Translator: Rebeca zuñiga Reviewer: Reiko Bovee
I'm really happy to be here, and I have a lot to talk about.
About a year and a half ago, I published a book
with my colleague, John Seely Brown
called "A New Culture of Learning."
And it addressed what we saw as some fundamental problems
with what was happening in education today.
And, it hit us very early on
that learning is fundamentally an easy thing that we do,
that we do from the day we're born until the day that we die.
And that for most of our lives
it is natural, and it's effortless everywhere but school.
So, it sort of hit us
that maybe we need to rethink a little bit
about what learning looks like in our everyday lives,
and start to think about how we can recreate
our educational systems, our classrooms, our training seminars
to mirror what learning really looks like.
And we came with the idea of a new culture of learning
based on really three different areas.
The first was the idea that we need to engage passion.
If you look at a child learning
you see in their eyes
the passion, the wonder, the joy.
A few months ago, I was with a colleague of mine
with her three-year-old child walking down the beach
in Santa Monica where I live.
And he came across a very odd tree
that had all kinds of misshapen branches and a strange bark,
and he just sat there and stared at it in wonder,
and then like a child would do when you're three,
started taking the bark, smelling it, putting it in his mouth.
He wanted to know everything about that tree.
And it was a moment when I thought,
I'm really witnessing pure learning happening.
And if somebody has a passion for something,
try to stop them from learning.
You can't do it.
No matter what obstacles you put in the way,
they will find a way to learn what they need to know.
That's the first thing.
The second thing that we found
as an important component of a new culture of learning is imagination.
And imagination
really begins with two words which I think are the two most powerful words
in English language:
What if.
It's the ability to imagine things differently than they are,
and the incredible power that comes out of those two words
can literally reshape the world.
So, those two things form one component
of the new culture of learning.
The third component that's equally as important is constraint.
If you want to drive an architect crazy
give them a large smooth flat piece of land,
and then watch them spin out of control
trying to figure out what to do with it.
But if you really want to make them happy,
give them something that's impossible to build on.
Give them a river, a mountain, a tree, a big rock in the middle
and let them work around it,
and they will create something brilliant.
I think when Ken Robinson, at the beginning,
he was talking about creativity; that's what he meant.
It's the idea of creating in the face of obstacles.
And putting obstacles in people's way can harness that passion and imagination,
and the combination of those two things can create something great.
And out of all this, John and I talked a lot
about what the fundamental ingredient was in creating a new culture of learning.
We decided it was play.
And play is a concept that combines those three things.
And I've come up with the definition that I rather like,
which is that play is an emergent property
of the application of rules to the imagination.
And if you think about something like as basic as a game where you say,
"Take this ball, put it in that goal, but you can't use your hands."
What would you invent? Football or what we call soccer.
So that idea of just putting those rules in place, fires the imagination,
and if you think of all the wonderful things
that people do in that game: the imagination, the creativity, the joy,
it all comes from that simple collision of imagination and rules.
So, that was the fundamental idea behind "A New Culture of Learning."
And I realized pretty quickly, one of the great things about my job
is I get to go to talk about this book to lots of audiences,
and a lot of them are teachers.
And, instead of telling teachers what they need to be doing,
I spend a lot of time listening to them
tell their stories about how their schools were working.
And I learned four things from the teachers that I talked to.
The first was that teachers, just as much as students, have passion.
They care about what's going on in their classroom;
they care about their students, and they want students to learn;
that the reason they went into that job
was to see the light bulb go off over a student's head,
to see their eyes light up with wonder when they've found some new idea.
And going through that, talking to these teachers,
I found time and time again they have roadblocks put in their way.
I talked to a ninth grade teacher who teaches English in California,
and on the curriculum, mandated by the state,
is that he teaches the book "Romeo and Juliet" by Shakespeare.
And he tells me
the first two pages of "Romeo and Juliet,"
this is his favorite thing to teach; it is his favorite day of the year.
It is the day he looks forward to more than anything else
because the first two pages of "Romeo and Juliet"
are full of dirty jokes.
And he knows
that he is going to get every student laughing and giggling,
and there'll be the one student who sits in their going, "I don't get it,"
and somebody will whisper in their ear, and they will go, "Ohh, I get it," right.
It is a joyful experience for him to watch
the language of Shakespeare come alive
and for them to say,
"Wow, I want to read this" - it's a dirty book, right? -
"I'm very interested in what's going to happen."
And this language, it has lots of different levels,
so they spend the rest of the semester trying to find the double entendre
and all of the magic in Shakespeare's language.
What a wonderful experience and to see him in one day and two pages
hook kids on Shakespeare!
That for him is why he became a teacher.
Except this year,
because someone complained because he was telling dirty jokes.
And he was called in not only to the principal's office
but in front of a tribunal to evaluate his fitness as a teacher.
He was suspended from school for a week.
He absolutely found this mind-boggling;
he hadn't assigned the book, and he said,
"Your problem isn't with me, it's with Shakespeare,
and if you're going to tell me I have to teach this play,
I'm going to teach it properly."
So he was being punished
for actually teaching the text he was told to teach,
and the kids' understanding it.
And at one point he turned to this committee and said:
"Has any of you actually read 'Romeo and Juliet'? "
And not one of them had.
But one of them had children who had, who had explained it to her,
and she said to him,
"Why can't you just make it a nice love story?"
And he said, "You do realize they both die at the end, right?"
(Laughter)
So that's the kind of battle
that teachers are facing.
And to make matters worse,
I was just in New York talking to some teachers as well.
They'd done a survey on New York students,
and they'd asked K-12 students outside of the classroom,
what are their major learning resources?
And the things that came up with were their mobile phone or iPhone,
Facebook and Youtube.
So New York City did the only reasonable thing that you could do,
which is they banned all three, immediately.
Not only for the students but also for the teachers.
So if you're a New York City school teacher,
you cannot access Youtube to show videos;
you cannot do anything with mobile phones,
and you cannot have any contact with students
or use Facebook in the classroom.
And there is a big protest now,
where I think 47 of 51of the commissioners of the New York School System
wrote the president chancellor and said,
"This is unacceptable. You must allow phones in the schools,
but we agree they should be kept turned off."
So, that's the solution.
I find this fascinating that kids are telling people,
"This is how we learn,"
and the schools are responding by saying, "You can't do that here."
So, when I look at what's happening in the classrooms I think,
what we've done is we've looked at a way to prepare out students
for the jobs of the nineteenth century.
It's just that we've taken two hundred years to perfect that method
and we've gotten it right;
we are now training people for industrial revolution factory jobs,
and we're doing a very good job of it;
unfortunately, those jobs no longer exists anymore.
And I thought that was the problem until I talked to the teachers more.
And this led me to my second conclusion:
that the system of standardized testing we have
has almost nothing to do with knowledge
and everything to do with surveillance.
The way in which standardized testing works
is not about accountability;
it's not about making sure people learn things.
But the goal of any system of surveillance is about normalization.
It is about treating every student like every other student
and every teacher like every other teacher.
And I've come to believe that that kind of normalization
is incredibly toxic to the things that we talk about, like passion,
and creativity, and innovation.
Because it presumes that everything is equal,
and any deviation is to be treated with suspicion and contempt.
And that's what we're seeing take over in our school systems.
When I talked to these teachers, I was hearing all kinds of amazing things.
The one that disturbed me the most
was because of the pressures of standardized testing,
New York City school teachers said to me this line,
"We have no time for imagination."
And I thought that cut to the heart of exactly what it is
that we're trying to rail against.
So I talked to these New York City school teachers,
and I find that only a few of them are happy,
and the thing I realized pretty quickly is the ones that are happy
are teaching kindergarten,
and first grade, and second grade.
And I assume that's just
because they're getting these kids at that age when they're still joyful.
And someone said,
"Oh, no. Standardized testing starts in third grade."
That's what's making the teachers' lives miserable
because they no longer get to have any kind of learning in their classroom;
all they can do is teach to the test.
I come home from New York to California and hear a news report
that California has adopted something called the California Core Curriculum,
and it will now begin standardized testing in kindergarden.
I don't know how you devise a standardized test for nap time,
but they're probably going to figure it out.
Now, what's happening is we're sending messages to teachers
that essentially they can't be trusted.
My next-door neighbor teaches third grade in California,
and he actually was "called into the principal's office,"
that's how he described it,
for sneaking Art into the curriculum.
It wasn't in standardized test, there was no place for it,
and the administration believed it was trading off with higher test scores
as a result of putting more information in these kids' heads.
So he was called in, and disciplined as if he was a student
for sneaking Art into the curriculum.
So, what we have now
is what we think of as a new culture of learning only happens
when you sneak it into the curriculum, and it becomes subversive.
So, now teachers are not just battling for students' attention,
not battling to teach them, they're also battling their administration
defying the space to make real learning happen.
The result is that good teachers are forced to become bad teachers,
and great teachers are driven out of the profession.
There's no space for the kind of thing
that we think of as that noble art of teaching and learning.
The third thing I learned
is that our classrooms and our students are changing in a way
that we haven't really been able to keep up with.
The reason why is that we have become a culture,
and our learning institutions have become cultures
of context rather than content.
And I learned this from my students as well.
I had an interesting class where I talked to my students,
and I asked them a simple question.
I asked them, "Who do you trust?"
Because when I grew up it was very easy,
if it was in New York Times, you probably believed it,
because they did fact checking,
if Walter Cronkite said it, you believed It was true because it was on the news.
You know he was the voice of objective truth.
Now, maybe that was a little naive.
But I asked my students who they trusted
and they said, "No one."
And I thought they were being cynical,
but it turns out I was wrong; they weren't.
What they meant was they don't trust anyone in particular.
When a piece of knowledge comes to them,
they want to see it from lots of different sources.
They want to have lots of different contexts
to situate what that piece of knowledge means.
So, they're living in a world, where, when a piece of news comes in,
they look at four different news stations,
they look at a couple of different newspapers,
they hear what their friends are saying, and their parents are saying.
And out of all of that,
they come to a conclusion about what something means.
So they're living in a world of context
and they now have the tools to radically reshape context
in a way we never could.
If I wanted to reshape information
I needed to buy a television station, a magazine, a newspaper or radio station.
All these kids need is a weekend, Adobe Premier, and some raw footage,
and they can reshape anything they want.
In fact, there's a brilliant Youtube video called "Scary Mary,"
which is Mary Poppins, re-cut as a trailer for horror film.
Remarkable.
And it probably took a weekend for a kid to do with Adobe Premier.
Simple.
So, they can reshape context and have this acute awareness
that everybody else can too.
So they're very aware of what context means
and what content means.
Unfortunately, most teachers and most professors
are living in a world where they believe they are the content,
but in our students minds we're just another context.
What that means is we need to completely rethink
what our classrooms look like.
We need to understand where they are.
And the place that this came up, most interestingly is,
after I asked them these questions and grilled them for a few minutes,
one of my students said to me, "Can I ask you a question?"
I said, "Yes."
He said, "What is that what you guys" - meaning professors - "and Wikipedia?
You all hate it.
Why do you hate it so much?"
And it dawned on me
that professors treat Wikipedia as content,
but to our students, it's just another context,
so when they use it, they use it to gloss information
to get a quick understanding of something,
to put it in a perspective that allows them to understand it
in a much bigger picture;
but we're still thinking it's the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So there's that fundamental mismatch.
Now, that brings us to the fourth thing.
And, today when we enter the classroom
our classrooms need to become very different
than what they are currently.
What that means is we need to reevaluate what expertise is.
And this is a very hard thing for teachers to let go of
because we're used to being the people that stand up in front of the room
and tell you the information you need to memorize
to put on the test as students.
And, in fact, education has become a game, and that game has become:
"Guess what the professor wants, and then you give it back to him."
And you guys as students have spent twenty years sitting there,
and in the first five minutes of a class you are sizing the professor up,
trying to figure out what it is they want, and you're going to give it to them.
And lots of professors work that way too.
So, what it means to give up expertise is a very scary thing.
But what we have to realize is, as experts,
if I'm standing here telling you something
and you've got your laptop with Google,
in that battle of expertise, I'm going to lose every time.
There's too much information out there.
Now, my role has to change; it has to change to say:
Let's see what Google comes up with
and talk about those eighteen different webpages:
What are the good ones, what are the the bad ones, and why?
How do you reevaluate your context?
How do you make sense of your world?
And what does that mean?
And, in doing so,
the teacher's job becomes creating context.
Our job is to create a context where we can cultivate imagination,
where we can honor passion,
and where we can help people connect their passions to the things
that they need to learn.
And the question that I'd like to leave you with is:
Why aren't we making learning fun and easy?
Why aren't we making it a natural part of the experience of being at school?
Probably the worst thing you can say in reviews
of a teacher's class is that the class was easy.
Why is that a critique?
Shouldn't we celebrate teachers
who make learning easy, make learning fun,
make you feel your passion, cultivate your imagination?
And if we can create an environment in which teachers can do that,
imagine what the world will look like.
And then imagine what happens if we don't.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)