A Future For Us All - Sir Ken Robinson | Enhanced Version

thank you hello it's a great privilege to be part of this Global conversation and a considerable honor all over the world people are trying to figure out how to come to terms of the pandemic and what comes next like everybody else we're in lockdown in our case in London uh trying to persuade ourselves that we're going to get around to all those things that time privacy didn't allow us to get around to and do something productive and worthwhile and of course what we're really doing most of the time is contributing to the stock price of

Netflix but even so we are trying to look ahead as everybody is to a time when we might get back to normal the question really is what type of normal do we want to get back to and is it the normal that we've left behind us I think it shouldn't be and I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that there are all kinds of reasons for saying this and I want to talk a little bit about education this has been a huge shift for families for children and for educators all around the world it's the

first time in literary hunts of years that the whole education systems have just been turned off effectively the the treadmill has stopped and children have been at home were their parents with their relatives whatever the situation is trying to come to terms with how to carry on learning in this new situation well I think there are all kinds of lessons that we should learn from this as we look ahead to getting back to normal but let me just say a word about the pandemic because this is I think very relevant to the bigger issues that

we we're going to face you know whatever else we might say about the pandemic I think we have to recognize that this is largely of our own making what I mean by that is that Humanity if I can speak of as collectively has created all kinds of conditions which are frankly hostile to our best interests you know I've long felt that we're facing two major climate crises there is a climate crisis which is enveloping all of us and it was there before this pandemic hit is the pandemic frankly is part of it and it's still

there waiting to be dealt with but there's also been a long-term crisis in our ways of life in the lack of fulfillment many people feel and the tensions the stresses the anxieties and all of this I think is related to our neglect of our relationship with the natural world with nature with the other creatures we share this planet with and with the ecosystems that we depend upon now look there's a connection here in the way we've come to think about education let me put it this way most Mass systems of Education came into being you

know in the 18th century and they're mostly based on the process of industrialism now there's an interesting parallel here which is that the Industrial Revolution changed everything of course in the way that human beings conduct Our Lives you know we often talk about the need to save the planet I mean I don't know if you I often talk about it anyway but many people do people say you know we have to solve the climate crisis and save the planet you know honestly I feel very relaxed about this I think the planet's going to be fine

we may not make it but the planet will be great the Earth has been around as far as we can tell for four and a half billion years human beings like us have been around for about 200 000 years now I know that's a hard figure to visualize but one way of thinking about it is this that if you were to think of the whole history of the earth as one year a human being showed up at less than a minute to midnight on the 31st of December now the dinosaurs lasted remote 30 million years

and we've managed in the space of just a few hundred to create circumstances which are now inimical very often to our own flourishing and I think I know why it is a lot of people do know why it is but let me just say why I think it's important to see the parallels with education how we have created our human communities the Industrial Revolution brought about massive changes in manufacturing in technology and created the modern world that we now live in it as part of that the Industrial Revolution ran through agriculture and it did that

in three ways one was mechanization so for the first time it was possible to plow huge tracts of lands with mechanical diggers and Harrows and plows and create massive monocultures you know bananas as far as I could see I mean not in England as it turns out but you know but cabbages as far as you could see great monocultures so there was a great hit on diversity at that point secondly there was a big emphasis on fertilizers chemical fertilizers and the reason is that in industrial farming processes the emphasis is on increasing output you know

more of everything bigger everything and fertilizers managed to achieve that that with fantastic success by the way the result of that is that we have huge surpluses very often unevenly distributed it's one of the great ironies of life on Earth that we have huge mountains of food that we're throwing away while Hull tracks the population are living in in poverty and starving but that's an issue also that we don't want to get back to normal about I'm sure but there's a third element to this which was having created these huge monocultures the plants that were

there often lack the natural protection that comes from diversity in natural systems and so it was important or necessary anyway to protect them with chemical pesticides and the result of that was the devastation of insect life among others and all the all the life forms depend up depend upon it in the food chain you know birds and so on small animals it gave rise to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring now the thing is all this has been from one point of vast success but it's also been a catastrophic failure because these systems are simply not sustainable

and let me tell you one reason why that's true industrial farming has been focused primarily on output on yield you know more bigger better and the focus if you look at crops has been on the plant now that may seem obvious in a way but the result of it has been that soils have been eroded and degraded all around the planet you know we all depend on this very thin smear of soil that only covers part of the earth for everything that grows and those have been pretty badly degraded you'll be seeing being washed away

with polluted water cycles oceans well you know the story um the thing is that there are alternatives to these Industrial Systems they're variously called organic and sustainable farming but there's a big difference in these systems there's an emphasis on diversity on crops being grown in close proximity so they create their own natural protectedness they create conditions were insects and the wildlife depends upon them flourishes they have natural hedgerows and so on natural crop rotation Cycles but the big difference is that in sustainable versions of farming the emphasis is not on the plant it's on the

soil sustainable Farmers know we have to get the soil right and if we get the soil right through natural processes of of cultivation then life will flourish indefinitely and this is not the case with the chemicals which are being licensed the soils which are killing all of the nutrients on which life ultimately depends so we've had great short-term success with these Industrial Systems but they've also led to a catastrophic price and we see that in the extent and the spread of the climate crisis currently now the reason I'm saying all of this is that we

have to make a settlement with the Earth and we'll only make that settlement if we think differently about our relationship with it and not only with plants but also with the animals that we've come to depend upon we're pretty much eradicated huge numbers of species in our dependence now on diets which are primarily based on four animals known as sheep and cows and pigs and and poultry now these actually outnumbers by huge amounts all of these things creep up on us naturally don't they they they're unnoticed it's that boiling frog syndrome where we don't realize

that these systems have overtaken us but the consequence is that we have created systems which are unnatural and are short-term and not sustainable incidentally the consequence as well is that we've created uh sources of of processed foods which are wreaking havoc on our own health now you know a lot of this but what I'm really saying is that we've replicated these same mistakes in our social systems and particularly in education our education systems are based on output on yield we put our children through these systems year after year age group by age group and the

emphasis has been on output on test data on scores on graduation rates on everybody going to college and getting a degree and this is as pointless and unsustainable in its own way as agricultural systems are based on Industrial principles human beings are like the rest of life on Earth we flourish under certain conditions and we Wither in other in other circumstances the other parallel is this that when I say that agricultural systems the sustainable systems are based on cultivating the soil this is also true of our communities in our cities in our neighborhoods in our

schools that people flourish when the culture is right great teachers great principles great school systems understand that you don't make a successful education system based on driving people through pointless systems of tests and output and data-driven hurdles that the way you get people to flourish is by recognizing their individuality the great diversity and depth of people's talents for our children from every age are full of boundless possibilities and you do that by creating a mixed culture in schools one that values The Sciences the Arts technology that values individual Talent the driving force of individual passions

in other words successful schools don't focus on output they focus on culture in the same way the sustainable Farmers focus on the soil if you get the culture right everything else takes care of itself and that really means a culture of compassion of collaboration of empathy and of the vowing of individuals and the necessity of our social lives thriving through our joint participation by the way if we found out anything in this pandemic it's how fundamentally we rely on these sorts of processes when the chips are down the great suffering that's been Afflicted many people

during the pandemic is isolation we've had to isite ourselves it's been vitally important to stop the spread of the virus but we all know what terrible prices people have been paying in terms of their mental health by being isolated and how are they dealing with it by turning to creative work to painting to music to collaboration through joining together through joint projects like this process today unite we're here all today because we need to connect we need to see each other in our own settings and we need to see each other through the phase and

lens of our common Humanity so I believe profoundly that getting back to normal won't work we've pressed pause on many of our social systems it's time to press reset on them as well there is a chance to do that you know lots of people have been spending time at home learning with their children children with their peer groups I believe the most successful that I know we've spoken to a lot of parents the most successful examples are where parents haven't felt they need to replicate school there's a big difference between learning education and school learning

is the most natural process in the world we love to learn where deeply curious creatures highly creative uh deeply compassionate and highly collaborative people love to learn from the very early age not everybody gets on with education a lot of people don't like school and I say they're not in criticism of teachers I spent my life working with teachers and I have the deepest respect for teachers I am a teacher frankly so I'm not here to criticize them in any way whatever but to support them the problem is not teachers it's not kids it's not

families it's how we do school we've come to think of schools as particular types of places that resemble in many key respects the the algorithms and principles of standardization and of factory life and there isn't any reason for schools to be that way we can reinvent school we can Revitalize learning and we can reignite the creative compassion of our communities if we think differently when we try to go back to normal well look how do we do all of that well I think there's a big parallel here between what needs to happen in education and

in the environmental movement it's based on the same principles and it's it's achieving or aiming to achieve the same ends we need to work together we need to keep the collaboration that's being witnessed today through unite and we need to see that real social change comes from the ground up through people cultivating the Grassroots you know it's a mistake to believe that we just need to wait till some enlightened politician comes along and shows us the way you know good luck and a following that happens from time to time or often not frankly it doesn't

the real power is with the people and connecting people as we're doing today through United is the key to this getting people to share ideas to collaborate to work together to see future possibilities and to bring them about through joint projects and through the joint support that comes from from compassionate collaboration you know we are deeply creative creatures although we are like the rest of life on Earth there's one key respect in which we are different the difference is that we have boundless capacities for Innovation imagination and creativity you know we don't live in the

world as other creatures do we should live in the world as they do more than we have done but there is this difference that we've always created ideas about the world we have languages through which we express our feelings you communicate with each other about the world we create works of art scientific theories philosophies we create in a word cultures and our cultures Define Us in more ways often than we can really see openly or suspect the world is full of diverse cultures diverse ways of seeing that is true but we also have common interests

we have a common set of of Fortunes to confront where our single species with other species on one planet and as we get back to normal we need to reimagine what that could look like and to learn the lessons of this lockdown to learn the lessons of the pandemic to see beyond them and to create a new sort of world a new kind of normal there is an opportunity day it takes bravery and Imagination and we have plenty of that in store thank you