Ken Robinson: "I work a lot in in education I have done my entire life it's where I'm from
professionally and and spiritually really about my homeless education and
for as long as I can remember I've been worried about it I was worried about it
when I was in it so that's an early start as now I remember sitting there
thinking what's this we're doing this I can't remem I went to our chat about
this recently about how I got started actually I asked myself about it I was
nobody else asked me so I asked myself it's a good I often speak to myself it's
the only way of getting somebody to agree with me frankly but no but I uh I
went to a special school they used to be called I always think about this
recently I wrote a book about a girl called the element how finding your
passion changes everything and and Terry my wife we've been together for 35 years
she said you should tell your story in the book and I said why I don't think
it's not interesting really anyway she insisted and and it turned
out to be fascinating
if I say so myself I was riveted
no but I got until I was four I was all set to Wallace my family was convinced I
was going to be a soccer player my father was anyway because I was fit
and fast and deeply attractive toward the four-year-olds anyway
and so it remained actually seven city
anyway I got polio when I was four and so that put an end to my soccer career
ready with Everton it wouldn't do now by the way I think I think I have a good
chance of making the team these days the weather going on but
if you've been watching their performance recently but any I went to
this special school hand for a few years and and I was I supposed to discovered
there by a school inspector rather wonderful man called Charles Stratford
who saw something in me I don't know and encouraged the school to take more of an
interest but the reason I mention it is I suppose I've been struck from any age
by how different we are and how deeply hidden often our talents are nor
abilities that we all have tremendous natural talents and often people don't
know them they don't recognize them and they don't develop them they and to the
extent that they don't know what their talents are they don't really know what
they can do and to the extent they don't know that they don't really know who
they are I believe I think that's true of all of
us and I felt at the time that the kids I was in the class with as well probably
we were branded in a way by a single fact it's like people get branded by
their gender or they get branded by their ethnicity or they get branded by
their religion you know there's an old grammatical device called us I call it
is I used to call it cynic dogged score synecdoche isn't it where a single item
of something is taken to represent the whole of it like in Shakespeare let's
say a mast meaning a ship and I think we'd have this kind of cynical thinking
all the time about each other we take a single facet to somebody and extrapolate
from it and believe that's the whole of them somehow it's convenient to brand
them that way while I was in school with kids who had
cerebral palsy they had asthma and the guy who sat next to me had spasticity he
couldn't hold a pen in his hand he could only hold it in his feet but he did it
beautifully actually so he had and he didn't actually have much better
handwriting than I do was it handwriting we don't know
what was that what was he doing we don't know anyway whatever it was he
was great at it and there's a guy next to me about hydrocephalus and friend
Robert all kinds of people I was saying that our classroom was like the barroom
scene from Star Wars you know they were it was that people wandering around with
bits detached and falling off him
we had a monitor for had a body parts monitor you know other scores have
people turned away that chalk we'd say just collect whatever is dropped off
with you but the thing was you see that but that it wasn't what was of interest
to any of us in the class what interested us was whether people
interesting or funny or had something to say you know whether they entertained
your engages that stuff but I felt that for a long time
I mean afterwards that that's not quite how it was seen from the outside well in
a way special education I suppose ever since has struck me as a particular
example of a much more general principle which is that we do that to everybody an
education does it to everybody one way or another we have stereotypes in our
minds about what counts as ability what cancers success what counts as normal
and we apply them everywhere they're often just built into our mental
furniture we don't even know we're doing it half the time so a lot of what I've
been arguing for are supposed to Jerry my life is for a more thoroughgoing
principle of diversity in education that human life thrives on diversity and our
education systems are modeled ironically on the principle of conformity and it's
why so many people don't do terribly well at it people who could do a lot
better a lot of people go through education never discover what they're
good at at all or conclude that they're just not good I think of this as the
other climate crisis what I mean is that we've become used to see at least I hope
we have to the idea that there is a crisis in the world's natural resources
I mean there is I think if people doubt it just wait
you might think you know it's a waiting game this then but I think there's a and
by the way that that crisis in the natural climate has been caused by us we
know that let me ask you how many people do you think have ever lived on earth
how many human beings you think they're being I mean I've been trouble diets in
the under Thals I mean modern human beings Homo sapiens yeah groovy people
like ourselves you know with with cocktail shakers and and credit cards
you know seriously how many people do you think that it's right it's estimated
that human beings emerged on the planet in our modern form about fifty thousand
years ago so how many of us you think there are
have been all together thank you very much do I hear ten gone seven billion
eight billion oh don't you get in silly no no go on how many any advance on
eight billion fifteen buddy thank you thank you so all to the gentleman well
let me tell you first off nobody knows okay
well they're done I mean it how they gonna know
no nobody's been counting you know nobody's been I was going round with a
counter to go with four more over here hang on you two separate a second no six
eight six no but what would this being so smart as a species people have been
trying to figure it out and if you google the question how many
people have ever lived you'll find that estimates by serious people with poor
social lives have have resulted in a series of estimates and the estimates
range from 60 billion to 110 billion so it's a bit of a margin so let's split
the difference let's split the difference and say maybe 80 million
maybe 80 billion people have lived in the whole of history the last 50,000
years well they're two things to say about it the first is is that of those
almost 10% of the total is on earth right now wait we are the biggest single
generation I mean everybody living I don't mean people over 30 people under
12 right I all of us this collective cohort of humanity is there almost 7
billion dollars that's more people than have ever been on the planet at the same
time in the whole of human history and we're heading for 9 billion by the mid
of the century so around 10 percent of the total for most of history there was
hardly anybody around honestly if you go back to Shakespeare's day or go back to
the high Renaissance in Florence I mean Florence it was probably about
the size of Red Deer you know it was just warmer if Florence had been
in Alberta the Renaissance would not have happened it would be it wouldn't
because nobody would have ventured outdoors or they never there they'll be
home inventing electric blankets and things like that but we are now the
population has rocketed in the past 300 years pretty much that's 250 really and
growing exponentially well there was a study done a while after a great program
by David Attenborough done recently said if the question was how many people can
live on earth how many people can the planet sustain and it came to the
following conclusion which is that if everybody on earth consumed food water
fuel at the same rate as the average person in Rwanda the earth could sustain
the maximum population of 15 billion if everybody in Earth's consumed the same
rate as the average person in North America that tells the earth could
sustain a maximum population of 1.2 billion and we're at 15 billion that's
over 7 billion and Counting and honestly the only reason we're getting away with
it is because they're putting up with it or they're not really aware of it so
what it comes to for me is this that we are living in times of revolution and
over the next 50 years will face challenges which no previous generation
of humanity's ever had to deal with and to do that we have to think differently
about ourselves and about the way we run our communities and our schools and our
education systems and our our organizations I think we should always
have thought differently about it I think if we thought differently about it
in the first place we wouldn't have so many of these problems you see I think
of this is the the other climate crisis we're creating one but we're also the
DIMMs of another which is I think of as the crisis of human resources that most
people have no real idea of what they're capable of and it it plays out in pretty
disastrous ways sometimes frig's I mean there are lots of symptoms of this now
one of them is the high levels of dropout from education now I know it
varies I'm not speaking about British Columbia now I mean I live in America
where the dropout rate is 40 percent from public schools 40 percent in public
schools I'll tell you why in a minute but you see similar figures not just in
dropout rates but in disaffection in disengagement but people who can't be
bothered you know it's suicide rates especially
among people from 15 to 20 are at historically high levels and four times
as many young men commit suicide around the world as women it's it's the fourth
largest cause of death among young people suicide
there's people checking out for whatever and everyone has their own story of
course I mean there isn't you can look at generalities but among the things
that people believe are the lack of social cohesion the breakdown of the
family unemployment few prospects and a whole suite of depressive conditions
there are six hundred and thirty 1 million young people on earth at the
moment actually between 50 nothing at 25 and of those 81 million or about 13% are
unemployed so people at the inter labor organizing stocks matters about a lost
generation you know what I'm talking about and people who who don't know what
to do that would do it themselves in America one in 31 people is in jail one
in 31 in jail are on the way to jail or leaving jail well you see
this to me is a catastrophe and you know the price we pay you mopping it all up
and trying to deal with it and it's it's it to me it need not happen I mean
everyone has their own story you know they're 80 billion of us and we all have
our own biographies and that's my point well that we all chuck chart very
different courses of course through our lives but one of the biggest infants I'm
not saying education is responsible for these things but education could be the
solution and too often I don't mean individual schools or individual
teachers or anybody in particular but systemically taking it as a whole as a
system education doesn't contribute to the solution to these problems as
thorough as it could in fact in ways that it should not it contributes to the
problem it makes it worse and that's why I want to come and talk about this
business of educating the heart and the mind um I I was born in Liverpool I
mention this because it's very ten minutes since I mentioned myself and
now you get palpitations sent you did it no I can get you badly now I was born in
Liverpool in in 1950 and my brother John Etheridge is doing our family tree it's
not much of a tree Freddie it's a kind of small shrub ready with a curious
blight they wrap around the roots but John discovered to something very
interesting to me which was that our eight great-grandparents were all born
in Liverpool in the mid 19th century within two miles of each other that's
how they met they bumped into each other that's how people used to meet the
people they spent their lives with people until Corazon led very local
lives now you might say no no no this is nonsense this is not what happened
the this was the cosmos at work in its secret ways that these eight soulmates
it was contrived coincide at the same point in the space-time continuum that
they should further the process that has led to the miracle that is me you can
you should you can say that I don't think so myself I I just think people
had lower standards then thankfully I think I think people bumped into it and
thought you'll do you know this is yeah you are not to shoddy I can spend my
life with you with that without feeling embarrassed the rest of it the reason I
say this I mean think of all the people all the people of those 80 billion over
the past fifty thousand years in the most extraordinary circumstance how many
of those people had to meet each other and dip me to each other
and procreated down the centuries in a sequence that has finally led to you to
all the different relatives ancestors who on the top of which pyramid you
currently sit all the things have had to happen the chance meetings the places
the meals there and lastly the movies and the bottles of some say you know
what the expensive chocolates in it oh and all the things that may have stopped
people meeting you know the wars the catastrophe is then that was all the
stuff that had happened before you made it
it's extraordinary Danny Lama said he said that to be born at all is a miracle
so congratulations you know you made it we made it guys you know some and what
he also said is so what are you gonna do with this life now you have it what are
you going to do with it there are many people never got the chance and here you
are so what are gonna do we're gonna do something with it or frittered away and
education is meant to be the process by which we engage people in their fullness
to give them a sense of who they are on their capability so they can lead a life
that means something to them and to the rest of this and too often it simply
doesn't and we end up with lots of remedial programs or people being half
educated or willfully pulling away from it leading to what I say I think of as
this the other climate crisis I think certainly contributing to it there are
causes for this and I think that remedy lies in the type of work we're here to
talk about this evening that we'll talk about when the Linamar air and I get
together as well but let me just sketch up what I think the problem is the
problem as I see it is in the ideology of Education what I mean is the values
and assumptions that are taken for granted the things that we don't think
about so much but which kind of calibrate our actions there are two in
particular one of them and I've talked about about it is this idea of
standardization and conformity I don't want to go on about it now but but let
me just ask you a question um well I'll make a point buddy the first sister
existed I believe that what we've developed in our education systems is
analogous to what's happening in the catering industry you know in the
catering industry there are two modes of business and two methods of quality
assurance there's the fast food business and there's like the Michelin Guide with
fast food if you've got a favorite outlet you know whichever one you go to
you know exactly what you're going to get no matter where it is you can get
the same food the same bear the same fries the same bun the same Cola or the
same chicken nuggets what are chicken nuggets my dinner what
what what are they Terran I used to live in the countryside
and we had chickens they did not have nuggets it did they didn't know if they
had them they weren't showing them I mean they were they were keeping them
out of sight I can tell you I don't do not eat chicken nose
the result is that whichever fast without let you go - you know exactly
what you're gonna get it's all horrible and bad for your health but it's
guaranteed the Vic and its tribulus the worst outbreak of diabetes and obesity
in the history of the planet but hey the the other form of quality assurance in
catering is like the Michelin Guide and that's very different they set up
criteria of excellence and they say if you meet these criteria you're in the
guide it doesn't matter what food you serve you can be an Italian French Asian
fusion doesn't matter you can all be in the guide they don't tell you what time
to open they don't tell you what uniform swear or to have uniforms were there to
serve wine or not you meet these criteria in your own way and the
consequence is under that system you get very high level restaurants with great
great stuff to eat in every type of genre and culture and they're all
different now I think what's been happening over time and education is is
becoming more and more standardized it's becoming more like the fast-food model
when it ought to be much more like the Michelin model every school should be
different and great every classroom should be different and great it should
be built on diversity and not conformity and one of the symptoms I think is
becoming more and more worrying can ask you how many of you here would consider
yourself to be baby boomers go on thank you
me too well you know how many of you if you don't mind me asking I have had your
tonsils removed there we go that's a lot isn't it how many of you here are under
the age of 30 you're amazing how many of you have had your tonsils removed
like oh no it's interesting scent as a proportion
you see our generation the Boomers routinely had our tonsils removed
didn't we when you're a kid the first sign of a sore throat so I'm going to
pants on you and take you tonsils oh they did when I was a teenager you
couldn't afford to clear your throat in public or someone would be on you and
whip your tonsils out and your adenoids and and your appendix any loose bit of
flesh they couldn't account for it's not true anything that was lying around out
it would come and it'd be stacked in the corner of the surgery for collection
later on what happened to all the tonsils
what are chicken nuggets I mean come on what are they
witness we should be told we should be told it's
a conspiracy no the thing is that then it was a false identity medical
profession people still get sore throats they still get inflamed tonsils but they
don't whip them out anymore as witness the fact people under 30 of mostly got
them they let them heal they give them but there are other ways of treating
them it was a fad just a fad know what tonsillitis
take the tonsils are people to stop up their entire sets of teeth removed
because they needed a filling that's what people did it's a it's a medical
contagion that runs through the profession our kids don't suffer from
that the kids in your classrooms they do suffer from a new false epidemic I
believe which is the plague of ADHD now I don't mean to say and I've said it
elsewhere that there is no such thing people agree they were qualified to
pronounce these things that there is a suite of conditions called ADHD what I
contest is its status as a as an epidemic and there are studies around
which support that view there's one published reason you can read about on
CNN they reckon in the United States last year maybe 900,000 children were
falsely diagnosed with ADHD often apparently if if the kids who are
youngest in the class will be diagnosed with ADHD if they're in there because
they stand out more they may have more restless energy but you know III speak
to lots of people about our speaking so many recently had a son was being
diagnosed with ADHD and then I said what does he like to do said oh he loves to
play the guitar and write songs and I said does he lose interest when he's
doing that I don't know we all sit there for hours doing that
so part of it is this obsession of conformity we now have a suite of
narcotics or drugs available which can help people stay within the barriers so
standardization is a big issue I think we should be personalizing education or
standardizing it on the basis that we're all different but there's something else
which is the heart of our academic culture our education systems have
evolved really based on many of the the intellectual principles of the European
enlightenment and that way of thinking which has many benefits and of course
has produced spectacular success in science and technology and the rest it's
nonetheless predicated on the division between intellect and feeling if you
read a lot of the architects of the Enlightenment the whole burden of it the
whole drive of the Enlightenment was to push out intuition and superstition only
reason and objective facts would do human others right about keeping
feelings away from our attempts to understand the world and that view and
we could talk a bit more about that later on has contributed to I think a
schismatic view of of human beings we have developed a view of the mind which
is based on a particular view of rationality and we've come to mistake
the mind that entity that consciously thinks with consciousness which is the
broader character of our being we can engage with the world in many other ways
than are made available through our normal systems of Education in fact the
meditation is the tradition in which the Dalai Lama Center sits and others
I'll dedicate to the proposition that there is in the sense more to us than
the conventional sense of a thinking mind a carte tolay who lived
in the city is and as a friend of ours I'm not you doing a program with them on
Saturday if you've read his book a new earth or the power of now is also
dedicates that proposition that that we can apprehend ourselves and the world
more effectively if we don't depend upon or collide our association of conscious
with this rather narrow view of the rational mind the other thing that comes
from this is a division between thinking and feeling and I've been a longtime
advocate of the Arts in education and the arts are always at the bottom of the
pecking order in schools so when cuts begin to be talked of in
education or when standardization becomes the order of the day the
hierarchy of scores becomes apparent you know maths and science the top and
languages and then the commands of the Arts get pushed further and further down
and then in the arts there's now the hierarchy music and after normally given
a better place in theatre and dance and it's partly because we've also become to
associate those other disciplines with those particular science of mathematics
with hard knowledge and the arts with a softer form of knowledge the arts for
some people are seen as being less rigorous not really knowing at all some
form of self-expression some form of recreation some form of leisure and it's
a terrible caricature of how the arts actually work and we've also in a way
disembodied our children we've become to focus on them as minds in a head rather
than as people embodied by very good example is we have two kids so far as I
know how would I know I mean listen no and
our son James is great our daughter Kate is also great our two
children who are equally great our firm one is call James when he was 16 James
asked as if he was taking some exams is skilled in England and he said he wanted
to get a Playstation a Sony Playstation and he said if I do well in the exam was
gonna get a Playstation and Terry and I said no you cannot he said but all my
friends get anything this you know for doing well in the exams we said well
great he said well you know so what's gonna be my motivation I said we'll be
thrilled we we both said Terry is much more astute on these things than I was
but pushed for this anyway we didn't bribe him but after he got his exams he
and he did well he said to us you know could I could I have a Playstation
that's like three weeks later and I said Terry I think I think we should get
anyone you know because I wanted one
I thought we should have a Playstation hey I'm starving basically the house is
not completely any so we got we got this PlayStation and I I spent an Arab says
in James's room fixing the thing up I mean this was 10 years ago
so it's fixing up this PlayStation and
and I got the thing working it I mean you would have done it without leave
probably a lot faster but I'm a dad you know sit down my boy grasshopper you
know and I what is I know so I went downstairs and Kate was in the kitchen
we lived in the countryside of time he said would you make me a swing she was
12 and so I said okay I make perhaps they were 14 and 10 so I went out and
she found this 50-foot piece of rope in the shed where we did have this apple
tree outside the door so I rigged up a swing you put a piece of wood across the
bottom and she was on the spring playing and our two later James came down to get
a drink glass of water then again and he saw
Kate outside he said what's that I said that made her a swing so he dashed out
and he spent the whole of the rest of the afternoon on the swing with Kate in
fact they spent the whole week and went on to spend most of the summer on the
swing in the garden swinging back forwards so they kind of created this
ditch underneath them destroyed the grass most apples fell off but they were
doing Star Wars set to sell a you know Paris the Caribbean 10 years before the
movie came out I think we're still no royalties for it
Harry you know they were doing they were just lost in this fantasy world and they
were exhibited by the whole thing and of course the reason was it was a physical
embodied activity which was firing up their imagination it wasn't just all
here it was a full physical embodied experience and I just find it
fascinating turn I was saying it's interesting is because I think I think
if we'd said to James in the June you know James if you do really well in your
exams you can have that piece of old rope in the shed you know I'm not sure
it would it be the incentive he was looking for frankly but there is
something about the physicality of that type of play well there is a there are
legion reports now from every quarter about emotional dysfunction daniel
goleman you know wrote famously the book
emotional intelligence there was a book written actually 1974 by a guy called
Robert Witkin which had a title with the same meaning but it was expressed
differently he called his book the intelligence of feeling and he begins it
by saying in a de cartes thing that I think therefore I am
which is a contestable argument right there but wicken said perhaps we would
be better saying I feel therefore I am that we are above all feeling organisms
we are organic but he makes a very interesting point at the beginning of
the book which is an obvious another point but he says that and he speaks in
a long tradition in saying is that we all live in in two worlds there is a
world that exists that existed before you existed and we're all being well it
would exist after you have ceased to be because in the end we're not here for
long you know in terms of the history of the planet the planet is four-and-a-half
billion years old and we've been here for fifty thousand years apparently if
you were to liken the whole history of the planet the lifespan of the planet
to a single year human beings appeared on the planet at one second to midnight
on the 31st of December there's a great piece on the onion recently about save
the planet you know commenting on everyone saying
we should save the planet they said don't worry about it the planet will be
fine we may go as a species the planet may decide to shrug it off and say we
tried humanity not so good
the next planetary conference don't recommend it
we gave it 50,000 years it ended in tears so the planet will continue but
his point was Robert Witkin is that there is a well that exists whether or
not we exist it's the outer world of objects and events and physicality and
of other people but he said there is also a world that exists only because
you exist it's the world that came into being when you did and will end or
change according to your beliefs when your physical being ceases to be it's
the world of your private consciousness of your own being and whereas we all
make attempts to know the outside world nobody can truthfully know the detail of
your inner world it's the world that RD Laing once said in which there's only
really one set of footprints it's your own inner world of consciousness well
what we constitute try to is to bridge these two we try to relate the one to
the other we try to often to understand ourselves in terms the other I think the
problems that have arisen in education because of our obsession with a certain
type of rationalism is that we spend a great deal of time in education now
getting children focused on the external world giving them data and information
about it and increase in that world is becoming more and more distracting and
kaleidoscopic and insistent I'm sure that is one of
the contributions to people's lack of attention now the constant flickering of
data but our education systems are remorse C turned outwards to the outer
world when what kids and all of us des we need to is time to look inward and to
dwell in that inner space where in the end we find the only things that
truthfully make sense for us and education is increasingly poor at giving
people techniques to look inward and to understand the relationship between the
two you see science if I can caricature it seems to me the primary purpose
science and I'm a great advocate for science education but the primary and
I've written a lot about the creativity of science but broadly speaking Sciences
broadly speaking the physical sciences are directed to understanding the
external world in its own terms seems to me that the enterprise of
science is explanation we're trying to figure things out and to be as objective
as we can I don't think objective means true and we might talk about that you
can be objective and wrong and the history of Sciences of people being
perfectly directive but wrong but trying to be right but people have often
believed things to be factually correct which turned out to be nonsense the role
of the Arts I think is to be self-consciously to manage this
relationship between the inner and outer world it's to and the aim of an artist
is not so much to explain their experience but to describe it to give an
account of it in objects or somehow convey that sense of perception well I
think we pay a high price for the Exile of feeling in education this remorse is
turning out and the failure to help people engage with what's within them I
believe that what identifies us as human beings above all are the powers that
flow from our deep resource of imagination to our right searched a lot
about creativity if you ask you know for the foot
most of the past fifty thousand years we have lived harmoniously with the rest of
life on earth our ancestors did in the last 300 years which is a blink of an
eye we've taken off like a rocket and are about to bring the house down around
our ears and what accounts are it or what is it that makes us so different
because here most respects were like the rest of life on earth were mortal
organic no different from them lives are short but what makes us different why
are we sitting in the building that we've made you know rather than sitting
outside while all the dogs are sitting in here you know all the lemurs and the
squirrels sitting out in meetings are we're outside in the trees trying to
figure out what to eat you know there is a difference and the difference is that
we have evolved this powerful sense of imagination the ability to bring to mind
things that aren't here and from it flow all kinds of powers like creativity and
uniquely and distinctively the power of empathy the ability to put yourself in
somebody else's position and to imagine what that might be like what happens in
all times of conflict and cruel tears we shut empathy off so that we can do
things that are unimaginable and the way we avoid that is by killing our
imaginations and making those things unimaginable in turn empathy essentially
in imagination are the things that make us human and the powers that flow from
it creativity and intuition so it seems to be we have two big challenges in
education one of them is to have a more unified conception of what it is to be a
person one that recognized that feeling and knowing are parts of the same
complex of a whole being that our feelings are forms of perception and
they're affected by what we think by our frameworks of ideas they're affected by
how well we can express ourselves and the languages we have available to do
that so part of the task graduation is to connect ourselves with ourselves and
I think that the reason suddenly people get depressed and last as they have lost
the connection with themselves they have no sense of purpose Carl Jung said this
he said in his 30 years of professional practice he said there wasn't a single
person who came to see him whose malaise he said couldn't in the
end be attributed to a loss of faith in religion now I don't think he meant and
I said he don't mean in quoting him organized religion I think the word I
would use and perhaps he would have except it would be spirituality a sense
of your spirit but he said in the end nobody either nobody either got well
without regaining a sense of spiritual connection so part of the task education
is connect ourselves with ourselves but the other great task is connected with
each other through the power of empathy through the power of intuition and
mutuality and all those things get lost in an industrialized homogenized
atomized system of Education and the price couldn't be higher and we're
paying it every day in disaffection disengagement and emotional turmoil now
I don't see education as the whole of it but we contribute to it it's the old
Marxist principle isn't it you know that part of the problem or you're part of
the solution and we have to be careful not to be part of the problem so what do
we do about it so let me cure the conversation I hope we're going to have
I think any rate there are a number of practical strategies which think about
the first is that we have to recognize that education is personal if you make
education impersonal people pull away from it or pull out of it or just
disengaged interests me that all the remedial programs in education are based
on personalized curriculum I was in a meeting in LA the week about alternative
education to get kids back into school alternative education is based on all
that was the same thing always the same thing on personalized curriculum on
close working relationships between teachers and students negotiated
programs and collaboration group work and mutual support and now member states
this meeting it's interesting that's called alternative education
because that's really education it's the alternative that's causing the problem
you know we should call all the mainstream stuff alternative education
and get on to the good stuff I feel us by there in all of what I do i
I feel I stand in a very long tradition of people who've been arguing for
something like this for a very long time you can there are precursors and
ancestor for every argument I ever think I put you know whether it's Bruner or
prj or Montessori or or Pestalozzi or freeball all in their different ways
people have been arguing for holistic approaches to education since we had
education it's just the mainstream has rocketed away
into this on these rails of conformity and I think it's time to make the
alternative into the mainstream so personalizing it is a big piece of it
and we might talk a bit about that the second is I believe we have to put the
arts back into education the arts are not only but among the prime ways in
which we negotiate our own understanding of ourselves in the world around us it's
through music and art and theatre and dance all the things that are
marginalized that we express our own unique individual humanity not just
doing them but learning about them learning about other cultures through
them and creating our own unique forms of expression in the process the arts
should be at the center of this not instead of but Foursquare alongside the
humanities and the sciences and physical education I think a school that
marginalizes the arts is not doing education they might be doing something
else some version of it but if you leave out of account one of these major areas
of human growth and development then you're not doing the job it's and I
think it's as simple as that and the final thing is that we can we are
learning more and more through studies of the brain through the fusions of
ancient method of processes about what's increasing being called mindfulness
there are practical things techniques that we can use in classrooms to get
children to focus in on themselves to create some common allies some points of
meditation some points of practice which if they became routine I think would
start to show themselves in the change
in the overall culture of Education and
we're going to be hearing some more about those in the conversation we're
about to have but those particular things seem to me
at the heart of what they're all versions of personalizing education but
the root of it to me is that they all point to a different metaphor for
education you see most of our sisters vegetation are mechanistic I think
they're kind of data-driven and and impersonal
the trouble is that human beings are not mechanisms we are organisms and schools
are like organisms too and if you create certain cultures people flourish and in
other cultures they tend to feel demeaned and to pull away so to me it's
about looking again at the nature of the culture of the school the vibrancy of
the school recognize that we're all unique individuals but that together we
create unique patterns and forms of behavior which we can change I've seen
terrible scores improve in the space of six month when a new T head teacher came
in and saw the potential to make people work differently I've seen great schools
go down for the opposite reason schools have much more freedom I think than we
often believe we do there's nothing I think in the legislation we all operate
within that says that you have to have 40-minute periods in high schools they
have to have separate subject departments how the school is wrong is
really about the leadership of the school and the collective what are the
people who work within it but there's we pay a high price of a current system but
there's a great prize in the new one there's a wonderful quote remember Anais
Nin approach she wants in the interests use an organic metaphor she said of
herself that there came a point in our own our own life in a way where she had
to be true to herself she said they came a point when the pain of remaining tight
in a bud was greater than the pain it took to blossom I thought that was
lovely but I think it's true in for all of us that very often the pain of
containing our consciousness or our failure to understand us
it's greater than the paint it would take to go on the journey to make it
happen and I think that's true in scores the pain of containing people who are
being disengaged is more than the effort it would take to reconnect with them if
we changed our metaphors and I think if we do I think as we sit here at this
point in humanity's growth and development we may be feeling that shift
I know Eckhart Tolle writes about that it but he calls he subtitles his book a
new earth the flowering of human consciousness it's again it's an organic
metaphor but I think it's true I feel a shift as I go around the world and I
think you can sense it in lots of ways the people who it's often a long
revolution but I think it's begun in front fold but if we go with it if we
understand that these things are all making and that we can remake them that
education and human life is organic and it's out of culture if we get the
culture right and I think will witness a harvest of human flourishing that will
amaze us
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