Translator: Maria Ardley Reviewer: Tomás Guarna
If you are a high school graduate,
you’ve been through 10 seconds like these, 3 million times.
(Applause)
When I was 15, I drew this on my bedroom wall.
I'm stuck behind bars,
thinking about my love of aeroplanes.
That sums up how I felt right then.
I felt trapped. Trapped in school.
Nearly all my friends, whatever the school, felt the same way,
I finished school last year
and now I want to understand those feelings I had.
And I think I felt that way because every day
was more or less the same.
For most subjects the lesson went:
enter the classroom and sit listening to the teacher
copying what they wrote on the board,
white letters on a green background, into the file on the desk,
to regurgitate it in the test.
Every day, hour after hour, for several years.
Board, file, test.
Maybe I felt trapped because I felt like
at school there was no room
to learn things that interested me.
I always liked a lot of things
like the aeroplanes in the drawing.
At home I loved learning about them.
Why they fly, what makes them how they are.
I did a lot of research online
and tried making aeroplanes out of paper and cardboard
and reaching conclusions.
But there was no place for that in school.
My life was split into school and real life; school and learning.
The same thing happened to a few of my friends.
The one who liked music and playing the guitar,
the one who liked drawing comics and inventing characters,
we felt like school was robbing us of the time
to do what we enjoyed.
When we were in school,
all we wanted was for the bell to ring
so it would be home time.
But when we left we were often tired, exhausted.
We were zombies who didn't feel like doing anything
except watching TV or messing about on our phones.
People are thinking about how to improve things
but lots of the changes suggested
are big and take time.
In the meantime, what do we do for the students
who are at school today?
It got me thinking:
when didn't I feel trapped?
I realised that sometimes this feeling went away,
in some teachers' classes
or during some of the activities.
For example, when we were practising for the maths olympics,
which was very different to maths as a subject.
A lot of people think only some subjects
are about memorising things by heart, like history.
But these days, every subject is about memorising things by heart,
even mathematics.
I didn't enjoy maths as a subject at all.
I even did quite badly at it and sometimes didn't go.
In maths, we did things like this.
Every problem had the same solution, by chanting:
plus times minus equals minus, minus times minus equals... Audience: plus.
Addition becomes subtraction,
multiplication becomes... Audience: division.
And to learn how to do these exercises,
you had to do them over and over until you could remember.
A few years ago, during one of these lessons,
I asked what all of this was for.
My classmates told me:
"To pass maths. What else would it be for?"
(Laughter)
But the maths olympics was nothing like the subject.
Since anyone could enter, a friend suggested I sign up,
and I went to check it out.
What I saw was something very different to what I expected.
Nothing about calculating 'x', no doing anything robotically.
You had to think and work things out.
I'll tell you one of the first puzzles I saw of this type:
I love it.
You've got 9 identical coins that all weigh the same,
except one, and we don't know which, that weighs a bit more.
And you can't tell by picking them up.
We have a set of balances for weighing them.
We can put as many coins on as we want
and find out which side weighs more, or if they weigh the same.
How do we work out which coin weighs more
by using the balance only twice?
To solve this type of problem I had to try different ideas,
fail, be creative and share ideas with other people,
just like in real life.
And so we learnt maths, not by memorising,
but by learning to think.
Sometimes my friends would ask me to tell them one of these problems,
to see what they were like.
I liked telling them ones like the coins and scales one.
But what happened to them
was the same as what happened to me the first time I heard it:
I don't know, I never saw this at school, I don't know how to solve it.
That was when I first realised that school
gets us used to not being able to solve problems
if we can't see the solution straight away,
and there's nothing we can do except give up.
I don't think real life works like that.
There were times, too, when I felt free in class.
I remember the teachers who did things differently,
who broke away from the board, file, test method.
Like when we had history debates.
We chose a situation.
Half the class were for
and the other half were against.
That brought history to life
and it taught us how to think,
how to put ourselves in other people's shoes and to debate.
I also felt free at school
when I could choose things I enjoyed.
I was lucky that my school
got us ready for the maths olympics
and offered some optional seminars, like astronomy.
Once they asked us to put sticks in the sun
measure their shadows,
and work out for ourselves the Earth's diameter.
But at school there was rarely the freedom to choose.
During those 12 years I had to read a huge number of books.
But I didn't choose to read any of them.
And that happens in other subjects too.
We kids almost never choose what we learn.
What would've happened if I'd been able to choose some of what I read?
And if I'd had the freedom to learn about something I chose?
I'm sure that if students were given
more chances to choose at school,
and if classes gave us more real-life challenges,
and less board, file, test,
school would actually be a place we'd enjoy being.
Every now and then, I hear people say
that school doesn't need to be a place students enjoy being.
"Students go to school to learn,
then they go home and do what they like."
Or: "They go to university afterwards
and choose the degree they want."
But this way of thinking puts students off school.
If we're not motivated to learn there, or to do what we want,
then where are we motivated?
What also happens is that when it's time to choose what to do next,
we've already turned into zombies.
We don't follow our hearts; we choose by process of elimination
because school turns us off.
If we want to, we can change things.
All of us: schools, students and parents.
We can find lots more opportunities like these.
Opportunities to make school about more than just copying and repeating,
so it's not just 'to pass.'
And instead of board, file, test, it can be choose, explore, learn.
And so, instead of school turning us into zombies,
it opens our eyes and really makes us want to learn.
Learn how to compose music, how to draw cartoons
or why aeroplanes fly.
Thank you!
(Applause)