Sir Ken Robinson - RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms VOST FRENCH

[Music] every country on Earth at the moment is reforming public education there are two reasons for it the first of them is economic people are trying to work out how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st Century how do we do that given that we can't anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week as the recent turmoil is demonstrating how do we do that the second though is cultural every country on the earth on Earth is trying to figure out how do we

educate our children so they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization how do we square that Circle the problem is they're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past and on the way they're alienating millions of kids who don't see any purpose in going to school when we went to school we were kept there with a story which is if you worked hard and did well and got a college degree you

would have a job our kids don't believe that and they're right not to by the way you're better having a degree than not but it's not a guarantee anymore and particularly not if the root to it marginalizes most of the things that you think are important about yourself some people say we have to raise standards if this is a breakthrough you know like really yes we should why would you lower them you know I haven't come across an argument that persuades me of lowering them but raising them of course we should raise them the problem

is that the current system of Education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age it was conceived in the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the Industrial Revolution before the middle of the 19th century there were no systems of public education not really I mean you could get educated by Jesuits you know if if you had the money but public education paid for from taxation compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery that was a revolutionary idea and many people objected to it they said it's not

possible for many Street kids workingclass children to benefit from public education they're incapable of learning to read and write and why are we spending time on this so there's also built into it a whole series of um assumptions about social structure and capacity it was driven by an economic imperative of the time but running right through it um was an intellectual model of the mind which was essentially the enlightenment view of intelligence that real intelligence consists in the capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and a knowledge of the classics originally what what we

come to think of as academic ability and this is deep in the gene pool of public education that there are really two types of people academic and non-academic smart people and non-smart people and the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not because they've been judged against this particular view of the mind so we have twin pillars economic and intellectual and my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people's lives it's been great for some there have been people who benefited wonderfully from it but most people have not instead

they suffer this this is the modern epidemic and it's as misplaced and it's as fictitious this is the plague of ADHD now this is a map of the instance of ADHD in America or prescription for ADHD don't mistake me here I don't mean to say there is no such thing as attention deficit disorder I'm not qualified to say if there is such a thing I know that a great majority of psychologists and CH and pediatrician think there is such a thing but it's still a matter of dis of debate what I do know for a

fact is it's not an epidemic these kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out and on the same Whimsical basis and for the same reason medical fashion our children are living in the most intensely stimulated ating period in the history of the earth they're being besieged with information and calls to their attention from every platform computers from iPhones from advertising Holdings from hundreds of television channels and were penalizing them now for getting distracted from what you know boring stuff at school for the most part it seems to me not a

coincidence totally that the incidence of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing now these kids are being given rellin and adol and all manner of things often quite dangerous drugs to get them focused and calm them down but according to this attention deficit disorder increases as you travel east across the country people start losing interest in Oklahoma they can hardly think straight in Arkansas and by the time they get to Washington they've lost it completely and there are separate reasons for that I believe it's a fictitious epidemic if you think of

it the Arts and I don't say this exclusively the Arts I think it's also true of Science and of maths but let me I say about the art particularly because they are the victims of this mentality currently particularly the Arts especially address the idea of aesthetic experience an aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their Peak when you're present in the current moment when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing that you're experiencing when you are fully Alive an anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to

what's happening and a lot of these drugs are that we're getting our children through education by anzing them and I think we should be doing the exact opposite we shouldn't be putting them asleep we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves but the model we have is this it's I believe we have a system of Education that is modeled on the interests of industrialism and in the image of it I'll give you a couple of examples uh schools are still pretty much organized on Factory lines ringing Bells separate facilities uh

specialized into separate subjects um we still educate children by batches you know we put them through the system by age group why do we do that you know why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are you know it's like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacturer I mean well I know kids who are much better than other kids at the same age in different disciplines you know or at different times of the day or better in smaller groups than in large

groups or sometimes they want to be on their own if you're interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality these are it's essentially about Conformity and increasingly it's about that as you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricular and it's about standardization I believe we've got to go in the exact opposite direction that's what I mean about changing the Paradigm there is a great study done recently of Divergent thinking it's published a couple of years ago Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity I Define creativity

is the the process of having original ideas that have value Divergent thinking isn't a synonym but it's a an essential capacity for creativity it's the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question lots of possible ways of interpreting a question uh to think what Edward deona would probably call laterally uh to think not just in linear or convergent ways uh to see multiple answers not one so I mean there are test for this I mean one kind of cod example would be people might be asked to say how many uses can you think

of for a paperclip one those routine questions most people might come up with 10 or 15 people who good at this might come up with 200 and they do that by saying well could the paperclip be 200t tall and be made out of foam rubber you know like does it have to be a paperclip as we know it Jim you know um now they test for this and they gave them to 1,500 people this in a book called breakpoint and Beyond and on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level you'd

be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking okay so my question to you is what percent perent of the people tested of the 1500 scored at genius level for Divergent thinking now you need to know one more thing about them these were kindergarten children so what you think what percentage at genius level 80 80 80 okay 98% now the thing about this was it was a longtitudinal study so they retested the same children 5 years later ages of 8 to 10 what you think 50 they retested them again five years later ages uh 13

to 15 you can see a trend here can't you now this tells an interesting story because you could have imagined it going the other way could you you start off not being very good but you get better as you get older but this shows two things one is we all have this capacity and two it mostly deteriorates now a lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up a lot but one of the most important things happen to them I'm convinced is that by now they've become educated you know they spent 10

years at school being told there's one answer it's at the back and don't look and don't copy because that's cheating mean outside schools that's called collaboration you know but inside schools now this isn't because teachers want it this way it's just because it happens that way um it's because it's in the gene pool of Education we have to think differently about human capacity we have to get over this old conception of academic non-academic abstract theoretical vocational uh and see it for what it is um a myth uh secondly we have to recognize that most great

learning happens in groups that collaboration is the stuff of growth if we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment and thirdly it's crucially about the culture of our institutions the habits of the institution and the habitats that they occupy for