(Laughter) "It's confusing everybody."

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(Laughter)

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Anyway, we moved from
Stratford to Los Angeles,

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and I just want to say
a word about the transition.

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Actually, my son didn't want to come.

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I've got two kids;
he's 21 now, my daughter's 16.

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He didn't want to come to Los Angeles.

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He loved it, but he had
a girlfriend in England.

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This was the love of his life, Sarah.

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He'd known her for a month. (Laughter)

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Mind you, they'd had
their fourth anniversary,

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because it's a long time when you're 16.

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He was really upset on the plane.

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He said, "I'll never find
another girl like Sarah."

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And we were rather pleased
about that, frankly -- (Laughter)

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because she was the main reason
we were leaving the country.

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(Laughter)

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But something strikes you when you move
to America and travel around the world:

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every education system on earth
has the same hierarchy of subjects.

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Every one. Doesn't matter where you go.

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You'd think it would be
otherwise, but it isn't.

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At the top are mathematics
and languages, then the humanities.

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At the bottom are the arts.
Everywhere on earth.

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And in pretty much every system, too,
there's a hierarchy within the arts.

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Art and music are normally given a higher
status in schools than drama and dance.

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There isn't an education
system on the planet

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that teaches dance every day to children
the way we teach them mathematics.

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Why? Why not?
I think this is rather important.

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I think math is very
important, but so is dance.

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Children dance all the time if
they're allowed to, we all do.

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We all have bodies, don't we?
Did I miss a meeting?

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(Laughter) Truthfully,
what happens is, as children grow up,

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we start to educate them
progressively from the waist up.

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And then we focus on their heads.

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And slightly to one side.

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If you were to visit education as an alien
and say "What's it for, public education?"

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I think you'd have to conclude,
if you look at the output,

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who really succeeds by this,
who does everything they should,

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who gets all the brownie points,
who are the winners --

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I think you'd have to conclude
the whole purpose of public education

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throughout the world is to
produce university professors.

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Isn't it? They're the people
who come out the top.

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And I used to be one, so there.

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(Laughter) And I like
university professors,

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but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up

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as the high-water mark
of all human achievement.

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They're just a form of life.
Another form of life.

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But they're rather curious.
And I say this out of affection for them:

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there's something
curious about professors.

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In my experience -- not all of them,
but typically -- they live in their heads.

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They live up there
and slightly to one side.

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They're disembodied, you know,
in a kind of literal way.

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They look upon their body as a form
of transport for their heads.

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(Laughter)

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Don't they? It's a way
of getting their head to meetings.

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(Laughter)

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If you want real evidence
of out-of-body experiences, by the way,

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get yourself along to a residential
conference of senior academics

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and pop into the discotheque
on the final night.

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(Laughter) And there, you will see it.

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Grown men and women writhing
uncontrollably, off the beat.

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(Laughter) Waiting until it ends, so they
can go home and write a paper about it.

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(Laughter)

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Our education system is predicated
on the idea of academic ability.

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And there's a reason. Around the world,
there were no public systems of education,

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really, before the 19th century.

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They all came into being to meet
the needs of industrialism.

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So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.

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Number one, that the most useful
subjects for work are at the top.

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So you were probably steered benignly away
from things at school when you were a kid,

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things you liked, on the grounds
you would never get a job doing that.

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Is that right? "Don't do music,
you're not going to be a musician;

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don't do art, you won't be an artist."

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Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken.

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The whole world
is engulfed in a revolution.

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And the second is academic ability,

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which has really come to dominate
our view of intelligence,

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because the universities design
the system in their image.

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If you think of it,

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the whole system of public education
around the world is a protracted process

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of university entrance. And the
consequence is that many highly talented,

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brilliant, creative
people think they're not,

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because the thing they
were good at at school

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wasn't valued,
or was actually stigmatized.

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And I think we can't
afford to go on that way.

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In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO,

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more people worldwide will be
graduating through education

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than since the beginning of history.

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More people. And it's the combination
of all the things we've talked about:

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technology and its
transformational effect on work,

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and demography and the huge
explosion in population.

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Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.

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Isn't that true? When I was a student,
if you had a degree, you had a job.

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If you didn't have a job,
it's because you didn't want one.

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And I didn't want one, frankly.

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(Laughter) But now kids with
degrees are often heading home

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to carry on playing video games,

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because you need an MA where
the previous job required a BA,

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and now you need a PhD for the other.

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It's a process of academic inflation.

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And it indicates the whole structure
of education is shifting beneath our feet.

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We need to radically rethink
our view of intelligence.

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We know three things about intelligence.

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One, it's diverse.

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We think about the world in all
the ways that we experience it.

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We think visually, we think in sound,
we think kinesthetically.

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We think in abstract terms,
we think in movement.

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Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.

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If you look at the interactions
of a human brain,

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as we heard yesterday from
a number of presentations,

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intelligence is wonderfully interactive.

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The brain isn't divided into compartments.

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In fact, creativity --

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which I define as the process of having
original ideas that have value --

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more often than not comes about

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through the interaction of different
disciplinary ways of seeing things.

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By the way, there's a shaft of nerves
that joins the two halves of the brain,

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called the corpus callosum.
It's thicker in women.

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Following off from Helen yesterday,

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this is probably why women
are better at multitasking.

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Because you are, aren't you?

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There's a raft of research,
but I know it from my personal life.

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If my wife is cooking a meal
at home, which is not often...

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thankfully. (Laughter) No,
she's good at some things.

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But if she's cooking, she's
dealing with people on the phone,

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she's talking to the kids, she's
painting the ceiling -- (Laughter)

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she's doing open-heart surgery over here.

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If I'm cooking, the door is shut,
the kids are out, the phone's on the hook,

00:14:27.570 --> 00:14:29.197
if she comes in, I get annoyed.

00:14:29.280 --> 00:14:32.017
I say, "Terry, please,
I'm trying to fry an egg in here."

00:14:32.100 --> 00:14:38.830
(Laughter)

00:14:39.250 --> 00:14:44.667
"Give me a break." (Laughter) Actually,
do you know that old philosophical thing,

00:14:44.750 --> 00:14:48.167
"If a tree falls in a forest,
and nobody hears it, did it happen?"

00:14:48.250 --> 00:14:52.457
Remember that old chestnut? I saw
a great T-shirt recently, which said,

00:14:52.540 --> 00:14:57.337
"If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and
no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"

00:14:57.420 --> 00:15:03.030
(Laughter)

00:15:05.090 --> 00:15:08.520
And the third thing about
intelligence is, it's distinct.

00:15:09.110 --> 00:15:11.557
I'm doing a new book
at the moment called "Epiphany,"

00:15:11.640 --> 00:15:14.027
which is based on a series
of interviews with people

00:15:14.110 --> 00:15:15.917
about how they discovered their talent.

00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:18.057
I'm fascinated by how
people got to be there.

00:15:18.140 --> 00:15:21.277
It's really prompted by a conversation
I had with a wonderful woman

00:15:21.360 --> 00:15:23.977
who maybe most people have
never heard of, Gillian Lynne.

00:15:24.060 --> 00:15:25.597
Have you heard of her? Some have.

00:15:25.680 --> 00:15:28.067
She's a choreographer,
and everybody knows her work.

00:15:28.150 --> 00:15:30.107
She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera."

00:15:30.190 --> 00:15:34.257
She's wonderful. I used to be on the board
of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.

00:15:34.340 --> 00:15:36.207
(Laughter)

00:15:36.290 --> 00:15:39.757
Gillian and I had lunch one day.
I said, "How did you get to be a dancer?"

00:15:39.840 --> 00:15:43.207
It was interesting. When she
was at school, she was really hopeless.

00:15:43.290 --> 00:15:46.017
And the school, in the '30s,
wrote to her parents and said,

00:15:46.100 --> 00:15:48.077
"We think Gillian has
a learning disorder."

00:15:48.160 --> 00:15:50.197
She couldn't concentrate;
she was fidgeting.

00:15:50.280 --> 00:15:52.097
I think now they'd say she had ADHD.

00:15:52.180 --> 00:15:57.627
Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and
ADHD hadn't been invented at this point.

00:15:57.710 --> 00:15:59.687
It wasn't an available condition.

00:15:59.770 --> 00:16:04.987
(Laughter) People weren't
aware they could have that.

00:16:05.070 --> 00:16:11.637
(Laughter) Anyway,
she went to see this specialist.

00:16:11.720 --> 00:16:15.367
So, this oak-paneled room,
and she was there with her mother,

00:16:15.450 --> 00:16:17.717
and she was led and sat
on this chair at the end,

00:16:17.800 --> 00:16:21.397
and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes,
while this man talked to her mother

00:16:21.480 --> 00:16:23.887
about all the problems
Gillian was having at school,

00:16:23.970 --> 00:16:27.457
because she was disturbing people,
her homework was always late, and so on.

00:16:27.540 --> 00:16:28.637
Little kid of eight.

00:16:28.720 --> 00:16:31.567
In the end, the doctor went
and sat next to Gillian and said,

00:16:31.650 --> 00:16:34.307
"I've listened to all these
things your mother's told me.

00:16:34.390 --> 00:16:35.917
I need to speak to her privately.

00:16:36.000 --> 00:16:40.937
Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be
very long," and they went and left her.

00:16:41.020 --> 00:16:42.597
But as they went out of the room,

00:16:42.680 --> 00:16:45.477
he turned on the radio
that was sitting on his desk.

00:16:45.560 --> 00:16:49.547
And when they got out of the room, he said
to her mother, "Just stand and watch her."

00:16:49.630 --> 00:16:54.697
And the minute they left the room,
she was on her feet, moving to the music.

00:16:54.780 --> 00:16:58.227
And they watched for a few minutes,
and he turned to her mother and said,

00:16:58.310 --> 00:17:00.227
"Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick.

00:17:00.310 --> 00:17:01.980
She's a dancer.

00:17:03.340 --> 00:17:05.917
Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What happened?"

00:17:06.000 --> 00:17:08.917
She said, "She did.
I can't tell you how wonderful it was.

00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:11.767
We walked in this room,
and it was full of people like me --

00:17:11.850 --> 00:17:16.947
people who couldn't sit still,
people who had to move to think."

00:17:17.030 --> 00:17:18.807
Who had to move to think.

00:17:18.890 --> 00:17:22.437
They did ballet, they did tap, jazz;
they did modern; they did contemporary.

00:17:22.520 --> 00:17:25.207
She was eventually auditioned
for the Royal Ballet School.

00:17:25.290 --> 00:17:28.487
She became a soloist; she had
a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.

00:17:28.570 --> 00:17:31.067
She eventually graduated
from the Royal Ballet School,

00:17:31.150 --> 00:17:34.277
founded the Gillian Lynne Dance
Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber.

00:17:34.360 --> 00:17:35.597
She's been responsible for

00:17:35.680 --> 00:17:38.767
some of the most successful musical
theater productions in history,

00:17:38.850 --> 00:17:41.817
she's given pleasure to millions,
and she's a multimillionaire.

00:17:41.900 --> 00:17:45.557
Somebody else might have put her
on medication and told her to calm down.

00:17:45.640 --> 00:17:52.420
(Applause)

00:17:53.600 --> 00:17:56.917
What I think it comes to is this:
Al Gore spoke the other night

00:17:57.000 --> 00:18:01.520
about ecology and the revolution
that was triggered by Rachel Carson.

00:18:02.260 --> 00:18:04.307
I believe our only hope for the future

00:18:04.390 --> 00:18:08.207
is to adopt a new
conception of human ecology,

00:18:08.290 --> 00:18:10.757
one in which we start
to reconstitute our conception

00:18:10.840 --> 00:18:13.047
of the richness of human capacity.

00:18:13.130 --> 00:18:16.437
Our education system has mined our minds

00:18:16.520 --> 00:18:19.960
in the way that we strip-mine
the earth for a particular commodity.

00:18:20.380 --> 00:18:22.737
And for the future, it won't serve us.

00:18:22.820 --> 00:18:24.917
We have to rethink
the fundamental principles

00:18:25.000 --> 00:18:27.007
on which we're educating our children.

00:18:27.090 --> 00:18:29.707
There was a wonderful quote
by Jonas Salk, who said,

00:18:29.790 --> 00:18:34.827
"If all the insects were
to disappear from the Earth,

00:18:34.910 --> 00:18:37.690
within 50 years,
all life on Earth would end.

00:18:38.770 --> 00:18:41.747
If all human beings
disappeared from the Earth,

00:18:41.830 --> 00:18:44.460
within 50 years, all forms
of life would flourish."

00:18:45.380 --> 00:18:46.660
And he's right.

00:18:47.390 --> 00:18:51.120
What TED celebrates is the gift
of the human imagination.

00:18:51.530 --> 00:18:55.707
We have to be careful now
that we use this gift wisely,

00:18:55.790 --> 00:18:58.957
and that we avert some of the
scenarios that we've talked about.

00:18:59.040 --> 00:19:02.737
And the only way we'll do it
is by seeing our creative capacities

00:19:02.820 --> 00:19:07.757
for the richness they are and seeing
our children for the hope that they are.

00:19:07.840 --> 00:19:11.617
And our task is to educate their whole
being, so they can face this future.

00:19:11.700 --> 00:19:15.737
By the way -- we may not see
this future, but they will.

00:19:15.820 --> 00:19:18.477
And our job is to help
them make something of it.

00:19:18.560 --> 00:19:25.210
Thank you very much. (Applause)