Translator: Carol Wang Reviewer: Zsófia Herczeg
I'd like to talk to you today about a very common large topic -
education, schooling,
from pre-school all the way through university,
all the way to adult education.
We love to talk about education all the time,
but we love to talk about it in relatively negative ways -
I call these negative myths.
Let me tell you a story to give you an example:
My dad, who’s 89 -
By the way, when my family got together just before I was going to do this
and he kept hearing all this talk about the TED Talk,
he finally looked up at me and said,
"Who the hell is Ted, and why do you have to talk to him?"
(Laughter)
So my dad can come right here, right now
and recite several great poems from start to finish -
Robert Frost, you name it.
I'm wondering how many of you can do that.
My son, who's 19, freshman at Penn State,
he couldn't do that if his life depended on it.
And then we stop and we go, "Yes, schooling has gotten worse.
The good old days, that's what we want."
There's a famous, famous TED Talk, maybe the most famous, by Sir Somebody,
who tries to argue that education kills creativity.
It kills intelligence.
It's letting the world down.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
It's not right.
We like to have these negative myths
because education has become so powerful in our lives.
It's hard to deal with.
It's a major game that we all have to play.
I've just finished a book called The Schooled Society
where I try to imagine -
and I'm going to invite you to do the same thing today -
What happens to the world when it becomes educated?
What's happening is what we can call an education revolution.
All over the world, people are getting more and more educated.
People who did not have access to schools and universities now do.
The darker the color of the country behind me,
the more educated the entire population is.
This has been a dramatic effect in just about a hundred years.
Your grandparents or if you're young, your grandparents' parents
lived in a world where the average person in the world was illiterate.
That's changed in just 50 years.
It's not only basic education.
Now one out of five people around the world who are youth
are in some kind of higher education.
What's this done to the world?
I put together a team of social scientists,
cognitive scientists, neuroscientists,
and we started off with very simple but demanding questions.
I think the best science is done on the big questions.
And we asked,
"What does education actually do to people?
And when we have a lot of people with education,
what does it do to our world?"
And we used all kinds of methods.
We worked - not with babies, that's just a cute picture -
we worked with guys with the sneakers on there.
And we had them do math problems and reading problems,
and other people have been doing this kind of work, and it's amazing.
Teaching somebody to read,
teaching somebody just a little bit about numbers,
having them go to school,
of course, makes them literate,
of course, gives them some knowledge,
but it changes neurological structures.
It changes cognitive skills in ways we didn't even know before.
And it doesn't just do it once, in the early years,
it keeps doing it all the way through.
Let me give you an example of a fun part of this research.
Research is hell, right?
Don't show this to my funder.
Now, I show this because it's at the top of the world.
It's in the Andes in Peru.
And we went there because it's very hard to find people now in the world
who've had no education.
But you can find certain places in the world
where you can find people that have had a little bit of education,
have had no education,
and others who have had a little bit more.
And we took our team there, and we tested people.
And we found
that even small amounts of education
helped people think in very different ways.
They tend to think more abstractly.
They tend to be able to marshal their cognitive enhanced skills
to solve new problems.
They can count.
Not only can they count, they have a sense of a number.
We're so educated we don't realize how strong of effect that is.
It's a major effect.
This is those people's kids.
The education revolution is caught up here.
This is the first generation of Quechua kids
who will go all the way through school.
When I walked in, they ran up to their teacher and said,
"Father Christmas's walked into our classroom."
(Laughter)
You can imagine what my graduate students said about that for the next week.
We also have gone to Africa.
We went to Ghana, north of Accra.
Same kinds of folks.
But here we asked,
What's the effect of all this cognitive enhancement?
And we focused on what people understood about the tragic HIV.
And we looked at people without education and people with education.
We were interviewing a man who had no education.
He was illiterate.
And he passed around this kind of material all the time.
The West has spent billions and billions of dollars
on getting the simple facts out.
And so we asked him, as we did everybody, about some causes of HIV.
And we said, "Can you get HIV from a blood transfusion?"
His face lit up and he said, "Yes, but not if you wear a condom."
(Laughter)
It's funny and tragic.
This man does not have the skills
to put together a working theory of that disease.
Education, basic education, has saved millions of lives
all around the world.
We need to start to understand this both scientifically and politically.
Education is the major social vaccine against all kinds of diseases:
rising childhood obesity worldwide,
the smoking epidemic in Asia,
the high birth rates in the southern part of the world,
which are still very large and very problematic,
keeping children's lives.
The number one factor is "if the mothers had some education."
At the same time, this is basic education.
So you may want to say,
"Well, what happens when people get more education?"
Let me finish the story about my father and my son.
My son, I told you, could not recite a great poem, right?
But my son, ever since he was a little kid in school,
has been invited to be a poet.
He's written poems -
they weren't very good but he's written them -
and he's analyzed poems,
and he's been asked to rewrite great poems.
My father would never, ever think of that.
This is a different kind of education that we're doing -
we invite kids to be mathematicians, we invite them to be scientists.
This is happening all over the world.
This empowers people - big time.
Not only does it give them cognitive skills,
but it empowers them to think - to dare to think if you'd like.
What does that do to the world?
There's a lot of interesting impact.
Let me share a few.
So when we have enhanced skills and enhanced empowerment,
what happens?
One of the biggest things, I think, for a Fulbright audience
is it changes world politics:
the Arab Spring, the Ukraine.
What's happening there?
Educated people are leading the way to change.
They have the skills, but more importantly,
they have the willingness to dare to think
about what a nation would look like if it were changed -
ironically, and it's a nice irony.
The totalitarian governments around the world
in the last 30 or 40 years
have bought two things from the West:
guns and armaments, unfortunately, and they bought education.
But they bought education for only half of the reason.
They bought education
because they thought they were going to make a more skilled society.
But like a Trojan Horse,
what they also bought was an empowered population.
At the root of all of these conflicts around the world
is the education revolution.
It has made politics very liquid.
We have some discussions about liquid democracy.
It also changes religion.
A lot of people thought, as more people became educated,
religion was going to go away.
No. The United States is one of the most schooled societies in the world,
and it's also one of the most religious societies in the world.
But education changes religion.
It changes from a tyrannical God to, well, Morgan Freeman.
If you don't like Morgan Freeman as God, you can pop in your own.
(Laughter)
But also, it turbocharges religious movements.
Educational folks bring organizational skills
that also creates a world where we respect a lot of religions,
and that gives the place for lots of religions to grow.
Let me give you one other myth,
and this is about my grandfather's good example.
So I was in graduate school at Hopkins,
and I went to see my grandfather,
my late grandfather, who was then in his 80s,
and he said to me, "Dave, I want to build a stone wall."
My grandfather only had about six years of education,
and he became a very successful man.
And I said, "Okay. I'll go out and help you."
We go out.
And within about two minutes, it becomes very apparent
I don't know anything about building the stone wall.
And my grandfather had this great cynical laugh.
And he laughs, and he looks up at me,
and he says, "Dave, how much education have you had?"
(Laughter)
I put my head down, did a little math,
"Well papa, about 20 years."
And he looks up and then he says the statement
that stayed with me my entire life since then.
He says, "But what can you do with all that education?"
Right?
We love to think about, "Who's going to be the carpenters?"
Or, "Are the PhDs going to be the angry taxicab drivers?"
That was the image back then.
But my grandfather, bless his heart, was wrong.
What happened instead was the world changed with me,
the world changed because of me and all the other mes.
The economy changes.
We often like to think that economies change
because of technology or supply of capital.
But they also change by the skills
and the education level of the workers that are available.
Firms change the way in which they make profit.
All kinds of things happen
because there are educated people in the world.
We keep predicting over and over again
that there's going to be an over education crisis,
that the world is going to fall apart.
It doesn't.
That doesn't mean that there's no pain.
That doesn't mean there aren't winners and losers.
But it shows us how dramatic a transforming force education is.
Okay. So what's our future and how to think about it?
I think it's very important that we start to put these negative myths aside.
We like them so much because education is so powerful,
and it's so hard for us to deal with.
We have to deal with it.
We have to educate our kids.
That's really the only way we can invest in our kids.
So we use these negative myths as some relief,
but what they do
is they obscure what's really going on -
not only for us, but for policymakers.
And this is really bad.
We need to start to understand what education actually does,
how it's changed the world.
By and large, I think it's changed the world in very positive ways.
But we need to harness that going forward.
All of the kind of TED Talks that you can imagine,
all the subjects, all the audience,
is predicated on an educated world.
That's where we have to start.
So I hope we can continue to dare to think about education going into the future.
And the next time you hear an overeducation story
or education has gotten dumbed down,
maybe you'll think of me.
Maybe, you'll say, "No, no, no, no.
Let's think about it in a different way."
Thank you.
(Applause)