RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms

[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 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 you 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 route to it marginalizes most of 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 mean 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 you had the money but public education paid for from taxation compulsory to everybody and three 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 working-class children to benefit from public education they're incapable of learning to read and write and why we're 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 this capacity for a certain type of deductive reasoning and the knowledge of the classics originally what we come to think

of as academic ability and this is deep in the gene pool of public education at the 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 prescriptions for adhd don't mistake me 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 children pediatrician think there is such a thing but it's still a matter 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 stimulating period in the history of the earth they're being besieged with information and caused their attention from every platform computers from iphones from advertising holdings from hundreds of television channels and we're 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 ritalin and adderall and all manner of things often quite dangerous drugs to get them focused and calm them down but according to this attention deficit order 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 anesthetizing 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 specialized into separate subjects 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 manufacture what do you 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 curricula 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 was a great study done recently of divergent thinking published a couple of years ago divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity i define creativity as 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 de boehner would probably call laterally to think not just in linear or convergent ways to see multiple answers not one so i mean the 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 paper clip all those routine questions most people might come

with 10 or 15. people are good at this might come up with 200 and they do that by saying well could the paper clip be 200 foot tall and be made out of foam rubber you know like does it have to be a paper clip as we know it jim you know um now they tested this and they gave them to 1500 people 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 percentage 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 do you think what percentage at genius level eight eighteen eighty okay 98 now the thing about this was it was a longitudinal study so they retested the same children five years later age of eight to ten what do you think 15. they retested this them again five years later ages 13-15 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 couldn't 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 that i'm convinced is that by now they've become educated they know they're spent ten 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 i 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 and see it for what it is a myth secondly we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups the 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 you