Translator: Jim Taylor Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm very happy to be here because I've known TED for several years.
TED has always been a great source of inspiration for me.
I first came across TED watching a video of Ken Robinson.
So to talk today, just after Ken Robinson, is a real honor for me.
So Ken Robinson was just saying, during his talk,
that for him, creativity means having new ideas
that bring added value.
Michel Coster who is the Head of entrepreneurship at EM Lyon
has described entrepreneurship as creating richness from imagination.
So upon reflection, we can see entrepreneurship is a form of creativity.
Could you raise your hand if you have ever created a business,
or if you're in the process of creating one?
Oh! Wow, impressive!
But you are not exactly representative of the proportion of people
who have set up a business on a national scale, that is, in France.
In France, the proportion of adults who are in the process of setting up
or who have already set up their own business is 6%.
It's not a lot.
This figure of 6% makes us 56th out of the 59 countries in the study.
Very low.
So why are we so bad at entrepreneurship?
Well, Grenoble School of Management which conducted this research
tried to figure out what was holding each country back,
and the strengths and weaknesses of each one.
And for France, they found something very distinctive,
something very characteristic of France.
And this is an enormous fear of failure.
So where does this fear of failure come from?
Well, it comes for the most part from our education.
Because in our education,
there's something, there's a particular lesson,
a rule that we have been taught, that has been drummed into us so much,
that it has become deep-rooted deep down inside us.
And this rule is that mistakes are not allowed.
Of course, mistakes aren't allowed because if you make a mistake,
it must be that either you haven't understood the topic
or that you have understood it, but you weren't concentrating hard enough.
Either explanation is completely unacceptable, we all agree on this.
Well, actually, I don't entirely agree with that.
What I would like to suggest
is that I first explain to you I came upon this little discovery,
of this characteristic of our French education,
and secondly, I would like to explain the four consequences of this rule.
And you will very quickly see why this rule is actually very harmful.
As Thomas was saying a minute ago,
I had the opportunity to live in Asia for eight years with my family,
that is, my husband and my two daughters.
My daughters were very young when we left,
so they started their school careers in Asia, in international schools.
There they are, above, in Shanghai in their uniform for the British School.
Next in the uniform they wore for school in Hong Kong,
And then on the right, with no uniform, at their school in Tokyo.
In Asia, my daughters were always very enthusiastic about school,
about the learning process, and teaching.
For them, learning was always something to be enjoyed.
In fact, you can see them here working at home
for the second night in a row, on a project about Cambodia
that they had decided to make, to share with their classmates.
Then, in 2010, we were asked to come back to France.
In September 2010, for the first time, my daughters went to a French school.
From that moment on, little by little,
their enthusiasm for school began to dwindle.
They started to complain, they started to be less keen to go to school,
they were even afraid to go to school,
and they even started thinking that two-day weekends are too short.
And then, one day my eldest, who was nine last year
came home from school, collapsed onto the sofa,
and she said to me, "Mum, I'm tired."
"Getting tired at the age of nine, that's too bad," I thought, but she said,
"No Mum, I'm tired of being scared of making a mistake."
As a mother, and I'm sure it would have been the same for any of you,
that upset me, but at the same time, it reminded me
actually, of the rule that had been passed on to me when I was little.
That rule which is so important in French education,
"Mistakes are not allowed."
As I was saying earlier, I see four consequences to this rule
which mean that this rule is really very harmful to our children.
The first of these consequences is intolerance.
If I show you this sign with my hand what number do you see?
Good! Right answer. In France.
But wrong answer in China.
This sign means eight in China.
Here you can see two different styles of handwriting:
on the right is the Anglo-Saxon handwriting
that my daughters learned to read and write with,
on the left, the French handwriting that you all know.
My youngest daughter is called Inès.
When she arrived in France last year, she was in the class CE1,
and she started to write her name with the Anglo-Saxon handwriting,
as it was the only one she knew.
Some of my close family members told her, and her school teacher too,
told her that she was writing her name badly,
that she was wrong.
Her teacher made her write lines of "I" s in the French style
so that she could eventually write her name correctly.
So far, I can accept that.
The problem was when my daughter said to me recently,
"But I didn't use to write my name normally."
It's that word "normally" which I find really unacceptable.
Because we're all agreed that: OK, in France we have decided
on a certain number of conventions, and in France we apply those conventions.
So far, so good.
However, what we must teach our children
is that in the world there are as many conventions as there are cultures,
and that if it's normal in France to write from left to right and horizontally,
in Japan it is completely normal to write from right to left and vertically.
That doesn't mean any one convention should be favored over another.
The second consequence of this rule, "Mistakes are not allowed,"
is that it causes very low self-esteem.
I would like you to just reach into your memory bank,
and in your memory bank try to pick out a memory
of a bad homework you did,
a bad dictation exercise, a bad maths test.
Try to remember what you felt at that moment,
how you felt when you were given back your bad piece of work
when you saw the grade, all the marks in red,
and that you even had to take it home to your parents.
Remind yourself of what you felt at that moment, maybe injustice,
but undoubtedly anger, disappointment,
and in the end, a very bad image of yourself.
My daughter then, as I was saying a minute ago,
Inès, who I told you about, went back to the CE1 class.
She started doing dictation exercises in French
only she had never done them in French because she had always studied in English.
So for her, dictation, French spelling, etc., was all new to her.
Of course, the first few of them went quite catastrophically.
in fact not just the first few, but all the rest, too.
In fact we, as parents, gave her a hard time about her failures,
about her bad grades,
and her school teacher was hard on her, too.
She made her do lines of words, lines of spellings, and corrections.
My daughter was simply convinced
that she was rubbish at dictation exercises in French,
and that it wasn't even worth trying to change things,
she was just rubbish, and that was that.
Then, recently, she talked about it with a friend of ours who told her,
"It's quite strange really,
because before you had very good grades in your English dictation exercises.
So I don't understand why you have this problem now."
Actually, my daughter started to reflect,
and she realized
that yes, actually, she had already been capable of getting good grades,
and she had already been able to work on it.
So having thought about it,
maybe she was capable of doing well after all.
So she set to work.
The next week she started working on her words and on spelling,
she came back with a 16/20 in her French dictation exercise.
And very recently, and this happened a very short while ago,
you can see the date of this work is October, 17,
she came home with her first 20/20 in dictation.
What our friend did was not sorcery, it was not magic.
What our friend did was instead of focusing on our daughter's failures,
she quite simply drew her attention to her successes and her strengths.
That's how, little by little, she changed her perception of herself,
and we succeeded in seeing this result.
The third consequence, in my opinion, of this rule,
"Mistakes are not allowed,"
is a lack of autonomy when faced with a problem.
I'm an educational engineer, an analytical engineer.
In my ten years in the industry,
I have had the opportunity to work on Japanese quality management techniques
and in particular, as you can see here, Jidoka.
Toyota worked on a quality management technique
using a car assembly production line.
In Jidoka, there is an aspect that I like very much,
which is to say that the operators in an assembly line
instead of giving them an inspector at the end of the chain to say yes or no,
the car is acceptable or not,
it's each worker in the chain, in his or her post,
who has the responsibility to inspect himself or herself.
They do the inspection themselves,
if they find a mistake, if they come across a mistake,
they can even stop the chain by pulling on a little thread
to fix their mistakes,
so they don't pass on products to their neighbor which are not conform.
What is the link between the workers at Toyota and children in education?
In fact, your child in education
is in exactly the same position as the production line worker.
Today, what we do is we put an inspector at the end of the line.
We make sure there is always an adult: a schoolteacher, a parent.
It's this adult who checks the work.
In fact when the child works and tries not to make mistakes,
he's not doing it for himself, but to please the adult,
he does it to avoid disappointing the adult,
to avoid being told off by the adult.
I've brought in a photo of an educational tool
that my daughters used in their classes in Tokyo,
which a very simple mathematics tool.
It's a set of little cards with equations on them.
The children pull out an equation, calculate their answer,
and all they have to do to check the answer is turn over the card.
Maybe the child has got it wrong,
maybe they'll see that they've actually made a mistake
so they will re-do that question,
but in any case, the feeling they have at that moment,
maybe a little low self-esteem,
but nothing compared to what they might feel
if it was an adult telling them,
"You've gone wrong here, and it's me who will give you the answer."
I think that is what we must teach our children.
Our children must become independent in this regard.
They must be capable of detecting their mistakes on their own.
We don't want them to become adults who are always relying on somebody else
to know if their work is good or not.
The final consequence is, in my opinion, a lack of perseverance.
When I came back from Asia last year,
I had a plan to open an international school
to share with other children what my daughters had experienced abroad.
For a year, I worked at getting sponsorship,
approval, authorization from the Council, recruiting teachers,
recruiting families, ordering materials, initiating communication-public relations.
I even had three t-shirts made.
I turned my daughters into sandwich-boards,
with the logo of the school on the front,
around which I had printed, "Opening in September 2011."
But in June 2011, the owner of the building I was going to rent
simply announced that he didn't want to let out the building anymore.
So the new school year of 2011 simply fell through.
But from this first failure, I learned lots of lessons,
particularly, with regard to my work ethic, planning objectives,
timetabling, communication.
Now I'm setting out on a new project,
and applying those lessons that I've learned from this first failure.
There's a saying which I like very much by Winston Churchill who said,
"Success is going from failure to failure without losing one's enthusiasm."
That's what we need to teach our children today.
That's what we want for the adults they are to become.
So that they are able to move forward, to make mistakes,
to live with those mistakes, but to carry on going.
"He who does nothing, never puts a foot wrong," is what we always say.
It's true that if we forbid children to make mistakes,
they have no choice but not to start anything new.
What I wanted to say is that the children who we have around us today
are the society of tomorrow.
If we want tomorrow's society to be made up of adults
who want to move forward, who want to start new things,
who won't be afraid of taking risks,
who won't be afraid of failure, and of other people watching,
it's time to change our message.
That's why I propose to you from today onwards,
to enter into a new era.
An era which will end the ban on mistakes,
where we will give to our children the right to make mistakes.
Thank you.
(Applause)