Transcriber: Denise RQ Reviewer: Mile Živković
Good morning and welcome to TEDxLondon
and the Education Revolution.
I'm Ken Robinson and firstly let me say I'm sorry not to be with you today
at the Roundhouse.
I would love to have been there,
I have a great affection for the Roundhouse and for London.
Unfortunately, I have to be in Los Angeles which, of course, has its own benefits.
This event has been organized by TEDxLondon,
and I wanted to thank all the people who have put it together
and have worked so hard over the past few months
to make it work as an event in its own right.
But I also wanted to say a couple of words of thanks because the event,
to some extent, has been triggered by the second talk
that I gave at TED in Long Beach.
I spoke at TED originally in 2006 and talked about creativity
and Chris Anderson asked me to go back and talk again four years later
and I thought that was the sequel,
and I called then for our efforts to be redoubled to revolutionize education.
So today is an opportunity to develop some of those ideas through the speakers
that you will be hearing and in the conversations
you will be having between the sessions.
So I wanted to give a few thoughts about the direction
in which these conversations might go
and why I thought it was important
to talk about a revolution in education in the first place.
It's actually very appropriate that you should be meeting at the Roundhouse.
The Roundhouse, if you have not been there before,
has a long history in cultural policy and agitation.
It was the centre for Arnold Wesker's Centre 42
which was named after a proposition that the trades unions put together
to promote cultural access and cultural equity.
I also saw a lot of productions at the Roundhouse in the 60s and the 70s,
that would be the 1960s and the 1970s by the way,
and one of them was by Peter Brook,
and I am going to come back to that just before I wrap these comments up.
But I wanted to firstly congratulate and welcome the other speakers.
I know of their work, and I particularly want to mention Jude Kelly
who will be speaking shortly.
Jude and I have worked together for a very long time.
Judy does wonderful work at the Southbank Centre
but we also worked together 10 years ago on a report for the British Government
called "All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education".
Jude's work, like mine, crosses over
from the professional arts into education and beyond.
So I wanted to say that you are in good company today
for this conversation and there is great expertise in the audience.
The reason I think we need a revolution is really captured in a phrase
you hear politicians often misuse.
They talk about the need "to get back to basics" in education,
and I think we should!
The problem I think, is that many politicians
when they say "get back to basics," seem to believe the basics
are a group of subjects that they did when they were in school.
And in particular, they tend to emphasize literacy and numeracy and science.
Well, of course they are fantastically important but the basics of education
are not a group of subjects.
The basics in education are fundamental purposes,
and I hope that you'd bear these purposes in mind during the today's conversations
and debates on issues which I hope will flow from today.
There are three basics as I see it.
Not in particular order of priority
though I have a reason for putting them in this sequence.
The first one is economic.
Education has powerful roles in economic growth, development and sustainability,
and any conversation about education that doesn't take account of the economy
is really, in some respects, detached and naïve from the world that we live in.
The problem is that the economies we are now generating around the world
are quite unlike the economies in which people,
certainly of my generation, grew up in
and completely unlike the ones in which public education was conceived.
The economies of the 21st century demand
that we develop our skills of creativity and innovation
and the great multiplicity of human talents.
Our education systems don't do that.
So, one of the reasons for a revolution is to meet economic purposes.
But the second is cultural.
Education has fundamental roles in enabling our students
of whatever age they happen to be
to understand their own cultural backgrounds,
their own histories and traditions,
their own identity and what shaped and formed it.
But it had equal responsibilities to encourage them
to understand other people's cultures.
The great challenges that we face on the planet just now
are partly environmental, but they are also partly cultural.
The great conflicts around the world are borne
out of cultural mistrust and misunderstanding.
So the cultural roles of education are fundamental.
And that has real implications for the curriculum.
But the third, and I come to it last because it's to me, the bridge
into everything that matters to me in education,
as we start to build for the future,
the third one is personal.
Education, in the end is about people, it's about individuals,
it's about their hopes and aspirations, it's about their talents
and their abilities and their passions.
A lot of people are dropping out of education,
a lot of people are staying in but detaching from it.
And they all have personal reasons for doing that.
Education is not a mechanistic process.
It's a process that depends upon the imaginations and interests
of students being properly engaged.
So at the root of my call for a revolution is the need to personalize education.
And I say it because, particularly over the last 10 or 15 years
education has, in a way, become more and more impersonal.
The more the governments have driven to standardize education,
the more they have driven education towards a narrow view of conformity
the less personal it has become.
So, the root of the revolution to me, is the need to reverse our priorities
and focus on students and the teachers.
I mentioned Peter Brook.
I used to go to the Roundhouse in the 70s
and I saw a number of productions by Peter Brook.
Peter Brook, if you don't know was a theater director, still is.
He was involved with the National Theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre
and then he moved to Paris to set up the Centre for Theatre Research.
I remember seeing his production of The Ik at the Roundhouse, when the Roundhouse
was a center for innovative theater in the 70s.
Peter Brook wrote a book, a number of years ago, called The Empty Space.
And in it, he talks about his interest in making theatre,
the most powerful experience it can be.
And his argument is that a lot of theater experience
is not terribly powerful.
It passes the evening but it would have passed anyway,
and that theater has transformative potential.
So, his interest is in plumbing that potential and he says, to do that,
to make theater the most powerful thing it can be,
we have to focus on what it really is.
And he suggests a kind of thought experiement.
He said, if you were to take an average theatre performance
what could you take away from it and still have theater.
This is a way of getting to the irreducible minimum of theater.
Well, he said you could take away the curtains,
you could take away the scripts -- a lot of theater doesn't have scripts --
you could certainly get rid of the director --
a lot of theatre didn't have directors,
you could get away with the lighting, as long as you can see it
-- actually, even if you can't.
You could get away wit the stage crew, you could, in fact
can get rid of the building.
He said, you don't need any of this really, for theater.
What you do need, all you need for theater
is an actor, in a space, and somebody watching.
It cold be just one other person,
but an actor with an audience, that's it!
The actor performs a drama.
The fact of being witnessed by an audience
that relationship is theater.
And he said, if we are interested in making theater powerful
we should focus our efforts on that relationship
and on making it the best it can be.
And he said, we should never add anything to it,
unless it improves it.
If it is a distraction, get rid of it.
Well, you see, the parallel with education to me, is absolutely exact.
In education, in the end, what we are talking about
is the relationship between teachers and students,
between somebody learning and somebody helping.
Sometimes it's self-help, of course.
But it's that relationship that matters and, over time, what's happened
is that relationship has become obscured, encrusted and obliterated in some respects,
by every type of distraction: national policy sometimes,
by testing regimes where they don't contribute to the process,
by bargaining rights, by subject loyalties, by building codes.
It's like an old painting that has disappeared
under layers and layers of varnish.
And I find it interesting, people can talk all day about education
but never mention 'learning'.
And therefore, what I'm arguing is that education revolution has to be based
on a radical commitment to improving learning, however that happens.
It's not about curricula in themselves, it's about the quality of that.
And you can have all kinds of things going on in education, around it
but unless learning is deepened and improved
and that means making it personal,
then nothing really else matters very much.
So it leads me to suggest some core principles
for taking the revolution forward.
The first is that education has to be personalized.
Every student has their own story, every student has their own menu
of interests and of talents, it has to be about them.
It has to be about improving the motivation
and opportunities for creativity of teachers.
Teaching is an art form, it's not just a delivery system.
Great teachers are people who know how to mediate their material in a way
that really does inspire the imagination, ignite the creativity of their students.
Secondly, education has to be customized.
Wherever students learn, that is the education system for them.
It's not the committee rooms of our parliament buildings
it is not the boardrooms of our examinations boards.
Education happens in the schools
or learning communities that students attend,
and that, for them, is the system.
So, customizing education to those students
to this place, these needs, this community
is absolutely critical.
And the other key principle to me is diversity.
Our current drive towards standardization offends the principle of diversity
on which human life depends and flourishes.
If you are a parent, or a sibling, and you have a couple of children
or a couple of siblings, I'll make you a bet.
If you have two or more children or siblings I bet you they are
completely different from each other, aren't they?
I mean, you would never confuse them, would you?
And say, "Well, which one are you? I am constantly muddling you up."
And the reason is that human life is inherently diverse
and we need to celebrate that in our school systems.
Instead, too often, we subscribe to a rather bland menu of conformity.
And the final principle here is about partnership.
Education isn't just what happens in formal school buildings.
It should involve great institutions like the Southbank Center,
like the Roundhouse, our great museums, our great science institutions.
It should be a genuine partnership with the community more generally.
So to me, these principles open up a whole menu of issues for debate
about the curriculum, about the balance of it.
I think it's appaling that we ever contemplate
a national system of education for example that doesn't give equal weight to the arts
along with the sciences, the humanities and physical education
as well as literacy and numeracy.
It has big implications for pedagogy for who teaches
amd how we help them to learn how to teach better.
It has big implications for assessment and it has big implications
for the structure of education.
I think we should be talking today not just about formal schooling,
but homeschooling.
About all the different ways in which learning communities gather
and how they are organized internally to make the job most effective.
In the end, I think there isn't a more important conversation
to be had just now
than how to transform education to meet the needs of the 21st century.
And I am delighted that TEDx has taken on this debate,
I am delighted you are here today and I am looking forward
with great expectation
to the results of today and where it might lead us.
So 'Bon voyage' in the conversations that lie ahead!