Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Thank you.
Well, if you've come and spend six hours on a Saturday
for something that's about educational revolution,
then my guess is that you all are pioneers.
Or if you're not pioneers yet, then you're gagging to be one.
I like to think I have been;
I hope I still am.
I think the critical thing is,
What does the future hold?
There's many people in this room -
pure educationalists, technologists,
horticulturalists, sports people, entrepreneurs, artists -
and we're all here
because we want to put creativity into the heart of the learning experience.
We want to put creativity into the heart of the learning experience
for the learners and the teachers.
And I think we want to do that in lots of ways.
Some of us want to do it by harnessing all the technology that there is to offer.
Some of us
want to get back to the simplicity and the beauty of the spoken word
and the simple communication of human to human.
But what we all believe is that we want to do that for everyone.
We want to do it for all children, for all young people.
And I hope we particularly want to do it for those children
for whom education may be the only piece of scaffolding onto which they can cling,
those children for whom the world is so soulless and so chaotic
that actually, without education and without creative education,
they have no hope of reimagining who they could be
and changing their world, never mind anybody else's.
(Applause)
Now, I'm not in pure education,
I'm not a policymaker,
I'm not a head teacher;
I probably never will be.
I'm in the arts, so I'm here to talk about,
What can my bit be for that vision of change?
And in thinking about that,
I've looked back at some of the pioneers in my field
who if I'd known about them when I was young - which I never did -
then I would have been inspired by them.
And in a way, this is a bit of an educational test.
We can take this as a bit of an oral test here
on people that you may not know about.
Okay, so who knows who Ethel Smyth is?
One. Mums.
Ethel Smyth, suffragette,
one of the great composers of the Proms when Henry Wood started the Proms.
She gave up her career as a composer for a year
to join the suffragette movement,
and when those dreadful anarchists - as they seemed to be -
were breaking the windows
of Parliamentarians who were against suffrage,
she was sent to prison for a year.
Thomas Beecham, the conductor, came to visit her
and found her leaning out of the window,
listening to the quadrangle underneath singing suffragette songs,
and she was conducting it with a toothbrush.
(Laughter)
Lilian Baylis?
A few more.
Okay. She started Sadler's Wells.
She started the Old Vic,
and believe me, that was long before Islington and Waterloo were fashionable.
She started the English National Opera,
she started the first national company that became the National Theatre
and she started the English National Ballet.
She did it because she didn't believe
that the arts were reaching the right people,
she felt they were only reaching
those people in Knightsbridge and Kensington,
and she believed the arts was for everyone.
Marie Rambert started Ballet Rambert,
danced with Diaghilev's company,
formed the first ballet company in Britain.
Ninette de Valois, Irish born.
She started the Royal Ballet,
the Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Ballet School.
Annie Horniman started the Abbey Theatre and the Manchester Gaiety,
the first repertory theater company in Britain.
And of course, Joan Littlewood.
I'll assume you know who Joan Littlewood was,
but maybe not.
She's called "The Mother of Modern Theater."
She started the revolutionary Stratford East in the east of London,
committing herself to that neighborhood
because she believed they had as much cultural rights as everybody else.
And finally, two women who aren't dead,
Lucy Neal and Rose Fenton -
just to prove that there are still pioneers
in color and not in black and white -
started London International Festival of Theatre over 30 years ago
because they believed that unless we heard other cultural voices,
we could never understand the world in which we properly lived.
So all of those are inspiring to me,
and if I can, in some way,
live up to some of the actions they've committed themselves to,
then that will be wonderful.
But all of those people
did it because they felt a burning sense of the injustice of the world.
They felt that the world needed to take a step forward,
and they probably thought,
"Well, nobody else is doing this; it better be me."
In fact, It's often the case of pioneers: you don't know you are one.
You might just think you're rolling up your sleeves, getting something done.
Perhaps that's as it should be.
After all, pioneers sounds a little bit bodacious,
and it could go to your head.
And I started life
as a Liverpudlian, one of four daughters.
My father was one of ten, Irish-Catholics.
My mother, one of three, third-generation German Protestants.
That was a time in Liverpool when on the bed and breakfast
you could still read, "No Irish. No blacks. No dogs."
Places I was brought up in was Chinatown.
And my grandfather, who was a merchant seaman,
used to say, "Be very, very respectful of the Chinese. They're the first in."
The second in were the West Indian sailors,
and the third in were the Irish.
And I went to ballet classes in the West Indian Centre
and passed my Royal Academy of Dancing exams
because Marie Rambert and Ninette de Valois
had made it possible for girls like me to take exams in ballet.
But as we moved house -
my father went into the Civil Service after the war, and we moved home -
it became apparent to me
that this vivid, amazing neighborhood that I'd grown up in -
with all its stories, all its varieties, with all its tales to tell -
well, actually, it became poorer.
It became fiscally richer; we were certainly moving up in the world,
but poorer in the sense
that we lost the sense of such a wide and rich community.
Because who didn't come with us?
Well, the pure Irish, the West Indian, the Chinese,
those people who had a different color skin,
those people whose education couldn't be afforded,
those people whose life chances were different.
And as a child of the first generation of my family to go to university,
I was and still am keenly aware
that if you have an opportunity and you seize it,
my goodness, opportunities appear before you again and again.
And if you don't get that first opportunity,
you will fall behind incredibly rapidly.
So, I went to ballet classes; I discovered my love of the arts.
Not because my parents were arts goers,
but because they were very keen on health
and I had fallen arches and the doctor recommended ballet.
But in that circumstance, I found the person who I have ever since been,
and I'm so lucky.
But I had the kind of schooling we've heard talked about so much today.
Twenty-five percent ecstasy in the drama classes,
in the creative dance.
Seventy-five percent utter boredom at a time when my brain was still growing.
What a tragedy: my brain has atrophied since 19,
and most of what I learnt in school I can't remember.
But the thing is that I did have a head teacher
who, noticing that I was creeping towards sex, drugs and rock and roll
with great alacrity,
grabbed me and said,
"Look, I don't care what you do.
If necessary, don't go to math or biology, don't go to anything else,
start a drama class in the assembly hall in your lunch time."
And that's what I did, and it was my savior.
The rest of my career has been committed
to trying to make opportunities for anyone possible
to find their way into creative pursuits,
knowing how hard it can be
if you don't come from a family or a background,
which economically or educationally it is thought to be yours by right.
And that goes for many people.
And it's specifically and urgently goes for young people who, as I say,
so much need the arts to find out a true expression of who they could be.
And my life, really, has run in two courses.
On one side, as a theater director and an artistic director,
I have formed institutions from scratch
in order for the symbolism
of the change of whose artistic rights are allowable and legitimate,
I've formed those institutions to make those changes,
and at the same time, I've sat on education committees,
I've been on Ofsted,
I've formed committees,
I've given talks about education
and how education, if only it could be more creative,
how much richer it could be.
But I'm thinking of changing tack.
And I'm not changing tack because I don't believe in that any longer,
but I realize that while being so schizophrenic
and thinking that I'm cajoling education into one thing
while enacting my dreams in another place,
that actually, this won't do.
You can't dream something up on behalf of somebody else.
You can do it yourself,
and that's the thing you have to do.
You have to do it yourself.
Now, as I said, I'm not going to be an educationalist in a pure sense
or a policymaker,
but I am now the artistic director
of the largest cultural institution in the country
and possibly in Europe and maybe the world.
The Southbank Centre is 21 acres on the great River Thames,
in one of the most creative capitals of the world,
in one of the greatest economies of the world -
greatest creative economies of the world.
Now, the history of the Southbank Centre,
which was pioneered by a group of people, nearly all of whom are dead,
was staggering.
It was the site of the Festival of Britain,
created in 1951, after a second World War
when nobody knew who or what would survive,
either bodily or in terms of philosophy.
But in fighting for freedom, the people who came back from that war thought,
"What is the freedom we were fighting for?
What was that death and destruction about?
It has to be about a better world."
And out of that death and destruction came health, welfare,
education for all
and the arts.
The declaration of human rights -
everybody has the right to freely experience the arts and creativity.
And the Festival of Britain site was given this incredible title:
"The Propaganda of the Imagination."
That site wasn't just about the arts;
it was about technology, design, history.
And I found myself taking the job that I did five years ago
like an archivist,
going back into history, trying to locate this ideology.
What has it been for, this site, originally,
and how could I and my colleagues bloom that back into life?
How could we connect ourselves up to that ideology
and how could we take it forward?
So since then - I think you're going to see some more slides now -
we've seen many, many ways
that we've been able to use this extraordinary site
to engender curiosity,
to make people have fun,
to allow people to bump into arts,
to say that it's for everyone,
to make it intergenerational.
And we have schools of all kinds, and we have partnerships of learning
and we have all kinds of wonderful things
that I could tell you about if this was an advert.
But it's not enough, is it?
Because, as we know, those who have will get more,
and those who have less will carry on getting less.
And the gap between rich and poor
isn't just a fiscal strain in this country;
it's a cultural strain too.
So this is my dream,
that actually I could be as daring and as bold
as the people in whose footsteps I am now standing.
I haven't done anything like as extraordinary
as starting the Festival of Britain.
And yet I'm fortunate enough to be curating that magnificent site.
So supposing we were - just in our cultural institution -
to say that we would change the symbolism.
The symbolism of the moment is that there are over 1,000 events -
our films, our dance and theater performances,
our music performances of all kinds,
our literature, our debates -
all of these things are essentially for adults.
Of course, young people join in.
Of course, young people come to classes here,
but symbolically, ours and all cultural institutions in this country -
bar maybe five -
are all committed to the notion
that adults appreciate and that children learn.
Let's turn it on its head.
Let's say that all cultural institutions
have this absolutely incredible extracurricular activity
going on every night,
all of which, with a bit more context,
could automatically be used for education of all kinds.
Let's say that from nine o'clock in the morning to eleven o'clock at night,
every day, seven days of the week - because that's how often we're open -
all of it could be given over to clear educational opportunities
all the time.
And let's see whether in our ability to experiment,
since we don't have an obligation,
a statutory obligation to educate,
so in a sense, let's use the flexibility of cultural institutions
like the Southbank Centre
to experiment with mix and match.
Sir Ken talked about the fact
that we have been unable, so far, to create customized education
even though all the examples we see constantly
is that children learn best when it is for them:
"That dancing was for me."
"That drama in the assembly room was for me."
That's what motivates.
A child failed a level math three times
and now our budget is 45 million.
When I needed to count, I could count.
(Laughter)
Let's experiment with what customized education could be like,
intergenerationally, enthusiasm led, not bounded by age,
not bounded by class,
not bounded by school and geographical group.
Let's experiment with that at the Southbank Centre,
at the Roundhouse, at the British Museum.
Why not?
Taxes are there to create the bounty for the future for civilization,
and that bounty is something we have to think about creatively.
Of course, we'll fail some of the time doing this; it's an experiment.
But my guess is that so many lessons are failing anyway,
but they're legitimized because they're in school.
So let's fail more bravely.
Let's fail at the Southbank Centre,
let's fail in cultural institutions up and down the country.
And I can't make this pledge on behalf of anybody else but myself,
but I will make the pledge on behalf of the Southbank Centre.
So my pledge is this:
In five years time, I pledge that if you come to that 21 acres,
you will see, from nine o'clock in the morning to eleven o'clock at night,
a consistent cohort of cascading learning,
of schools in residence,
of schools coming from across the country and across the world
to learn from each other,
of families putting up schoolchildren,
of all kinds of versions
of the diversification of what learning could look like.
And by pledging that, of course, I'm going to frighten myself to death.
And that is quite right
because there's absolutely no point in saying we want to have a revolution
unless we're going to be scared,
unless we don't know how to do it.
I remember that Christmas carol "Good King Wenceslas,"
and the little page was looking out and it was so snowy and so cold,
and he said, "Look, just follow in my footsteps.
You'll find that the snow's not so deep and it's a bit warmer."
And that's how they traveled.
I can put my footsteps inside any number of pioneers,
pioneers who fought for girls education,
pioneers who fought for equal rights to education despite skin color,
pioneers like Annie Horniman, like Marie Rambert, like Joan Littlewood.
I can put my feet inside those steps and feel the warmth,
and then maybe I'll have the courage to do a little stepping out of my own
into that untrodden snow.
But I won't be doing it by myself, of course,
I'll be doing it with you all, you all pioneers.
So, I'd like to give that pledge today.
I would like to call a meeting at Southbank Centre before Christmas
where we will discuss
how we could turn all of these crazy ideas into little modules of trials and errors,
and I'd like to get your agreement that you will help me,
that you'll help me in any way you can,
and that you'll excuse me if I make a lot of mistakes
or we make a lot of mistakes together.
I expect we'll do it with lots of other people who aren't in this room,
and hopefully many of them will be much younger than us.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)