Translator: huda khaled Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
"I'd rather be dead than at school."
That was when our daughter was eight years old,
and she said these words.
And socially, she was doing fine.
She had lots of friends.
But what we saw in the summer holidays,
we saw a vibrant, energetic and curious child.
And it continued for the whole summer holidays
until the last week of the holidays.
And then she became small again as she got headaches, stomachaches,
and she became depressed.
And that continued for the whole school year
until the next holidays.
So when she said, "I'd rather be dead than at school,"
it was a big wake-up call for us as parents,
and it was horrible.
And then as parents of three daughters,
we started to investigate their school and many other schools.
And what we found
was that, at the systems level, all schools are the same:
all schools have the same or every similar curriculum,
similar teachers, similar books and similar exams,
and all schools are compulsory.
And incredibly,
the perception of the teacher
is one of the main factors
which determines success of children at school,
and this is a self-fulfilling prophecy,
So, what we found as parents
that was a big mismatch
between what the school offers and her individual learning needs.
An example with maths -
at school she would do, like, half a page of maths in an hour,
full with mistakes.
At home, she would do, like, 20 pages of math in an hour
with no mistakes.
And as parents,
we concluded that there was nothing wrong with our daughter or her maths,
but there was a lot wrong with the school.
But it goes much deeper than maths.
Our education system has a number of underlying assumptions
which govern the way you think about education.
I want to share a few here.
And one of them is that more education is better.
When problems in education surface,
the reaction of politicians, at least in the Netherlands,
is that we need more:
more subjects, less holidays, more school hours
and children should be sent earlier to school
at a younger age until a higher age.
But the question is, Is this true -
that we have to question this?
And in 1929, it was Mr. Benezet in Manchester, New Hampshire,
and he already thought then
the children were forced to do too much work at school.
And he set up an experiment with maths.
And he asked a number of principals and teachers
of schools in the poorest neighborhoods of Manchester
to drop maths from the curriculum for five years.
And they did.
And what they found in the sixth year when these classes got maths again
that the classes which didn't have maths for five years
were actually doing better at maths
than classes who did have maths for the whole period.
So, what if you don't give maths at school at all?
Another example can be found in New Zealand.
In 2011,
there was a big earthquake in Christchurch,
and all the schools were destroyed,
and the students preparing for the final exams
couldn't go to schools for a number of months.
And to the big surprise of the education authorities,
the exam results were the highest ever.
And the same happened two years later in Denmark
as a result of a teacher strike.
And also here the exam results were the highest ever.
So there are very good indications
that provided children are in rich environments
with opportunities to explore,
that less forced education is better.
Another assumption I want to share is children need guidance.
An unwanted adult guidance is coercion.
And my question would be,
Are children incompetent and due to that need to be guided,
or are children guided so much these days
that they are deprived from opportunities to achieve
and therefore seen as incompetent
and need to be guided even more,
or is this a self-fulfilling prophecy?
An MIT professor Laura Shields
performed an experiment with four-year-olds and toys.
And they were split into two groups,
and one group got instructed how to play with the toys,
and the other group didn't.
And what she found was that the group who didn't get instructions
showed much richer play and more inspiration
than the other group.
American psychologist Robert Epstein did a lot of research on adolescence.
And what he found was that human competences,
except for muscle power,
are at their peak between 12 and 14 years,
and after 14 years, they slowly decline again,
whereas, like, an eight-year-old
is about at the same level as a 10-year-old.
And also, there are some really great examples
of very young people performing extraordinary things.
And I want to name one here: the sailing girl Laura Dekker.
Laura Dekker was a 15-year-old Dutch girl who solo-sailed the world -
something not many adults would do after her.
But rather than to be a supporter to this great mind
who wants to achieve extraordinary things,
she was haunted by the authorities to force her to go to school.
Actually, unsolicited guidance of children
is harmful for their development and for their learning.
So, what did we do as parents?
We found that the education system was harmful for our children,
so we decided were not going to force our children
into the education system anymore.
And after a long journey, we found the Sudbury Valley School near Boston.
And this was really the school we wanted for our children.
This was the school we totally believed in.
And the essence of a Sudbury school
is that children are treated with total respect,
and we treat children as human beings.
So, how does it work?
Basically, a Sudbury school is a community which is warm and caring and safe.
There is no bullying.
And there's full age-mixing between all the students,
so it's students from age 4 to 19.
And they learn a lot from each other.
And also, the school is run in a participatory democracy
based on the rule of law.
So there's a weekly school meeting
where all students and staff have one vote,
and the school meeting decides on all matters concerning the school:
on the budgets and how it's spent,
on the rules and the rule enforcement.
The school meeting decides which people are staff in the school.
And it's amazing to see how children take responsibility for the community.
And it basically comes down to that if children are responsible,
they take responsibility.
And within this community,
children can decide for themselves
whats, how, when and with whom to do activities.
And they are responsible for their own choices
and the consequences of those choices.
Also, they take responsibility for things like cleaning of the school
and upholding the rules
to ensure that the school stays a safe and good place to be.
So, how do children learn at such a school?
Children are natural-born learners.
It's almost impossible to stop children from learning.
At the Sudbury Valley School,
there was a story about a group of primary-school-aged children,
and they were really motivated to learn.
It took them 20 hours to learn all the primary school maths.
At a traditional school,
it would take, like, 12,000 hours - that's 60 times more.
At our school, with a nine-year-old girl,
we decided to see how she wanted to learn to read.
It took her two weeks to master it.
And recently,
we had international visitors,
and we found a five-year-old student having a full conversation in English.
Nobody knows where she learned it,
but it was a full conversation, not just a few words.
Also, for our own children, it worked really well.
The curiosity came back.
They started to play again,
and the headaches and the stomachaches disappeared.
And for our oldest daughter, her joy for reading came back.
Her old school gave her a reading
at a level 5 of the 10 levels of the reading method.
When she came back to our school,
she discovered the newly-published "Harry Potter" books,
and she finished them in a few days.
There was nothing wrong with her reading.
So, how are our daughters doing now?
In between, they moved on.
They're in their mid 20s now.
And from a traditional prospective, they're doing okay or fine.
One started her own business in prosthetics and special-effects makeup.
One finished the National Pop Academy
and will be starting studies in human resource management.
And one just finished the Utrecht Art College,
and she will be starting a masters in Forensic Art and Facial Identification
at the University of Dundee in Scotland.
And actually, she will receive her diploma this afternoon at three o'clock.
(Applause)
But much more importantly, they are doing very well.
They developed into confident, thriving adults who know what they want.
And they take responsibility for creating their own lives.
So, why do I think we should change the education system?
I see two reasons.
Firstly, we inherited an industrial education system,
whilst we live now in a fast-changing world
of the network and information society.
And secondly,
because the education system is actually quite harmful for children.
And it violates their human rights on a daily basis.
Not only does the education system inhibit their learning and development,
but also it has some very harmful side effects.
When we force children to go to school,
they lose their freedom, they lose their privacy.
About half the children at school lose their motivation to learn.
About a quarter of children at school get a burnout.
And in modern Western societies,
there's a 10 to 20% chance that children will develop into functional illiterates.
And of course, there's a risk of being bullied.
So I really think we should fundamentally change our education system
to create opportunities for our children to prepare themselves,
to prepare for a very uncertain future in a fast-changing world.
And who can make these changes?
Firstly, there are people in power,
but in my experience,
the people in power, they're either too scared to change anything,
or they are afraid to lose their power.
So I think that teachers and parents are the best persons
to look after the interests of their children.
And to put things in historic perspective -
historically,
there are three groups in society
which didn't have their rights and freedoms.
These were slaves, women and children.
And after a long struggle in the 19th century,
slavery was abolished.
And in the 20th century, women got most of their rights.
So I think it's about time in the 21st century
to give our children their rights and freedoms.
Thank you.
(Applause)