Education and the Middle-Class Crisis - Carrol Quigley

Education and the Middle-Class Crisis - Carrol Quigley

Extracted from the book “Tragedy and Hope”, inserted in the chapter “The United States and the Middle-Class Crisis.(pag. 1274 and following ones).

"In his farewell report the Chairman of Harvard's Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem this way: 

     "The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas, because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the un-required books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind." 

     These remarks bring us close to one of the major problems in American culture today. We need a culture that will produce people eager to do things, but we need even more a culture that will make it possible to decide what to do. This is the old division of means and goals. Decisions about goals require values, meaning, context, perspective. They can be set, even tentatively and approximately, only by people who have some inkling of the whole picture. 
The middle-class culture of our past ignored the whole picture and destroyed our ability to see it by its emphasis on specialization. Just as mass production came to be based on specialization, so human preparation for making decisions about goals also became based on specialization. The free elective system in higher education was associated with choice of a major field of specialization, and all the talk about liberal arts, outside electives, general education, or required distribution were largely futile. They were futile because no general view of the whole picture could be made simply by attaching together a number of specialist views of narrow fields, for the simple reason that each specialist field looks entirely different, presenting different problems and requiring different techniques, when it is placed in the general picture. 
This simple fact still has not been realized in those circles that talk most about broadening outlooks. This was clearly shown in the influential Harvard Report on General Education (1945). As one reviewer of this document said, "It cost $40,000 to produce (the report) and a better answer could have been found by buying one of the books of Sir Richard Livingstone for $2.75."
This remark is equally mistaken on the opposite side, a fact that shows that the solution can be found only by all parties freeing themselves from their preconceptions by getting as familiar as possible with the diverse special areas in a skeptical way.
     Means are almost as difficult as ends. In fact, personal responsibility, self-discipline, some sense of time value and future preference, and, above all, an ability to distinguish what is important from what is merely necessary must be found. simply as valuable attributes of human beings as human beings. 

Neither America nor the world can be saved by a wholesale re-creation of African social realities here in consequence of our rejection of the middle-class outlook that brought us this far. Here we must discriminate. We have an achieving society because we have an achieving outlook in our society. And that achieving outlook has been, over the last few centuries, the middle-class outlook. But there are other achieving outlooks. An achieving society could be constructed on the aristocratic outlook, on the scientific outlook (pursuit of truth), on a religious basis, and probably on a large number of other outlooks. There is no need to go back to the middle-class outlook, which really killed itself by successfully achieving what it set out to do. But parts of it we need, and above all we need an achieving outlook. It might be pleasant just to give up, live in the present, enjoying existential personal experiences, living like lotus-eaters from our amazing productive system, without personal responsibility, self-discipline, or thought of the future. But this is impossible, because the productive system would itself collapse, and our external enemies would soon destroy us. 

     We must have an achieving society and an achieving outlook. These will inevitably contain parts of the middle-class outlook, but these parts will unquestionably be fitted together to serve quite different purposes. Future preference and self-discipline were originally necessary in our society so that people would restrict consumption and accumulate savings that could be spent to provide investment in capital equipment. Now we no longer need these qualities for this purpose, since flows of income in our economy provide these on an institutional basis, but we still need these qualities so that young people will be willing to undergo the years of hard work and training that will prepare them to work in our complex technological society. We must get away from the older crass materialism and egocentric selfish individualism, and pick up some of the younger generation's concern for the community and their fellow-men. The unconventionality of this younger group may make them more able to provide the new outlook and innovation every society requires, but they cannot do this if they lack imagination or perspective.
 
Above all, we must bring meaning back into human experience. This, like establishing an achieving outlook, can be done by going backward in our Western tradition to the period before we had any bourgeois outlook. For our society had both meaning and purpose long before it had any middle class. Indeed, these are intrinsic elements in our society. In fact, the middle-class outlook obtained its meaning and purpose from the society where it grew up; it did not give meaning and purpose to the society. And capitalism, along with the middle-class outlook, became meaningless and purposeless when it so absorbed men's time and energies that men lost touch with the meaning and purpose of the society in which capitalism was a brief and partial aspect. But as a consequence of the influence of capitalism and of the middle classes, the tradition was broken, and the link between the meaning and purpose of our society as it was before the middle-class revolution is no longer connected with the search for meaning and purpose by the new post-middle-class generation. This can be seen even in those groups like the Christian clergy who insisted that they were still clinging to the basic Christian tradition of our society. They were doing no such thing, but instead were usually offering us meaningless verbiage or unrealistic abstractions that had little to do with our desire to experience and live in a Christian way here and now. 

     Unfortunately, very few people, even highly regarded experts on the subject, have any very clear idea of what is the tradition of the West or how it is based on the fundamental need of Western Civilization to reconcile its intellectual outlook with the basic facts of the Christian experience. The reality of the world, time, and the flesh forced, bit by bit, abandonment of the Greek rationalistic dualism (as in Plato) that opposed spirit and matter and made knowledge exclusively a concern of the former, achieved by internal illumination. This point of view that gave final absolute knowledge ... was replaced in the period 1100-1350 by the medieval point of view that derived knowledge from the tentative and partial information obtained through sensual experience from which man derived conceptual universals that fitted the real individual cases encountered in human experience only approximately. Aquinas, who said, "Nothing exists in the intelligence which was not first present in the senses," also said, "We cannot shift from the ideal to the actual." On this epistemological basis was established the root foundations of both modern science and modern liberalism, with a very considerable boost to both from the Franciscan nominalists of the century following Aquinas. 

     The Classical world had constantly fallen into intellectual error because it never solved the epistemological problem of the relationship between the theories and concepts in men's minds and the individual objects of sensual experience. The medieval period made a detailed examination of this problem, but its answer was ignored when post-Renaissance thinkers broke the tradition in philosophy because they felt it necessary to break the tradition in religion. From Descartes onward, this epistemological problem was ignored or considered in a childish way, as if the medieval thinkers had never examined it. Today it remains as the great philosophic problem of our age. Irrational Activism, semanticism, and existentialism flourish because the present century has no answer to the epistemological problem. In fact, most contemporary thinkers do not even recognize that there is a problem. But Bergson's rejection of intelligence and his advocacy of intuition was based, like the Irrational Activism whence it sprang, on recognition of the fact that the space-time continuum in which man generally operates is nonrational. The whole existential movement was based on the same idea.
     Semanticism tried to solve the problem, in a similar fashion, by bringing the infinitely varied and dynamic quality of actuality into the human mind by insisting that the meaning of each word must follow the dynamics of the world by changing every time it is used. All these movements tried to reject logic and rationality from the human thinking process because they are not found in space-time actuality. But the tradition of the West, as clearly established in the Christian religion and in medieval philosophy, was that man must use rationality to the degree it is possible in handling a universe whose ultimate nature is well beyond man's present rational capability to grasp. This is the conclusion that the success of the West in World War II forces the West and the world to recognize once again. And in recognizing it, we must return to the tradition, so carelessly discarded in the fifteen century, which had shown the relationship between thought and action. 

     Alfred Korzybski argued (in Science and Sanity) that mental health depended on successful action and that successful action depended on an adequate relationship between the irrational nature of the objective world and the vision of the world that the actor has subjectively in his head. Korzybski's solution, like most other thinkers over the last two generations, has been to bring the irrationality of the world into man's thinking processes. This solution of the problem is now bankrupt, totally destroyed at Hiroshima and Berlin in 1945. The alternative solution lies in the tradition of the West. It must be found, and the link with our past must be restored so that the tradition may resume the process of growth that was interrupted so long ago.
     Korzybski, Bergson, and the rest of them are quite correct - most of man's experience takes place in an irrational actuality of space-time. But we now know that man must deal with his experience through subjective processes that are both rational and logical (using rules of thought explicitly understood by all concerned); and the necessary adjustments between the conclusions reached by thought and the confused irrationalities of experience must be made in the process of shifting from thought to action, and not in the thinking process itself. Only thus will the West achieve successful thought, successful action, and the sanity that is the link between these two. 

     As a result of this rupture of tradition, the thinkers of today are fumbling in an effort to find a meaning that will satisfy them. This is as true of the contemporary babbling philosophers as it is of the younger generation who fumblingly try to express Christ's message of love and help without any apparent realization that Christ's message is available in writing and that generations of thinkers debated its implications centuries ago. The meaning the present generation is seeking can be found in our own past. Part of it, concerned with loving and helping, can be found in Christ by going back to the age before his message was overwhelmed in ritualism and bureaucracy. Part of it can be found in the basic philosophic outlook of the West as seen in medieval philosophy and the scientific method that grew out of it. 

     The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act. This can be achieved only by a hierarchy that distinguishes what is necessary from what is important, as the medieval outlook did. But any modern explanation based on hierarchy must accept dynamicism as an all-pervasive element in the system, as the medieval hierarchy so signally failed to do. The effort of Teilhard de Chardin to do this has won enormous interest in recent years, but its impact has been much blunted by the fact that his presentation contained, in reciprocal relationship, a deficiency of courage and a surplus of deliberate ambiguity. 

     However, the real problem does not rest so much in theory as in practice. The real value of any society rests in its ability to develop mature and responsible individuals prepared to stand on their own feet, make decisions, and be prepared to accept the consequences of their decisions and actions without whining or self-justification. This was the ideal that the Christian tradition established long ago, and in consequence of its existence, our Western society, whatever its deficiencies, has done better than any other society that has ever existed. If it has done less well recently than earlier in its career (a disputable point of view), this weakness can be remedied only by some reform in its methods of child-rearing that will increase its supply of mature and responsible adults.

     Once this process had been established, the adults thus produced can be relied upon to adopt from our Western heritage of the past a modified ideology that will fit the needs of the present as well as the traditions of the past. And if Western culture can do that, either in America or in Europe, it need fear no enemies from within or from without."

Bring on the learning revolution - Sir Ken Robinson

Bring on the learning revolution - Sir Ken Robinson
Conference held in California - 2010

(Transcription from the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9LelXa3U_I)

I was here four years ago, and I remember, at the time, that the talks weren't put online.

I think they were given to TEDsters in a box, a box set of DVDs, which they put on their shelves, where they are now.  (Laughter)

And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk and he said, "We're going to start putting them online.

Can we put yours online?" And I said, "Sure."

And four years later, as I said, it's been seen by four ... Well, it's been downloaded four million times.

So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something to get the number of people who've seen it.

And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me. (Laughter)  (Applause) ... don't you feel?  (Laughter)

So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up to me doing another one for you, so here it is. (Laughter)

Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago and talked about the climate crisis.

And I referenced that at the end of my last talk.

So I want to pick up from there because I only had 18 minutes, frankly.

So, as I was saying ...  (Laughter)

You see, he's right.

I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously, and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more. (Laughter)

But I believe there's a second climate crisis, which is as severe, which has the same origins, and that we have to deal with, with the same urgency.

And I mean by this - and you may say, by the way, "Look, I'm good.

I have one climate crisis; I don't really need the second one."

But this is a crisis of, not natural resources - though I believe that's true - but a crisis of human resources.

I believe fundamentally, as many speakers have said during the past few days, that we make very poor use of our talents.

Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of.

I meet all kinds of people who don't think they're really good at anything.

Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now.

Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument.

He said, "There are two types of people in this world:

those who divide the world into two types and those who do not."  (Laughter)

Well, I do. (Laughter)

I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do.

They simply go through their lives getting on with it.

They get no great pleasure from what they do.

They endure it rather than enjoy it and wait for the weekend.

But I also meet people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else.

If you said to them, "Don't do this anymore," they'd wonder what you were talking about.

Because it isn't what they do, it's who they are. They say, "But this is me, you know. It would be foolish for me to abandon this, because it speaks to my most authentic self."

And it's not true of enough people.

In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people.

I think there are many possible explanations for it.

And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents.

And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep.

You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface.

You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

And you might imagine education would be the way that happens, but too often it's not.

Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough.

Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model.

What we need - and the word's been used many times during the course of the past few days - is not evolution, but a revolution in education.

This has to be transformed into something else.  (Applause)

One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education.

Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part.

It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious.

The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense;

things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done."

I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point. (Laughter)

He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress.

I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time.

We don't teach American history in Britain. (Laughter)

We suppress it. You know, this is our policy. (Laughter)

So, no doubt, something fascinating was happening in December 1862, which the Americans among us will be aware of.

But he said this:

"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion."

I love that.

Not rise to it, rise with it.

"As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.

We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

I love that word, "disenthrall."

You know what it means?

That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to, which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things, the way things are.

And many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries.

But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them.

Now, doing this is easier said than done.

It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted. (Laughter)

And the reason is that you take it for granted.

So let me ask you something you may take for granted.

How many of you here are over the age of 25?

That's not what I think you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that already.

Are there any people here under the age of 25?

Great. Now, those over 25, could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch?

Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it?

Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing.

Teenagers do not wear wristwatches.

I don't mean they can't or they're not allowed to, they just often choose not to.

And the reason is, you see, that we were brought up in a pre-digital culture, those of us over 25.

And so for us, if you want to know the time you have to wear something to tell it.

Kids now live in a world which is digitized, and the time, for them, is everywhere.

They see no reason to do this.

And by the way, you don't need to do it either; it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it.

My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20.

She doesn't see the point.

As she says, "It's a single function device."  (Laughter)

"Like, how lame is that?"

And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well."  (Laughter) "It has multiple functions."

But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

One of them is the idea of linearity:

that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life.

Everybody who's spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story:

that life is not linear; it's organic.

We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us.

But, you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative.

And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college.

I think we are obsessed with getting people to college.

Certain sorts of college.

I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go and not everybody needs to go now.

Maybe they go later, not right away.

And I was up in San Francisco a while ago doing a book signing.

There was this guy buying a book, he was in his 30s.

And I said, "What do you do?"

And he said, "I'm a fireman."

And I said, "How long have you been a fireman?"

He said, "Always. I've always been a fireman."

And I said, "Well, when did you decide?"

He said, "As a kid." He said, "Actually, it was a problem for me at school, because at school, everybody wanted to be a fireman."

He said, "But I wanted to be a fireman."

And he said, "When I got to the senior year of school, my teachers didn't take it seriously.

This one teacher didn't take it seriously.

He said I was throwing my life away if that's all I chose to do with it; that I should go to college, I should become a professional person, that I had great potential and I was wasting my talent to do that."

And he said, "It was humiliating because he said it in front of the whole class and I really felt dreadful.

But it's what I wanted, and as soon as I left school, I applied to the fire service and I was accepted."

And he said, "You know, I was thinking about that guy recently, just a few minutes ago when you were speaking, about this teacher," he said, "because six months ago, I saved his life."  (Laughter)

He said, "He was in a car wreck, and I pulled him out, gave him CPR, and I saved his wife's life as well."

He said, "I think he thinks better of me now." (Laughter)  (Applause)

You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.

And at the heart of our challenges (Applause)

At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.

This linearity thing is a problem.

When I arrived in L.A. about nine years ago, I came across a policy statement -

very well-intentioned - which said, "College begins in kindergarten."

No, it doesn't.(Laughter)

It doesn't.

If we had time, I could go into this, but we don't. (Laughter)

Kindergarten begins in kindergarten.  (Laughter)

A friend of mine once said, "You know, a three year-old is not half a six year-old."  (Laughter)  (Applause)

They're three.

But as we just heard in this last session, there's such competition now to get into kindergarten - to get to the right kindergarten - that people are being interviewed for it at three.

Kids sitting in front of unimpressed panels, you know, with their resumes, (Laughter)

flipping through and saying, "Well, this is it?" (Laughter)

"You've been around for 36 months, and this is it?"  (Laughter)

"You've achieved nothing - commit.

Spent the first six months breastfeeding, the way I can see it."  (Laughter)

See, it's outrageous as a conception, but it …….

The other big issue is conformity.

We have built our education systems on the model of fast food.

This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day.

You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering.

One is fast food, where everything is standardized.

The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances.

And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. (Applause)

I think we have to recognize a couple of things here.

One is that human talent is tremendously diverse.

People have very different aptitudes.

I worked out recently that I was given a guitar as a kid at about the same time that Eric Clapton got his first guitar.

You know, it worked out for Eric, that's all I'm saying. (Laughter)

In a way, it did not for me.

I could not get this thing to work no matter how often or how hard I blew into it.

 (Laughter) It just wouldn't work.

But it's not only about that.

It's about passion.

Often, people are good at things they don't really care for.

It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy.

And if you're doing the thing that you love to do, that you're good at, time takes a different course entirely.

My wife's just finished writing a novel, and I think it's a great book, but she disappears for hours on end.

You know this, if you're doing something you love, an hour feels like five minutes.

If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit, five minutes feels like an hour.

And the reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.

So I think we have to change metaphors.

We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people.

We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture.

We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process;

it's an organic process.

And you cannot predict the outcome of human development.

All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

So when we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system.

There are great ones, like KIPP's; it's a great system.

There are many great models.

It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching.

And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution;

it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions,

but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.

Now in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business,

in multimedia, in the Internet.

These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education.

And I urge you to get involved in it because it's vital, not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children.

But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow.

That's where children experience life.

Or at home, if that's where they choose to be educated with their families or their friends.

There's been a lot of talk about dreams over the course of this few days.

And I wanted to just very quickly ...

I was very struck by Natalie Merchant's songs last night, recovering old poems.

I wanted to read you a quick, very short poem from W. B. Yeats, who some of you may know.

He wrote this to his love, Maud Gonne, and he was bewailing the fact that he couldn't really give her what he thought she wanted from him.

And he says, "I've got something else, but it may not be for you."

He says this:

"Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with gold and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."

And every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams beneath our feet.

And we should tread them softly.

Thank you. (Applause)

Public schools - and the needs of others

Ken Robinson - "How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything"

 “Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism - they were created in the image of industrialism. 

In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. 

This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. 

Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. 

Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. 

They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. 

I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.” 

“When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.”

“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.”
 

“We are all born with extraordinary powers of imagination, intelligence, feeling, intuition, spirituality, and of physical and sensory awareness. (p.9)”

“young children are wonderfully confident in their own imaginations ... Most of us lose this confidence as we grow up”

 

 “Never underestimate the vital importance of finding early in life the work that for you is play. This turns possible underachievers into happy warriors.”
― Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

 

“If all you had was academic ability, you wouldn't have been able to get out of bed this morning. In fact, there wouldn't have been a bad to get out of. No one could have made one. You could have written about possibility of one, but not have constructed it.”
― Ken Robinson, Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative 

 

  

 

Schools kill creativity

Ken Robinson says it.
Conference held on 2006 - California
Transcription of the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

"Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it?

I've been blown away by the whole thing.

In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter)

There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant  to what I want to talk about.

One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had  and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it.

The second is that  it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.

I have an interest in education - actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education.  Don't you? I find this very interesting.

If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education - actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education.  (Laughter) You're not asked.

And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me.

But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like,

"Oh my God," you know, "Why me? My one night out all week." (Laughter)

But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?

Like religion, and money and other things.

I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do.

We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to

take us into this future that we can't grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue - despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days - what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

 And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have - their capacities for innovation.

I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do.

And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood.

What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is all kids have tremendous talents.

And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.

So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause)

Thank you. That was it, by the way.

Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left.

Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter)

I heard a great story recently - I love telling it - of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six and she was at the back, drawing, and 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."

 (Laughter)

When my son was four in England - actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year.

He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big.

It was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it: "Nativity II."
But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.

We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter)

He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit  where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh.

 This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence,

 because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?"

 They just switched, that was it.

 Anyway, the three boys came in - four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -and they put these boxes down,

and the first boy said, "I bring you gold."

And the second boy said, "I bring you myrhh."

And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter)

What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance.

If they don't know, they'll have a go.

Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong.

Now, I don't mean to say that 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.

So why is this?

I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago.

In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.

So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was. (Laughter)

Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where

Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was.

You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you?

Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you?

Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? (Laughter) "Must try harder." Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody." (Laughter)

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually.

 My son didn't want to come.

 I've got two kids. He's 21 now; my daughter's 16.

He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah.

 He'd known her for a month.

 Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16.

 Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah."

And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter)

But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.

Every one. Doesn't matter where you go.

You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.

At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.

Everywhere on Earth.

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 this is rather important.

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? Did I miss a meeting?(Laughter)

Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.

If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?"

I think you'd have to conclude - if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners - I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education

throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it?

They're the people who come out the top.

And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter)

And I like university professors, but you know, 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 - not all of them, but typically - 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, don't they?  (Laughter) It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night.(Laughter)

And there you will see it - grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat,

waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability.

And there's a reason.

The whole system was invented - around the world, 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.

Number one, that 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.

And the second is academic 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 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.

And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter)

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.

We know three things about intelligence.

One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.

We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.

Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.

If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive.

The brain isn't divided into compartments.

In fact, creativity - which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value - more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

The brain is intentionally - by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women.

Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking.

Because you are, aren't you?

There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.

If my wife is cooking a meal at home - which is not often, thankfully. (Laughter)

But you know, she's doing - no, she's good at some things - but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here.

If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed.

I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break." (Laughter)

Actually, you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut?

I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter)

And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment

called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there.

It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of; she's called Gillian Lynne - have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work.

She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera."

She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see.

Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "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.

I think now they'd say she had ADHD.

Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point.

It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter)

People weren't aware they could have that.

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.

Now, I think ... (Applause) What I think it comes to is this:

Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology,

one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity.

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity.

And for the future, it won't serve us.

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.

What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.

We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future.

By the way - we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much."