Translator: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Denise RQ
It's the year 2001,
and I'm standing in the middle of a road in a street in Scotland.
I look up and to my right to see a silver car hurtling directly towards me.
It's heading straight for me at breakneck speed,
and there's no way I'm going to be able to get out of its way.
Before I know it, it's hit me, and it's hit me hard.
I'm slammed into the windscreen,
and the force of my body smashes the glass.
I'm flipped upside down,
tossed into the air like a rag doll and dumped into a heap on the road below.
I lie in the road slightly stunned, and then I hear the word, "Cut!",
and then a muffled round of applause.
I stand up, and I walk over to the driver, and I shake his hand.
And then over to the director and say,
"How did it look? Shall we go again?"
It was my first stunt for a movie, and here it is.
Don't worry, no cars were harmed making this stunt.
(Laughter)
Apart from a smashed windscreen.
Some people sometimes ask me, "Richard, how did you become a stuntman?"
The real answer is: I fell into it.
(Laughter)
Actually, I was at school,
and I had an interview with a person whose title was "Career Adviser".
She asked me the question: what do you want to do when you leave school?
Now, I always knew that I wanted to be a stuntman,
but the careers adviser said to me to stop dreaming,
because it would be too difficult.
I've been a stunt man for the past 16 years,
and I've had a really fun ride with it, so I'm really glad I pursued my dreams.
As a child I did a bit of gymnastics,
actually I did a lot of gymnastics, fairly obsessed with gymnastics!
So, I was in the gym pretty much every day of the week,
my poor mum doing all of that driving to and from gymnastics.
She used to call herself "Mum's Taxi Service".
But what I learned from gymnastics that I didn't realize at the time
was how to think independently.
Because we were given creative freedom at gymnastics,
something we were just not given at school.
We were always encouraged to ask, "Why?"
And our coaches loved to help us realize the why,
using both our mind and our body.
So when I got thinking about today's event,
and how I could best contribute to the theme
of 'Thinking Differently about Education',
I asked myself this question:
is our education system teaching us not to think independently?
And it got me thinking deeper about school,
with children sitting still, in rows, in classes,
learning facts to pass exams in a robotic manner.
Are we not just programming their subconscious minds?
Rather than getting them to first think and understand why?
To think consciously, to think independently?
To create new thoughts about the questions and the answers?
We teach children to go to school and get a good job.
Sorry, we teach children to, when - when we're a - sorry, when -
Is my understudy in today!?
This room, by the very nature of this event,
is clearly full of independent thinkers.
We started life's journey as an independent thinker.
As a toddler, we were always asking the question, "Why?"
Albert Einstein said, "We must never lose our curiosity."
So when you think about asking the question, "Why?",
what does it mean to you?
Why is independent thinking so, so vital? So vital?
Because if we say to children, if we say to children in a classroom,
"Don't think independently,"
it causes them to disengage:
independent thinking is the catalyst to happiness and confidence.
Think about this:
our thoughts create our feelings and our feelings create our actions,
which allow us to progress.
And when we progress in any area of our lives,
we are both happy and confident.
And who doesn't want a happy, confident, engaged child?
Or to be a happy confident adult,
who's emotionally intelligent
and able to choose their own independent thoughts?
I was fortunate to have been over in Florida recently, at Disney World.
Who here has been to Disney?
Quite a few people.
It's one of my favourite places.
Would it be safe to say
that Disney pretty much have customer service nailed?
They kind of know how to make happy customers, right?
Well, I spent some time at the Disney Business Institute,
learning exactly how they make happy customers.
And I noticed from them,
and from all the super successful companies like Disney,
that they all have one thing in common.
Not only do they realize the importance of making happy customers,
they realize the importance--
they realize this one big thing above everything else:
that their staff must come first
and before the customer in the pecking order.
Their staff must first be happy and confident.
In a survey carried out for Disney in 2013,
87% of staff said that they were proud to work for the Walt Disney Company.
That's an impressive statistic because it's taken across
the whole of the Walt Disney portfolio and not just from the theme parks.
I did however hear recently, however,
that six out of the seven dwarfs are not happy!
(Laughter)
Successful companies train, support, nurture, encourage, reward,
celebrate, and listen to their staff,
because this breeds a culture of independent thinking and excellence.
Another good example of excellence is Google,
where they actively encourage their staff
to creatively work on their own individual projects during their employment.
It's known as Google's 20% time.
And some projects have actually been brought to market through this process,
famously Gmail and AdSense.
So this builds into the workplace creative momentum.
So if the super successful companies like Disney, like Google,
invest in their staff in a very, very big way,
should we perhaps invest in the minds of our teachers in our schools
in a very big way?
I put it to you that we must,
and then we must leave teachers to get on with teaching,
give them the freedom to be creative in what they do.
I'm going to leave you today with three final thoughts.
Firstly, because creativity breeds more independent thinking,
we must allow, we must actually think about soft subjects needing a new name.
Because they are anything but soft.
They are as important as the academic subjects,
and for some children way more important.
Secondly, always ask why.
Questioning the norm.
Yes, that outspoken child, who's labelled naughty,
could possibly be the brightest, most outstanding spark in the classroom:
if you're given the creative freedom,
they go on to inspire and encourage others to embrace their own independent thinking.
And finally, bring motion into every classroom,
and not just when it is a PE lesson.
Use movement and dance and sport, just a bit of jumping up and down,
because motion changes our emotional state.
It gets our minds connected to our bodies,
because we learn as a whole being and not just as a brain.
Teachers who encourage independent thinking
are those that really, really get it.
And they should be applauded, and we need more of them.
We must be investing in the minds of our teachers,
so our teachers can invest in the minds of our children.
Thank you.
Applause.