If you think of it, children
starting school this year will be retiring in 2077. Nobody has a
clue, what the world will look like in five years' time. Yet, we're meant
to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think,
is extraordinary.
We've all agreed, nonetheless, on
the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities
for innovation. My contention is that creativity now is as important
in education as literacy. Kids will take a chance. If they don't know,
they'll have a go. They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't
mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we
do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong,you'll never come up with
anything original --if you're not prepared to be wrong.
And by the time they get to be
adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of
being wrong. And, we run our companies like this. We stigmatize
mistakes. And, we're now running national education systems where
mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And, the result is that we are
educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this, he said
that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we
grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we
grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?
Every education system on Earth has
the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd
think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and
languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere
on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within
the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than
drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that
teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why
not? I think this is rather important.
I think math is very important, but
so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We
all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens
is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the
waist up. And, then we focus on their heads. And, slightly to one
side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say
"What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to
conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who
does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are
the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public
education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't
it?
They're the people who come out the
top. And, I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't
hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're
just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather
curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something
curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them, but
typically, they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to
one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They
look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. Don't they? It's
a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of
out-of-body experiences, get yourself along to a residential conference of
senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. And,
there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off
the beat.Waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about
it.
Our education system is predicated
on the idea of academic ability. And, there's a reason. Around the
world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th
century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So,
the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful
subjects for work are at the top. So, you were probably steered benignly
away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on
the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right?
Don't do music, you're not going to
be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice --
now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And,
the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view
of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their
image.
If you think of it, the whole
system of public education around the world is a protracted process of
university entrance. And, the consequence is that many highly-talented, brilliant,
creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good
at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And, I
think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according
to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education
than since the beginning of history.
More people, and it's the
combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation
effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly,
degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true?
When I was a student, if you had a
degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't
want one. But, now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry
on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job
required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process
of academic inflation. And, it indicates the whole structure
of education is shifting beneath our feet.
We need to radically rethink our
view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One,
it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience
it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We
think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is
dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we
heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is
wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In
fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas
that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of
different disciplinary ways of seeing things. By the way, there's a shaft
of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus
callosum. It's thicker in women. This is probably why women are better at
multi-tasking.
Actually, do you know that old
philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did
it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt
recently, which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no
woman hears him, is he still wrong?" And, the third thing about
intelligence is, it's distinct.
I believe our only hope for the
future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we
start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our
education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the
earth: for a particular commodity. And, for the future, it won't serve us. We
have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our
children.
There was a wonderful quote by
Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the
Earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human
beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years all forms of life would
flourish." And, he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of
the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this
gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked
about. And, the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for
the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And,
our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.
We may not see this future, but
they will. And, our job is to help them make something of it.