[0:00]Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist. We don't want to focus politics on a notion that involves the rejection of principles around which a large majority of our fellow citizens have organized their lives. We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.
[0:26]What people talk a lot about in education is the need to get back to basics. that'd be talking about this since the beginning of education by the way. Now normally what people mean when they talk about the basics is a group of subjects that they think are more important than all the others. And particularly in education now people talk about the STEM disciplines, science, technology, engineering and math. So they think it's science technology, engineering and mathematics. These are very important fundamental disciplines, they are necessary but they're not sufficient for the type of education that we need. In any case, the basics of education are not any group of subjects or disciplines. The basics of education are the purposes for which we do this. Now why are we invested anyway in systems of mass public education, what's it for? And if we don't agree on the purposes then we have a problem in talking about the means and the the processes. Well, I think there are four purposes to public education and I won't labor them but I'll just point them out as a reference point. And not in any particular order. The first one is is uh economic. Um, we all know that education has powerful economic purposes. It does and it should. We should recognize it as a fact. We invest so much in it as communities because we expect education will contribute to uh our long-term economic uh health, vitality and sustainability. That's how we got to have these systems in the first place, but the economic model of the day was industrialism which is why the system looks the way it does. It is not that system anymore for us. Um, we have a different set of imperatives now for our children and for ourselves if we're to make them economically independent. As I think we all want to do, don't we? Don't we want to make our children economically independent? We do. I can't tell you how much we we want to make our children economically independent and at once if it's possible. But what sort of education do you need for that? There was a report published uh about 18 months ago by IBM, in which they uh reviewed interviews they had with 1800 uh leaders of companies in 80 countries. companies and organizations. And they asked them what their priorities are, what keeps them awake at night. And there were two really that came out in reverse order, they are here. Uh, the first they said, in reverse order, was adaptability. How do you run organizations which are uh able to respond quickly to change? Now this is a bottom line issue for companies. Uh because if you don't adapt quickly to changing circumstances, you're very likely to go under. And the history of corporate life around the world is uh populated with the corpses of once great corporations that didn't move quickly enough. Think for example about Kodak. Kodak is now in uh bankruptcy proceedings. Kodak was synonymous in the 20th century with photography. They invented home photography, they invented digital photography. And now they're out of business. And it's not because people have stopped taking photographs. On the contrary, people are taking more photographs than ever. Aren't they? Irritatingly more photographs than ever. I get it all the time. People posting on Facebook, here's my cappuccino. Check this out from a different angle this time. You know, and here it is, after I've drunk half of it. Fascinating. Send me more of these photographs. What happened was that Instagram came along and whipped the ground really from beneath the feet of companies like Kodak. They just did not adapt. And the reason they didn't adapt is because organizations are not like machines, they're like organisms. They are living entities made up of people with feelings, motivations, roles, aspirations, passions, and ambitions. And if the if the organism doesn't respond just as in the natural world, if it doesn't respond to changes in its environment, it dies. And it's what's happened to many companies including most recently Kodak. So adaptability. But the top priority these CEOs pointed to uh for their companies long-term flourishing was creativity. They said, we need companies that are consistently and systematically creative. And how do you do that? You know, we need people who can think differently, but we can't this is the great irony. We can't always find them because kids coming out of universities and colleges these days find it very difficult to come up with fresh ideas. And why? They've been educated on the standard uh routine of routine testing, you know, of multiple choice tests. We've been sort of systematically quashing the uh the appetite for originality in our education systems. The irony is that a lot of these systems were in place now in what people believe to be the interest of the economy. And corporations say they want something else. So if we're to meet the economic requirement of education, we need to have systems which promote creativity and adaptability as as bottom line competencies. The very things that our education systems at the moment are being discouraged from doing. The second purpose of education is cultural. We live in a world that's been increasingly complicated, increasingly driven, increasingly contested. Many of the great conflicts around the world now are not economic in character, although there's an economic dimension, they're cultural in character. I mean, look what's happening in the Middle East just now. Uh look what's been happening in uh Central Europe, look what's happening across America. These are conflicts in people's ways of seeing the world, their ideologies, their value systems, hitting each other head on. And they may imperil us in the end and, you know, it's a small enough planet as it is, uh but it's becoming more and more populated. But in any case, for ethical reasons as well as strategic ones, we need forms of education which enable people to understand how they came to think as they do, why their values are as they are, why their patterns of life are as they are, and why other people's are different. We need forms of education which help people to understand their own cultural identity and what formed it and those of other people. Now for that, you need a broad education. You need an education that gives equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to social studies, not just to technical subjects. Um, by the way I came across this quote which I thought you'd like, about what it is to be British these days. Um, I found this on the Internet where I find so many things. I thought I thought you'd like this. It said that being British these days, but you you could read American for this or any other nationality you like, but as you'll see. Being British these days means driving home in a German car, stopping to collect some Irish Guinness or Danish lager, picking up an Indian curry or Greek kebab, and spending the evening sitting on Swedish furniture, watching American programs on a Japanese TV.
[7:27]And the most British thing of all? Suspicion of anything foreign. That's broadly right. So there's a big cultural agenda for education. The third is social. We need forms of education which engage this generation in the processes by which our communities are organized and governed. Um and there's a lot of evidence that people are pulling away from those roles. Um there's a lot of evidence of disengagement, disenfranchisement from our political institutions for reasons we can readily see. But John Dewey said this once, you know, he said that every generation has to rediscover democracy. I think that's right. Uh we live in Los Angeles, uh there was an election for the new mayor a couple of months ago. The election's gone on for 18 months, millions of dollars have been spent on the election, 15% of the electorate showed up to vote for it. Uh this is on a day when I'd for reasons uh just of interest to me, I was looking into the life of Emily Davidson, do you remember Emily Davidson? Uh who threw herself thought anyway under the hooves of the King's Horse at Epsom in 1913, died two days later, she did that in the interests of sustaining votes for women. And here we are, you know, just over a century later, uh and people aren't bothering to vote. People died for this. But we end up taking these things for granted. And of course we can't. Uh it's actually I have to say it's I think it's one of the great themes of the work of the RSA, that it it sets out actively to encourage this sort of social engagement particularly in education. It's very important that we take part in these civil discourses and that we actively promote it. Well, you don't do that in education by giving people lessons on civics, you do it by having a culture which embodies these processes of participation, and great schools do that. The fourth purpose of education though is the ultimate one to be which is personal. Because in the end education is personal, it's about people. It's not about components and machines, it's people who are being educated. And if we know anything about people, it's they are different, they're driven by different talents, different abilities, different passions, different interests and different motivations. One of the kind of signature features of humanity is diversity. Of course it contrasts sharply with one of the organizational principles of education, which is conformity. And an education which isn't nuanced to individual differences, soon finds that very many people are uh disengaged from it or alienated by it. And that's been the evidence in America for example, about 30% of kids don't complete high school. Um and there are similar figures actually in in some northern European countries as well. Uh this is really what my new book is about by the way, which you'll be pleased me to mention now at this point. Um, we're we're publishing a book called uh finding your element, which is about the nature of individual talent and passion and the things that drive us. But if we don't understand that education is about people and individuals in all their diversity and multiplicity, then we keep making the mistakes that we make. If we treat it as a machine age activity rather than a human process, then we run ourselves into a cul-de-sac. Well, um, if we recognize that, when I talk about changing education from the ground up, that's the ground I mean. You see, most political strategies start from the top down. They think if we can issue direct us from the top and get people to conform, everything will improve. And the evidence is quite the contrary, that uh, the more governments go into command and control mode, uh, the more they misunderstand the nature of teaching and learning, the more they misunderstand the process of education, the more alienated people become from the whole process. So we have a situation here in the UK now where most of the major teacher unions have passed a votes of no confidence in the government's education strategy.
[11:26]Well, you know, that shouldn't promote a smug expression of satisfaction on the government. That should keep them awake all night thinking, well, hang on, how badly have we got this wrong? You cannot improve education by alienating the profession that carries it out. It would be like trying to improve medicine by vilifying doctors and nurses, you can't do that. Um, so recognizing that education, I believe, can be encouraged from the top down is one thing, but it can only really be improved from the ground up by the people who do the work. Because in the end, it's not ministers of state who are teaching all our children, uh, if they could, uh, it's the people actually doing it in the schools. So, when do we get back? When we were talking about getting back to basics and I think we have to recognize at least this basic. There was a book published probably 25 years ago now, 30. Do you care when it was published? How much does this matter to you? I can check it if you like. We can Google it. We can Google it collectively. Uh, it was called The Empty Space by a theater director called Peter Brook. Peter Brook, uh is one of the most eminent theater directors, uh on Earth these days, uh certainly of his generation.
[12:38]Uh, he founded, among other things, the center for theater research in Paris. Peter Brook is convinced, has been throughout his working life, that theater can be a generally transformative experience. It can be a deeply powerful experience for people and can change the way they look and feel. But he also says that, of course, most theater's not like that. It's a night out. You know, it passes the evening, but it would have passed anyway. So he said, if you're really concerned to make theater the most powerful experience it can be, we have to decide what it is we mean when we say theater. We have to get back to basics and focus on what is it, what's fundamental? And he answers that question in a brief passage in the book by performing a thought experiment. He essentially says, you know, what can you if you take an average theater performance, what can you take away and still have it? Still have theater? What's the core of it? What's the irreducible minimum? So he says, well, you know, you could take away the curtains, you don't need those. You could take away the script, a lot of theater doesn't have script. Uh you could take away the stage crew and the lighting, you don't need it. You can get rid of the director, definitely. Uh, you can get rid of uh the building. You don't need any of that. The only thing you can't get rid of and still have theater is an actor in a space and somebody watching. Because the act performs a drama, theater describes the relationship between the audience and the performance. It's that relationship that we mean. So if we're trying to make theater the most powerful experience it can be, we have to focus on that relationship between the performer and the audience. And he says, we should add nothing to it unless it helps. And of course, a lot of what we add to theater at the moment distracts from that relationship, it substitutes for it. Well, the analogy for me with education is exact. Because at the heart of education is a teacher and a learner.
[14:32]And we've over time kind of confiscated that relationship with every type of accretion and distraction. We have syllabuses, we have testing regimes, testing companies, political ideologies, political purposes, subject loyalties, union issues, building codes, all these things, timetables, schedules. It's why we can spend all day long discussing education and never mention teaching or learning. But if there's no teaching and learning happening, there is no education going on. So if we're going to improve education, we have to improve that bit and everything else has to take a place around it and not get in the middle of it or get in the way of it. So the focus on teaching and learning to me is vital. Now, what we know about learners is about children is that children are learning organisms. Children don't need to be helped to learn for the most part. They they are born with a vast voracious appetite for learning. In fact, they evolve in the womb with a great voracious appetite for learning. There's a lot of evidence now, you know, that beyond a certain point children are absorbing all kinds of things from their mother, uh while they're in utero. You know, they're they're picking up voice rhythms, they're actually developing tastes, uh for certain types of nutrient. Uh it's why kids come out listening to the cadence of language. Now, what we also know is you don't teach your child to speak. Most kids get to learn to speak, you know, in the first year and a half or so of their life. Um, but you don't teach them. Do you? If you've got kids, you know that you don't sit them down. You know, when they get to the age of one and say, okay, here's the situation. You know, you probably notice your mother and I keep making all these noises and they actually refer to things that are in the in the room here. All these things have names as we call them. And here's a list of them. Now, there are roughly 50,000 to get through in the next couple of months. And when we've got all those down, we'll start to introduce verbs which can tell you what you can do with these things and later on things you might have done with them in certain circumstances and things you could have done possibly in the past or at least in the hypothetical past. Of course you can't do that. They just pick it up. I mean, you nudge them, you correct them, you encourage them. You don't teach them to speak. We do teach them to write. That's a different thing. Writing appeared much later in human evolution than speech. I mean, very recently actually we've had a history of written systems. But my point is that children have a vast appetite for learning. And it only starts to dissipate when we educate them. That's to say when we put them in buildings designed for the purpose and put them in serried ranks and start to force feed them information in which they may or may not have an interest. Now, the conceit of education is that, you know, children learn anyway.
[17:15]The conceit of education is that we can help them do it better and direct them to things they might may not otherwise learn if left to their own devices. That's why we plan to do this sort of stuff. But learning will happen anyway, and with the new technology is happening more and more actually spontaneously. What it means is, if we really want education to be effective, we have to focus on the process of teaching and learning. And teaching, I think, over the course of the past number of years of our these so-called reform movements, has become reduced in the political discourse to a kind of delivery system. You know, your job is to deliver the national curriculum. I don't know when we borrowed all this lexicon from FedEx. I don't know when that began to happen. Um, but teaching has become seen as kind of a delivery system and teachers have become seen as kind of functionaries in the raising of standards and the administration of tests. Actually, actually, teaching is an art form. Everything I've ever learned and seen about teaching convinced me that is the case. It's not enough to be a good teacher to know your stuff. Though you need to know it. You don't need to know everything, but you need to know enough to be able to teach it. But more than that, you need to be able to excite people about the material. You need to engage them. You need to pique their imaginations, you need to fuel their creativity. You need to uh drive their passion for it. You need to get them to want to learn this. You need to find points of entry. That's the gift of a great teacher. Somebody was saying to me earlier today, you know, how can you do that with 35 kids in the class? I know teachers and my wife Terry is among them when I first met her with 42 kids in the class and the place was humming and alive with activity and learning. And you do that not by you having teach them everything, but by getting them actively involved in teaching themselves and teaching each other. In Harvard now, they they talk a lot about the flipped classroom, the physics professors there who have stopped lecturing people, which is ironic for me to be reporting on now, I know that, but, but, but instead, he gets the students in groups to work together and teach each other. And I find it very interesting that finally, you know, Harvard and our universities have discovered what every good primary school teacher has known for years, you know, that people teach themselves if you create the right conditions for it. So one of the ways that we improve education is by recognizing that it happens at the point of where teachers and learners meet. If it doesn't happen there, it doesn't happen at all uh in formal organized education systems. So you can't improve education by ignoring that relationship or demeaning it or vilifying it. But it also means if you are in that relationship, you hold the tools of power right in your hands. You can change this system yourself. You don't need to wait for anybody to do it. Now, the shift, I think, is this. Um, I said that we have a mechanistic system metaphors of education. We do for the most part. We have systems of education too, but it's not a mechanistic system. And this I think is is uh one of our points of entry into the future. That um a school, just like a child or a teacher is not a component. They are living organisms, living, breathing entities. A school is a community of reciprocating individuals uh with who develop their own culture, their own way of seeing things, their own habits and rituals and so on. We can begin to see that there isn't a single point of influence. The teachers in the system, the head teachers are just as influential uh in their own world as the policy makers. And if you are a teacher, if you're a school principal, if you're a superintendent, if you run a school district, um, as far as the kids are concerned who go to your school, you are the education system. If you close the door on your children, you are the education system, it's not the secretary of state, it's you.
[21:07]And if you begin to change your practice, if you begin to change the environment of the school, if you, in other words, concentrate on your own microclimate in the school as part of the larger climate, eventually you start to affect the whole. That's how all social movements have happened. When people say times change but values don't, they're making a fundamental mistake. Actually values do change over time. But they don't change by the activities of government, they change from the ground up, people starting to act differently and demanding something else. I'm always struck by the fact, you know, that uh rock and roll, one of the great cultural movements of my generation, was not a government plan. You know, it was not the case that a group of culture ministers got together in Brussels for a briefing from two civil servants who had discovered three chords and said, we think ministers, these will come together in lots of interesting combinations and Jenkins here has designed some hairstyles that might go along with it. You know, we thought we'd run a few focus groups and see how it takes off. No, this thing just took off and bowled over everything in its path. People thought this is great. The Internet was not a government plan. Al Gore, despite what he says, didn't think of it. And the people who did think about it, uh Tim Bernesley did not have in mind what's actually happened and how fast this has grown up. Human culture is essentially unpredictable, but it it accumulates over the creative activities of individuals feeding off each other. That's how organic growth happens. And when I say the revolution is needed and it should start from the ground up, what I just want to tell you is it's already happening. This isn't a theory, there are already points of disruption across the whole planet here, and I'm just encouraging you to believe in it and to try to move our systems into the 21st century. I was in Austin, Texas last week where the whole school district is given their kids iPads, for example. It's a revolution in the way they're teaching and learning in that school district. Look at the massive online open course, the mooch which are beginning to really drive a wedge into the whole process of higher education. You can multiply these examples. The system is already adapting. The part of the system that's not adapting is the high level of government policy. And if any other social movement is there to go by, the movement will gather force before they're woken up to it. And I hope that they'll recognize they they too are part of the ecosystem and that they should at least understand that the real role of leaders when it comes to education, whether you're a teacher or a head teacher or you're the head of a district or you're the secretary of state for education, your proper role, if you have a loving relationship with education, is not to try and command and control it, but to recognize your place in climate control. And if you can help to change the climate of expectation in education, if you can change what's happening at the ground, then you've changed the world. Thank you.
