I must have been struck by how different we are and how deeply hidden often our talents
are and our abilities. That we all have tremendous natural talents as often people know them,
they don't recognise them and they don't develop them. To the extent that they don't know what
their talents, they don't really know what they can do. And to the extent that they don't
know that, they don't really know who they are.
In fact, it's like people get branded by their gender or they get branded by their ethnicity
or they get branded by their religion. There's an old grammatical device that's called synopticy;
a kind of synoptical thinking all of the time about eachother. We take a single facet of
somebody and extrapolate from it and believe that's the whole of them, somehow. It's convenient
to brand them that way. And education does that to everybody one way or another. We have
stereotypes in our minds about what counts as ability, what counts as 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.
Creativity now is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the
same status.
The population has rocketed in the past three hundred years, pretty much, last two hundred
and fifty really, and growing exponentially. We are living in times of revolution and over
the next fifty years will face challenges which no previous generation of humanity has
ever had to deal with. And to do that, we have to think differently about ourselves
and about the way that we run our communities and our schools and our education systems
and our organisations. I think we should have always thought differently about it; I think
if we had thought differently about it in the first place we wouldn't have so many of
these problems. Think of all the people - all the people of those eighty billion over the
past fifty thousand years. In the most extraordinary of circumstance how many of those had to meet
eachother and did meet eachother and procreated down the centuries in a sequence that has
finally led to you.
We have evolved this powerful sense of imagination; the ability to bring to mind things that aren't
here. From it flows all kinds of powers, like creativity, and uniquely and distinctively
the power of empathy. We have to realise that education is personal. If you make education
impersonal people pull away from it or pull out of it or just disengage. What interests
me is that all the remedial programmes in education are based on personalised curriculum.
Something the Dalai Lama said. He said so what are you doing to with this life; now
you have it what are you going to do with it. You know, many people never got the chance
and here you are so what are you going to do. Are you going to do something with it
or are you going to fritter it away.