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Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education
there are two reasons for it the first of them is economic
people try 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 has demonstrated. How do we do that?
The second one is cultural. Every contry on Earth is trying to figure
out how do we educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity so
that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process
of globalisation 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 then not,
but it's not a guarantee anymore. Particularly not if the route to it marginalises
most the think that you think are important about yourself.
Some people say we have to raise standards as if this is a breakthrough.
Like, really? Yes! We should! Why should we lower them?
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 concieved and structured
for a different age. It was concieved in the intellectual culture
of the Enlightment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution.
Before the mid of the 19th centuary there were no systems of public education.
Not really. You could get educated by jesuits if you had
the money. But public education, paid for from taxation,
compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery 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 are we spending time on this.
So it's also built into the whole series of assumtions about social structure and capacity.
It was driven an economic imperative of the time,
but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind.
Which was essentialy the enlightment view of intelligence.
That real intelligence consists in the capacity for certain type of deductive reasoning and
the knowledge of the classics, originaly. What we come to think of as "academic ability".
And this is deep in the gene pool of 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're being 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 have
benefited wonderfuly from it. But most people have not.
Instead they suffered this. This is the moden epidemic and it's as misplaces
and it's as fictitious. This is a plague fo ADHD.
Now, this is a map of the instances 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 pediatricians think that there is such
a thing, but it's still a matter of debate.
What I do know for a fact it's that it's not an epidemic.
These kids are being medicated as rutinely as we have 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 perioud in the hystory of the earth.
They're being besieged with information and calls for attention from every platform: computers,
from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels.
And we're penalizing them for getting distracted.
From what? Boring stuff at school, for the most part.
It's seems to me it is not a coincidence, totally,
that the instance of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing.
These kids are given Ritalin and Adderall and all manner of things, often quite dangerous
drungs to get them focused and calm them down.
But according to this Attention deficit disorder increases as you travel east across the contry.
People stop losing interest in Oklahoma.
They can hardly think straight in Arkensas.
And by the time they get to Washington they've lost it completely.
And there are several reasons for that, I believe.
It's a fictitious epidemic.
If you think of it, the arts and I don't say this exclusive to the arts,
I think it's also true of science and of maths, But I say about the arts particularly because
they are the victims of this mentality, currently.
Particularly.
The arts especially adress the idea fo 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 anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off
and deaden yourself to what is happening.
And alot of these drugs are that.
We are getting our children through education by anaesthetising them.
And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn't be putting them to sleep, we
should be waking them up to what they have inside of them.
But the model we have is this.
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.
Schools are still pretty much organised 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?
Why is there this assumtion that the most important thing kids have in common is how
old they are?
It's like the most important things about them is the date of manufacture.
Well, I know kids who are much better then other kids of the same age in different disciplines
or different times of the day or better in small groups than in large groups
or sometimes they want to be on their own.
If you are interested in a model of learning, you don't start from this production line
mentality.
It's essentialy about conformity, and increasingly it's about that as you look
at the growth of standardised testing and standardised curriculum.
And it's about standardisation. I believe we gotta go in the exact opposite
direction. That's what I mean about changing the paradigms.
There was a great study done recently on divergent thinking, published a couple years ago.
Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity.
I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value.
Divergent thinking isn't a synonym, but it's 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 to think laterally, not just in linear or
convergent ways to see multiple answers, not one.
There is a test for this. One kind of COD example would be...
people might be asked to say how many uses can you think of for a paper
clip? Most people might come up with 10 or 15.
People who are good at this might come with 200.
And they do that by saying: well could the paper clip be 200 ft tall and made of foam
rubber? like, does it have to be a paper clip as we know it, Jim?
There are tests for this and they gave them to 1500 people
in a book called Break Point & Beyond and on the protocol of the test, if you scored
above a certain level, you'd be considered a genius at divergent thinking.
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 kindergarden children.
So what you think? What percentage at genius level?
- 80?
98%.
The thing about this was it was a longitudinal study.
So they retested the same children 5 years later, age of 8-10.
What do you think? 50
They retested them again 5 years later, ages 13-15.
You can see a trend here.
This tells an interesting story. Because you could have imagined it going either
way. 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.
A lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up. A lot.
But one of the most important things that happened to them
I am convinced that by now they've become educated.
They spent 10 years of school being told there's one answer
it's at the back.
And don't look!
And don't copy because that's cheating.
Outside school that's called collaboration, but inside schools...
This isn't because teachers wanted it this way
it's just because it happens that way.
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.
Second we have to recognise that most great learning happens in groups.
That collaboration is 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 habbits of institutions
and the habitats that they occupy.
Captions by: Pnina Shirly