Transcriber: Lucía Prosdocimi Reviewer: Taher Koja
I want to share something personal with you:
I come from a line of eight generations of teachers.
The very last one in that line was my great grandfather.
So, I never actually got to meet any of them in person,
but I've always felt very closely connected to that profession.
And since we're talking about past generations,
I want you to appreciate what life was like 100 years ago or so
when my great grandfather was teaching
and how far we’ve come as a society, how much we’ve changed our concepts of work,
health, technology and knowledge.
I want to give you today a glimpse of a few of
the core principles of evolved education.
Education is the only concept that hasn't evolved in line with
the rest of our society.
So let me start with an example.
I was consulting on an educational game,
which was about the laws of physics and space.
And the professor, who was the astrophysics advisor on the project,
argued that we absolutely could not tell children about electricity
without teaching them about the atom first.
Why? Because that's how it is in textbooks.
Well, is that how it should be in textbooks?
Because we can observe directly electrical phenomena
and then we become naturally curious why they occur and what underlies them.
Isn’t that how humanity accumulated all of its knowledge? And I find that
all formal learning is organized
for some completely unknown to me reason from small to large
and from abstract to specific.
Is that the most intuitive way,
or is that just the way someone chose a few hundred years ago
and completely arbitrarily? Probably...
And we’re just going along with it today
without questioning it or challenging it, even though we know better.
I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the neural basis of learning.
So, I’ve seen firsthand that the brain learns by experience and by analogy.
And the more senses on you the experience engages,
the more robust and long-lasting peace of knowledge is formed.
Abstract definitions are very difficult to remember exactly for this reason,
because the brain can't link them to any actual experience and discards them
as irrelevant and meaningless.
So when I say: “engages the senses”,
I don't mean what teachers made us do in primary school when you're learning
something by heart. Look at yourself in the mirror
and that will make learning easier. No, that doesn't make learning easier.
Engaging the senses means when you're learning what the dog is for
the very first time, for example, to see one, to hear one bark,
to touch it and feel how smooth or hairy it is, what temperature it is.
And then you see, hear and feel many different types of dogs of different
shapes, sizes, breeds, colors, barks,
and you gradually build up your concept of what dogginess is,
and your ability to define what a dog is to somebody who has never seen one.
You see? Obstruction is the mastery level.
It’s the level we reach after we’ve accumulated sufficient observational
knowledge first.
So, the most natural way to learning would be to accumulate observational
experiential learning first and then move on to abstraction.
And today we have so many ways to allow experiential knowledge:
we have electron microscopes,
we have whole simulated worlds within digital games,
we have a AR and VR technology.
I mean, the opportunities are endless and really exciting.
I mean, imagine how far education could go in this direction.
We just need to utilize this opportunities.
OK. Let me ask you a question. Imagine you were raising the next Elon Musk.
What would you teach this child?
Let's make the task easier.
Let's say you already know he has a photographic memory and
a genius for math and engineering.
So, you have a pretty good sense
of the potential that he has to contribute to our society with this
talents of his.
So
how many of you would focus on developing these exceptional talents?
Can I see a show of hands?
OK, thank you. And how many of you would focus on making him just
an average student, just like everybody else? OK, I see about two hands.
I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to hear that's exactly what
the current educational system would do.
In fact, Elon Musk recently revealed that he's on the autism spectrum.
So, in the current educational system,
he would have been labeled as a special needs child
and treated this one rather than as a genius.
So you see how standardized education robs us of potential.
Standardized education was only useful to humanity for
a very brief moment in our history during the industrial revolution.
Back then, workers were literally cogs in the production machine
and had to be identically trained in order to be easily replaced.
And I think we can argue with relative certainty that there will never again
be a moment in our future history when we would want people to be identical
or easily replaced.
Right?
So, I suggest we replace this outdated,
standardized model with a personalized learning plan for each child,
which allows sufficient exploration
so that it can discover its exceptional talents and strengths,
and then the emphasis would be
on developing these exceptional strengths according to interest and ability,
not age.
OK, so we learned that experience is the basis of knowledge,
and we figured out how will race Elon Musk.
Now let’s think how we’re going to race someone even more important: yourself.
Think back to your six year old self.
What would you teach yourself for
the following 12 years that would give you the chance to become
the best version of you?
I’m ready to, but it’s not advanced trigonometry,
but how many of you would teach yourself something that would make you
smarter when you grow up? OK. What about healthier?
After today's talks, I imagine.
OK, lots of hands.
Happier and more successful?
OK. A lot of hands for each of those.
So, we appreciate how important these are. And with age
and with trial and error, mostly, we develop
an understanding of how important these are for our life and our identity.
And we also have unprecedented knowledge of each of these
that we’ve never had before in history, we have enough to teach them.
We know so much about how the brain develops
and how we could stimulate intellectual development.
We know about nutrition and sleep cycles and physiological wellness
and managing stress. We know that emotional maturity is the best predictor
for future happiness and professional success.
So, we know a lot about them and we know how important they are.
We also know that there are teachable. So, why don’t we teach them?
And someone might wonder:
doesn’t the current educational system support
intellectual development, at least?
I mean, that’s what it claims to. Right?
I've seen a lot of IQ and standardized tests in my life,
I used to work at Mensa for a while and I can tell you not
a single IQ test, to the best of my knowledge, relies
on mechanistic memorization.
In fact, people with high IQ tend to be rather bad at memorization
because they’re so much more efficient at focusing on the relevant
and simply discarding the rest.
So, you see this model of mechanistic memorization is just a leftover from
the past like standardized education. It’s a legacy from...
back when the first public schools were monastic,
so they had to rely on memorizing and reciting the Bible back
to the priests in Latin, which was a foreign language to the majority of
the wider public back then.
And that was in the 11th, 12th century in the Dark Ages.
And today, some 900 years later,
we still use this model of mechanistic memorization across virtually all
academic disciplines.
I mean, just think of it:
we have the technology to send tourists to Mars,
yet our education is still in the Dark Ages.
And the truth is memorization doesn’t give us anything in terms of intellectual
development. It's not aligned with how the brain develops or learns.
It's not aligned with how neural networks are formed
or with how knowledge is stored and retrieved.
It would have been so much more useful and efficient if we told children
things like how to form relational connections between different bits of
knowledge, how to analyze facts in order to create new knowledge,
or how to apply the same principles from one discipline to another.
Because, remember, the brain learns by analogy,
and this would be timeless and universal knowledge that would support
axonal growth that would keep the brain young and adaptable.
And, yes, it is the kind of knowledge that is tested by IQ tests.
So, we’ve covered one: that’s how you get smarter,
or your best self does, at least, in the future.
Let's talk about being healthier for a moment.
When it comes to health and physical development,
I really believe that psychology and neuroscience need to be given
a chance to redeem themselves. Because in the 20th century,
psychologists and neuroscientists worked on things like developing
the most addictive junk food formulations or creating a core media presence
for professional, smart, successful women who smoke just to encourage more
and more women to take up smoking.
And don't let me even get started on body image.
So the impact on public health has been devastating in just a few short decades.
And I think it's time we built some resistance into the educational system
because health starts with our personal mindset and responsibility first.
I mean, if you had to drive a car for 6 to 78 years,
how would you maintain it to last?
Because the majority of us maintain our bodies as if we were in a Formula One race
for the first 30-35 years and then we rely on
the mechanics to fix us when they start breaking down.
Except that by that age,
probably some irreparable damage is already done.
And I find that one of the biggest regrets people have about the past is
the way they treated their bodies when they were young.
So instead of hiring psychologists to trick young bodies to crave
the unhealthy. We could hire them to train young minds
to resist such cravings. Because resisting our impulses
and instincts is how we grow. This is our most human characteristic.
And I truly believe that public education is the best route to support such growth
for everybody. OK, so we've covered becoming smarter and becoming healthier.
Let's talk about the happier and more successful
side of things that you also wanted to be.
Psychologists have known for about 50 years that
the roots of both of those is emotional and social competence,
and yet emotional maturity is still really hard earned knowledge.
We pay for it with years invested in
poor relationships with unhappiness
and stress in the workplace.
In fact, I heard someone joke a few days ago
that school should be boring
and unpleasant because that's how it prepares students
for what their workplace will be like.
I mean, I hope it was a joke.
But how about we prepare kids for a completely different type of workplace?
Maybe they will be the ones to create that kind of workplace.
Maybe children will be leaving primary school one day with
the ability to regulate their emotions, to cooperate and to resolve conflict.
Or how about teenagers leaving high school with a growth mindset and
the ability to accept themselves and others?
How about graduates show up to their first workplace knowing how to build positive
and long-lasting relationships and to develop win-win strategies.
I mean, just dream for a second about that, you know,
the workplace of the future. So, my last big proposition for today is
to replace this outdated memorization model with a well-rounded
model of education that supports human growth in all of these three
important areas that we all agreed here are really crucial for our future.
Intellectual development, physical development and health and emotional
and social development.
Because in the future, in order for our society to advance,
we're not going to need everyone to know,
advance trigonometry or to recite Wikipedia back to us, right?
But if we can all benefit from people being more cooperative
and more emotionally stable.
We can all benefit from people being healthier and more productive.
And, given how dynamic jobs in the future are,
we can all benefit from our minds being more flexible
and more open to lifelong learning.
So, I just want to summarize the three...
the three concepts that I introduced to you today and
the three key principles that I believe evolved education should have
so experiential knowledge first and then build
on to abstraction, personalized learning plan with a focus on strengths,
and well-rounded model that supports growth in these three important domains:
intellectual, physical and emotional growth.
If you're interested in finding out more about the remaining principles
and my whole concept of evolved education,
you can read about it in my upcoming book,
but now I would like to encourage you all to think why things are
the way they are and if they no longer serve us our best interests as
a society to challenge them and demand them to change.
And if we ever look back at our past, it should be to build on it,
not to repeat it. And I believe that's true for any aspect of our society,
not just education.
Thank you.
(Applause)