A little girl of six years was in a drawing lesson at
the back bench, drawing. The teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid
attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and
she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the
girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said,
"But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They
will in a minute."
All kids have tremendous talents
and creativity. They are not frightened of being wrong. Now, It doesn't mean being
wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not
prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're
not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have
lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our
companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running
national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And
the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.
Picasso once said this -- he said that all children are born artists. The
problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that
we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated
out if it.
Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy
of subjects. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and
the bottom are the arts. And in pretty much every system too, there's a
hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in
schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet
that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?
Why not? I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all
the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Truthfully,
what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively
from body to heads. And slightly to one side.
The whole purpose of public
education throughout the world is to produce university professors. They're the
people who come out the top. But we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water
mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of
life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them.
There's something curious about professors in my experience. They live in their
heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you
know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of
transport for their heads.
There were no public systems of education, really,
before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of
industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: 1. The most useful
subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away
from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds
that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music,
you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign
advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a
revolution. 2. The second is cademic ability, which has really come to dominate
our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their
image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the
world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is
that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not,
because the thing they were good at school wasn't valued, or was actually
stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.
In the next 30 years, according
to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than
since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all
the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on
work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees
aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a
degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want
one. But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video
games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you
need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it
indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We
need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
Gillian Lynne is a choreographer.
She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful.
I once asked her, "Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she
said it was interesting; when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And
the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian
has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting.
Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this
oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on
this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man
talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And
at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people; her homework was always
late; and so on, little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat
next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that
your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said,
"Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and they went and
left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was
sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother,
"Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she
said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few
minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't
sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school."
I said, "What
happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was.
We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't
sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think.
They did ballet; they did tap; they did jazz; they did modern; they did
contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she
became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She
eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company
-- the Gillian Lynne Dance Company -- met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been
responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in
history; she's given pleasure to millions; and she's a multi-millionaire.
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
We have to rethink the
fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a
wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to
disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all
human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life
would flourish." And he's right.
[KEN ROBINSON]
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