TED Talk
Ken
Robinson: How to escape education's death valley
00:14
Thank you very much.
00:17
I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our
two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los
Angeles --
00:24
(Laughter)
00:27
thinking we were moving to America, but anyway
--
00:30
(Laughter)
00:32
It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to
America.
00:37
(Laughter)
00:39
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got
here, I was told various things, like, "Americans
don't get irony."
00:48
(Laughter)
00:50
Have you come across this idea? It's not
true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth
of this country. I have found no evidence that
Americans don't get irony. It's one of those
cultural myths, like, "The British are
reserved."
01:04
(Laughter)
01:06
I don't know why people think this. We've
invaded every country we've encountered.
01:10
(Laughter)
01:14
But it's not true Americans don't get
irony, but I just want you to know that that's
what people are saying about you behind your
back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in
Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic
in your presence.
01:27
(Laughter)
01:29
But I knew that Americans get irony when I
came across that legislation, "No Child Left Behind."
01:35
(Laughter)
01:37
Because whoever thought of that title gets
irony.
01:40
(Laughter)
01:42
Don't they?
01:44
(Applause)
01:49
Because it's leaving millions of children
behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive
name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left
Behind." I can see that. What's
the plan? We propose to leave millions of children
behind, and here's how it's going to
work.
02:06
And it's working beautifully.
02:07
(Laughter)
02:08
In some parts of the country, 60 percent
of kids drop out of high school. In the Native
American communities, it's 80 percent of
kids. If we halved that
number, one estimate is it would create a net gain
to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a
trillion dollars. From an economic point of
view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should
do this? It actually costs an enormous
amount to mop up the damage from the dropout
crisis.
02:42
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an
iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids
who are in school but being disengaged from it,
who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit
from it.
02:55
And the reason is not that we're not spending enough
money. America spends more money on education than
most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than
in many countries. And there are hundreds of
initiatives every year to try and improve
education. The trouble is, it's all going in the
wrong direction. There are
three principles on which human life
flourishes, and they are contradicted by
the culture of education under which most teachers
have to labor and most students have to
endure.
03:29
The first is this, that human beings are naturally
different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got
children of your own? Okay. Or
grandchildren. How about two children or more?
Right. And the rest of you have seen such
children.
03:49
(Laughter)
03:52
Small people wandering about.
03:54
(Laughter)
03:55
I will make you a bet, and I am confident
that I will win the bet. If you've got two
children or more, I bet you they are completely
different from each other. Aren't they?
04:07
(Applause)
04:09
You would never confuse them, would
you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind
me."
04:14
(Laughter)
04:17
"Your mother and I need some color-coding
system so we don't get confused."
04:22
Education under "No Child Left Behind" is
based on not diversity but conformity. What
schools are encouraged to do is to find out what
kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of
achievement. One of the effects of "No Child Left
Behind" has been to narrow the focus onto the
so-called STEM disciplines. They're very
important. I'm not here to argue against science
and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but
they're not sufficient. A real education has to
give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to
physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry,
thank you --
04:59
(Applause)
05:04
One estimate in America currently is that something like 10
percent of kids, getting on that
way, are being diagnosed with various
conditions under the broad title of attention
deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not
saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe
it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down,
hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical
work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget,
you know?
05:34
(Laughter)
05:35
(Applause)
05:42
Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a
psychological condition. They're suffering from
childhood.
05:48
(Laughter)
05:52
And I know this because I spent my early life as a
child. I went through the whole
thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum
that celebrates their various talents, not just a
small range of them. And by the way, the arts
aren't just important because they improve math
scores. They're important because they speak to
parts of children's being which are otherwise
untouched.
06:14
The second, thank you --
06:16
(Applause)
06:20
The second principle that drives human life
flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity
in a child, they will learn without any further
assistance, very often. Children are natural
learners. It's a real achievement to put that
particular ability out, or to stifle
it. Curiosity is the engine of
achievement. Now the reason I say
this is because one of the effects of the current
culture here, if I can say
so, has been to de-professionalize
teachers. There is no system in the world or any
school in the country that is better than its
teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the
success of schools. But teaching is a creative
profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a
delivery system. You know, you're not there just
to pass on received information. Great teachers do
that, but what great teachers also do is
mentor, stimulate, provoke,
engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If
there's no learning going on, there's no education going
on. And people can spend an awful lot of
time discussing education without ever discussing
learning. The whole point of education is to get
people to learn.
07:41
An old friend of mine -- actually very old, he's
dead.
07:44
(Laughter)
07:47
That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid.
07:50
(Laughter)
07:53
But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful
philosopher. He used to talk about the
difference between the task and achievement senses
of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of
something, but not really be achieving it, like
dieting.
08:11
(Laughter)
08:12
It's a very good example. There he is.
He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not
really.
08:17
(Laughter)
08:18
Teaching is a word like that. You can say,
"There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's
teaching." But if nobody's learning
anything, she may be engaged in the task of
teaching but not actually fulfilling it.
08:30
The role of a teacher is to facilitate
learning. That's it. And part of
the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture
of education has come to focus on not teaching and
learning, but testing. Now, testing is
important. Standardized tests have a
place. But they should not be the dominant culture
of education. They should be diagnostic. They
should help.
08:52
(Applause)
09:00
If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized
tests. I do. I want to know what
my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard
scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my
doctor invented in the car.
09:14
(Laughter)
09:16
"Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange."
09:18
"Really?"
09:19
(Laughter)
09:21
"Is that good?" "We don't know."
09:23
(Laughter)
09:24
But all that should support learning. It
shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often
does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a
culture of compliance. Our children and teachers
are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather
than to excite that power of imagination and
curiosity. And the third
principle is this: that human life is inherently
creative. It's why we all have different
résumés. We create our lives, and
we can recreate them as we go through them. It's
the common currency of being a human being. It's
why human culture is so interesting and diverse and
dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have
imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much
in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have
a dog. And your dog may get
depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to
Radiohead, does it?
10:18
(Laughter)
10:22
And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack
Daniels.
10:24
(Laughter)
10:29
"Would you like to come for a walk?" "No,
I'm fine."
10:32
(Laughter)
10:33
"You go. I'll wait. But take pictures."
10:37
(Laughter)
10:39
We all create our own lives through this restless
process of imagining alternatives and
possibilities, and one of the roles of
education is to awaken and develop these powers of
creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of
standardization.
10:54
Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It
really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top
in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do
well at, because that's all that's being
tested. That's one of the problems of the
test. They don't look for other things that matter
just as much. The thing about work in Finland is
this: they don't obsess about those
disciplines. They have a very broad approach to
education, which includes humanities, physical
education, the arts.
11:25
Second, there is no standardized testing in
Finland. I mean, there's a
bit, but it's not what gets people up in the
morning, what keeps them at their desks.
11:36
The third thing -- and I was at a meeting
recently with some people from Finland, actual
Finnish people, and somebody from the American
system was saying to the people in Finland, "What
do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?"
11:49
And they all looked a bit bemused, and
said, "Well, we don't have
one. Why would you drop out? If
people are in trouble, we get to them quite
quickly and we help and support them."
12:00
Now people always say, "Well, you know,
you can't compare Finland to America." No. I think
there's a population of around five million in
Finland. But you can compare it to a state in
America. Many states in America have fewer people
in them than that. I mean, I've been to some
states in America and I was the only person
there.
12:20
(Laughter)
12:22
Really. Really. I was asked to lock up
when I left.
12:26
(Laughter)
12:30
But what all the high-performing systems in the world
do is currently what is not evident,
sadly, across the systems in America
-- I mean, as a whole. One is
this: they individualize
teaching and learning. They recognize that it's
students who are learning and the system has to
engage them, their curiosity, their individuality,
and their creativity. That's how you get
them to learn.
12:59
The second is that they attribute a very high
status to the teaching
profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you
don't pick great people to teach and keep giving
them constant support and professional
development. Investing in professional development is not a
cost. It's an investment, and
every other country that's succeeding well knows
that, whether it's Australia,
Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or
Shanghai. They know that to be the
case.
13:30
And the third is, they devolve
responsibility to the school level for getting the
job done. You see, there's a big difference
here between going into a mode of command and
control in education -- That's what happens in
some systems. Central or state governments
decide, they know best and they're going to tell
you what to do. The trouble is that education
doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our
legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms
and schools, and the people who do it are the
teachers and the students, and if you remove their
discretion, it stops working. You have to put it
back to the people.
14:09
(Applause)
14:14
There is wonderful work happening in this
country. But I have to say it's
happening in spite of the dominant culture of
education, not because of
it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind
all the time. And the reason I think is
this: that many of the current
policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of
education. It's like education is an industrial
process that can be improved just by having better
data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of
some policy makers is this idea that if we
fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it
right, it will all hum along perfectly into the
future. It won't, and it never did.
14:55
The point is that education is not a mechanical
system. It's a human system. It's
about people, people who either do want to learn
or don't want to learn. Every student who drops
out of school has a reason for it which is rooted
in their own biography. They may find it
boring. They may find it
irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with
the life they're living outside of school. There
are trends, but the stories are always unique. I
was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of --they're called
alternative education programs. These are programs
designed to get kids back into education. They
have certain common features. They're very
personalized. They have strong support for the
teachers, close links with the community and a
broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs
which involve students outside school as well as inside
school. And they work. What's
interesting to me is, these are called "alternative
education."
15:56
(Laughter)
15:57
You know? And all the evidence from around
the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no
need for the alternative.
16:05
(Applause)
16:13
(Applause ends)
16:14
So I think we have to embrace a different
metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human
system, and there are conditions under which
people thrive, and conditions under which they
don't. We are after all organic
creatures, and the culture of the school is
absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term,
isn't it?
16:35
Not far from where I live is a place called Death
Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place
in America, and nothing grows
there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't
rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the
winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven
inches of rain fell over a very short period. And
in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The
whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a
while. What it proved is
this: that Death Valley isn't
dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are
these seeds of possibility waiting for the right
conditions to come about, and with organic
systems, if the conditions are right, life is
inevitable. It happens all the
time. You take an area, a school, a
district, you change the conditions, give people a
different sense of possibility, a different set of
expectations, a broader range of
opportunities, you cherish and value the
relationships between teachers and learners, you
offer people the discretion to be creative and to
innovate in what they do, and schools that were
once bereft spring to life.
17:57
Great leaders know that. The real role of
leadership in education -- and I think it's true
at the national level, the state level, at the
school level -- is not and should not be command
and control. The real role of leadership is
climate control, creating a climate of
possibility. And if you do that, people will rise
to it and achieve things that you completely did
not anticipate and couldn't have expected.
18:24
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin
Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the
world: Those who are immovable, people who don't
get it, or don't want to do anything about
it; there are people who are
movable, people who see the need for
change and are prepared to listen to
it; and there are people who
move, people who make things
happen." And if we can encourage more people, that
will be a movement. And if the movement is strong
enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a
revolution. And that's what we need.
18:56
Thank you very much.
18:57
(Applause)
19:01
Thank you very much.
19:02
(Applause)
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