>>Ken Robinson: Adults think they're not creative, but children
do.
That's true, isn't it?
Broadly speaking?
In fact, I want to give you a quick test, if I could.
Well, I'm going to, so....
How creative do you think you are personally?
I mean, if you would, think of that on a ten-point scale, with ten at the top.
Okay?
It's important to know that ten is the top.
And where would you put yourself on a scale of one to ten?
While you're thinking about that, have a think about this.
How intelligent are you on a scale of one to ten, with ten at the top?
Now I'm going to ask you to put your hands up.
You don't have to.
You can say, "I'm sorry.
I did not come to Zeitgeist for this type of thing.
I'm a grownup.
You may put your hand up."
But assuming you're willing to, let me just give you an assurance that if you do put your
hands up, there are no social consequences.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: For me.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Can be social death for you,
for all I know.
What I'm going to do, I'm not going to drag anybody you up here and ask you to demonstrate
anything.
It's purely a straw poll for the purpose of conversation.
So with that caveat in mind, would you put your hands up if you gave yourselves ten for
creativity?
Was that a vote or a scratch?
All right.
One.
Nine?
Eight?
Seven?
Six?
Five?
Four?
Three?
Two?
Okay.
Where was the average, do you think, of that?
Yeah, I'd say.
How about intelligence?
Now, I know a certain social modesty comes into play here, but this is Zeitgeist, so
get over it, you know.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: How about ten?
Any tens for intelligence?
No?
Nine?
Thank you.
Actually, you can -- we're just wasting your time, honestly.
You can go now.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Eight?
Seven?
Six?
Five?
Four?
Three?
-- it's getting tense, isn't it?
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Two?
Any twos?
Okay.
I never do one, by the way.
If you got one, you're not following this anyway, are you?
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Where was the top of that
curve, would you think?
In intelligence?
About seven again?
Okay.
Eight.
Okay.
All right.
One last question.
Last time you have to put your hands up.
Put your hands up if you gave yourself different marks for intelligence or creativity.
Okay.
The reason I ask you this is, I think you're all wrong, by the way.
Obviously, apart from the two nines, obviously.
Never argue with a nine is my view.
But the reason I say it is that I think most people operate on a very limited conception
of creativity and of intelligence.
So my question is, what were you thinking of when you gave yourself the mark?
When you decided you could give a number for creativity, what was in your mind?
When you give yourself a number for intelligence, what was it you were thinking of?
You see, my experience of it is that people operate on all kinds of misconceptions about
creativity.
And I think it's why that last conversation was so important.
They think it's all about the arts.
And while the arts are terribly important, it's not just about the arts.
They think it's about special people.
It's really not.
I mean, if you're a human being, it comes with a kit.
You are born with tremendous creative capacities.
The trouble is that creativity's a bit like literacy.
You may have an aptitude for it but never developed the abilities that are required
to exercise it.
That, to me, is a big fault of our education system.
And the third misconception is, there's nothing you can do about it.
You're creative or not, and that's the end of it.
And I believe there's a great deal you can do to make yourselves more creative.
The whole theme of this conference is about linking these two worlds, or this session,
the inner world and the outer world.
And I believe that our education systems currently are failing to keep pace with the developments
in the external world, which are moving with a tremendous speed and depth of change.
And they have never been good at connecting with our inner world.
Very many people go through their education having no real sense of what lies deep within
them.
I'm convinced of this, that we're all born with tremendous natural talents.
But very few of us actually get to tap into them, to tap into the -- the depth of them.
Just on this external world, by the way.
I mean, I published a book ten years ago called "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative."
And I was asked if I would like to make any changes to it last year.
We were bringing out a new edition.
The publisher was going to do a tenth-anniversary edition.
"Would you like to make any changes?"
Well, it seemed to me, improbable, frankly, that it could be improved in any way.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: It was, after all, a masterwork
that I had written myself.
But I decided under some pressure I'd make a few changes.
I had in mind a weekend with a spell check and a bottle of burgundy.
That was the plan.
I actually rewrote the entire book from start to finish.
I don't think there's a single word unchanged in the entire book.
And the reason is that so much has happened in ten years, just in ten years.
I mean, Google is responsible for quite a bit of this, I think.
But ten years ago, there were no smartphones, were there?
There were no iPads?
No iPods?
I know that's not a Google idea.
There were no social media.
I mean, Alison talked about interviewing Zuckerberg here when it was just a faint idea in his
head.
There was no Twitter ten years ago, was there?
I mean, ten years ago, people didn't tweet, did they?
I mean, if they did, they were discouraged, weren't they?
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: People -- people would say,
"What was that?
And do you mind not doing that again?
We're trying to eat in here.
If you have to tweet, go outside and do it."
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: But now, you know, if you're
not tweeting on a regular basis, if you haven't tweeted this morning, you feel socially inadequate.
This is just in the space of ten years.
So we know the external world is changing with a fantastic rate and profundity.
So that's one of the reasons I wanted to rewrite the book.
By the way, I rewrote the book on Microsoft Word.
Do you use Microsoft Word?
Yes.
Well, I like it.
But you may have noticed Microsoft Word has opinions.
Doesn't it?
It tends to give you little squiggles if it -- there are two sorts of squiggles, those
that point out you have made a mistake.
I'm fine with that.
The squiggles I don't like are where they disapprove of what you've just said.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Like the passive voice.
They don't like it.
And why?
What has this got to do with Bill Gates?
We don't know.
If you use the passive voice, they give you squiggles and suggest helpful alternatives.
I wrote this sentence, "The foundations of the modern intelligence test were laid in
the late 19th century by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin."
That's true, by the way.
It's a beautiful sentence, isn't it?
I'll read it again for you.
It's that good, I'm feeling.
[ Laughter.
] >>Ken Robinson: "The foundations of the modern
intelligence test were laid in the late 19th century by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of
Charles Darwin."
Microsoft Word didn't like that.
It has the passive voice in it, "were laid."
So it helpfully suggested this alternative in the active voice.
"In the late 19th century, Sir Francis Galton laid a cousin of Charles Darwin" --
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: -- "the foundation of the
modern intelligence test."
I had no idea.
But I rewrote the book using Microsoft Word for lack of an alternative, because so much
has changed in the world around us.
The rate of technological change has transformed everything.
And it will continue to.
People here are much more expert at this than I am, but you will know, I'm sure, that ten
years from now, the book will have to be rewritten again.
Many of the things that we think are so smart and groovy just now will be discarded within
ten years.
I mean, I think if you show your grandchildren your iPad, they will smile at you with a kind
of patronizing look of how quaint it was that you thought this was so exciting.
You know, that you actually have to hold something in your hand, like an actual object.
Because, I mean, the work we've been seeing on robotics, you can multiply that with what's
happening in cloud computing and everything else, ten years from now, these things we
think are so advanced will be primitive, in all likelihood.
The other fact is population growth, that's, I think, about to present us with challenges
people haven't faced up to.
There was a very good program on the BBC -- there are many good programs on the BBC.
This happens to be one of them -- last year.
It was about how many people can live on Earth.
And it was called.
"How Many People Can Live on Earth."
The BBC have a great gift for titles, I find.
And they came to this view.
You know, there are now seven and a half billion people on the planet, seven and a half -- heading
for seven and a half billion, which is more people than the whole history of humanity,
by a long way.
And we don't know if the Earth can handle it.
So they said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate as the average person
in Rwanda -- you know, consume food, fuel, water, air, space.
They said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate as the average person in
Rwanda, that the Earth could sustain a maximum population of 15 billion people.
So we're halfway to that.
The trouble, of course, is, we don't all consume at the same rate as they do in Rwanda.
They said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate as the average person in
North America -- that's us -- the Earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.2 billion.
So we're five times past that currently.
So if everybody on Earth wants to live as we do in North America -- and, by the way,
they do -- we would need four more planets to make this feasible, which we don't have.
And there's a paradox here.
All of these challenges are created by human ingenuity and human innovation and creativity.
It's not the lemurs that are causing the problem.
It's us.
And at the very point where we need to get even more innovative, more inventive, more
ingenious to deal with the challenges that we have created, our education systems are
stifling the very capacities on which we're about to depend.
And this is -- I just want to get to this.
There are -- We really live in two worlds, don't we?
There's a world, as a guy called (saying name) once, I thought, very nicely put it.
There's a world that exists only -- exists whether or not you exist, a world that came
into being before you did.
It was here before you got here.
It will be here well long after you are gone.
It's the world of other people, events, other circumstances.
Our education systems are pretty obsessed with that world.
But there's another world that exists only because you exist.
It's the world of your own private consciousness, the world that came into being when you did,
the world, as somebody once said, where there's only one set of footprints, a world of your
private passions, your motivations, your aspirations, your hopes, and your talents.
And I believe the future of the world around us, so far as we're concerned, depends on
understanding much more about the world within us.
And the more standardized our education systems become, the less amenable they are to allowing
us to make those explorations.
You have no idea what your talents are, I'm sure.
How many of you have got children?
Can I ask you?
How about two children?
Okay.
And the rest of you have seen such children?
[ Laughter.
] >>Ken Robinson: Small people wandering about.
I will make you a bet.
If you've got two or more children or you have two or more siblings or friends -- I
hope that's now included everybody.
But if you've got two or more children, I'll make you a bet.
My bet is that they are completely different from each other.
Aren't they?
Completely different from each other.
No matter how alike they may be in some respects, you would never confuse them, would you?
Like, "Which one are you?
Remind me."
[ Laughter.
] >>Ken Robinson: I am constantly being mixed
up here.
And the reason I point out is this, that our education systems are based on three principles
which are the opposite of how human life flourishes.
Apart from that, they're great.
The first one is conformity.
Our systems are becoming more and more standardized; whereas the great pulse of human life is diversity.
We are here in all of our varied differences, we are centers of unique talents and possibilities,
each of us in every child.
The second is our education systems are based on compliance, more and more.
Whereas the energy of human life is creativity and innovation.
It's why in the United States -- kids come from college and they cannot innovate anymore.
It's kind of been educated out of them.
But the third is this: Human life is organic.
We create our alliance, our education systems are based on a principal of linearity.
I would bet very few of are you of living the life now that you anticipated you would
be living when you left school; is that correct?
I mean, we submit to a fiction here that there comes a point in your life where you have
to write your resume.
And we set it all out in some linear narrative, you put headings in, certain things in bold
you pick them out to try to make your life look as if it's all run along some very well-planned
strategy here to take you from your childhood to your present position of eminence.
But of course it's not at all like that.
You do that because the last thing that you want to do is to convey in your resume the
actual chaos that you've been living through.
[ Laughter ] >> Ken Robinson: And the actual decisions
you've made all along the way.
Now we are paying a very heavy price for this.
This failure to hold people to plumb the world within them.
Currently, in the United States, almost 10% of 14 to 19-year-olds are on drugs to treat
attention deficit disorder, ADHD.
The people prescribing them will tell you, in some cases these are genuine instances;
in many cases it's based on the quickest and most subjective of assessments.
Our kids are being drugged, often to get them through this education system in a way that's
unprecedented.
Nearly five and a half million children in America are on these drugs to get them to
focus on things which are presumably otherwise rather tedious for them.
And a minimum of a third of our kids who head to high school in America do not graduate.
It's as high as 60% in some parts of the country.
I was in Houston, Texas recently.
I was told by the superintendent, 60% of kids don't graduate high school.
That's a catastrophic.
In America, where we are now, where I live, one in 31 Americans is in the correctional
system.
I don't mean to say if you drop out of school you end up in jail, of course not.
But what is true is very many people in the correctional system did not complete their
education.
Many states are spending more money on the correctional system now while reducing it
on the educational system.
And the other fact you might just dwell on is that a couple of years ago, sales in America
of anti-psychotic drugs that were previously only given to people who were in mental care,
sales of that category exceeded sales of anti-cholesterol drugs and drugs for acid reflux.
It's now a $14 billion industry.
If you wanted evidence that the world within us is in bad shape, on a grand scale, I think
they are just some of the examples that I could give.
So what I'm saying is if we're serious about exploring the world around us, we have to
explore the world within us.
We do that, as Van Jones I thought said beautifully earlier, by looking again at the broad structure
of education, we need to restore arts programs, sports programs, we need to re-professionalize
the teaching profession.
Above all, we have to personalize education to every child in the system.
We have the technology now for the first time in human history to do it.
The last thing that I just want to say is there was -- there was a great thing on the
Onion, do you know that website?
Yeah, about -- we have to save the planet.
I'm optimistic that we have the powers within us to do it.
But -- but we have to attend to them.
The Onion's were saying don't worry about saving the planet.
The planet will be fine.
As we saw at the very beginning of that fantastic image of the cosmos of the Milky Way, we are
a very small part of all of this.
The earth has been around for four and a half billion years.
Human beings like us, showed up -- I don't mean like neanderthal creatures.
I mean like brutal people like us, with attractive profiles and a sense of irony.
[ Laughter ] >> Ken Robinson: We showed up probably less
than 100,000 years ago.
If you think of the whole arc of the life span of the earth as one year, human beings
showed up less than a minute to midnight on the 31st of December.
So the Onion said, look, don't worry about the planet, the planet is going to be fine.
It's gone on for four and a half billion years left yet.
We may not make it, you know.
The planet make conclude, you know, we tried humanity, not so good.
[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Not the idea we thought it
would be.
We're going back to bacteria.
They had a fantastic run.
[ Laughter ] >> Ken Robinson: Don't worry about the planet.
Worry about us.
And what we can do to live harmoniously with it, as we saw from those wonderful photographs
of the arctic.
I mean that picture of the slaughter of the dolphins I think will live with all of us.
We are despoiling the very planet on which we depend.
We won't, I think, make a better job of it until we understand the depth of our own talent
and spiritual resources within us.
When I ask you how intelligent you are, that's the wrong question.
The real question is how are you intelligent.
The question is not how creative are you; it's how are you creative.
If we can flip our education to get to a better sense of human capacity, then I think we'll
have a better chance of understanding and making sense of the world within us and the
world around us.
By the way, there is a wonderful quote from H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer in
the early '20s, he said, "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe."
Now, it may or may not be the case, but what we do know is that -- that the great bridge
between the two worlds that we live in is education.
And I think that we have to rebuild it so we can build a bridge to the future, thank
you very much.
[ Applause ]