I am very interested in education, as I believe we are all. This topic is so close to us, partly because education should be the door for us to a future that we cannot imagine.
If you think about it, children who entered school this year will retire in 2065. Despite what we have heard in these four days, no one has a clue of how the world will work in at least five years. However, our task is to prepare children for it. There is absolutely nothing to predict here.
And thirdly, we all, I think, agree that children are capable of absolutely extraordinary things, capable of inventing new things. We saw Sirina yesterday - her abilities are extraordinary. They are simply amazing. She is exceptional, but in a sense and ordinary, if you compare her with all the children in the world. In her, we see a combination of rare dedication with natural talent. I believe that all children have such talents, and we irresponsibly scatter them.
I would like to talk about education and creativity. It seems to me that creativity is now just as important as literacy, and we must give creativity an appropriate status.
I love to tell one story. A six-year-old girl was sitting on the back of a school desk in an art lesson, drawing something. In general, the girl did not pay attention to the lesson, but then she worked very enthusiastically.
The teacher became interested, went up to the girl and asked: "What are you drawing?" The girl replied: "I am drawing a portrait of God." The teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like," and the girl replied, "They will find out now."
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When my son was four years old in England … To be honest, he was four years old everywhere. Strictly speaking, that year, wherever he was, he was four years old. He played in a Christmas play.
The role is without words, but remember the part where the three wise men appear. They come with gifts, bring gold, incense and myrrh. A real case. We were sitting in the hall, and the Magi seemed to have mixed up the gifts; after the performance we asked one of the boys if everything went well, and he was very surprised by the question. They just waved. Three boys came out with towels on their heads, each of them four years old, put boxes on the floor, the first one says: “I brought you gold,” the second says: “I brought you myrrh,” and the third says: “I brought you … okay, here!"
There is something in common in both stories - children know how to take risks; if they are not sure about something, they try it anyway. Am I wrong? They are not afraid to make mistakes.
Of course, I am not saying that creating and making mistakes are one and the same, but we know that those who are not ready to make mistakes, are not able to create, cannot think in an original way. You need to be able to make mistakes.
But when children grow up, most lose this ability, they become afraid to make mistakes. Likewise, we run companies. We do not forgive mistakes. And our public education systems are built on a zero tolerance for mistakes. As a result, we wean people off the ability to be creative.
Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The problem is staying an artist as you mature. I'm sure we don't develop creativity by growing up, but rather growing out of it. Or even we are weaned from them. Why is this happening?
You should not think that these people are an indicator of human achievement
When you move to America or travel the world, you notice one thing - from the point of view of the hierarchy of subjects, all educational systems are the same. All without exception. It seems that there should be differences, but they are not.
Mathematics and languages always dominate, followed by the humanities, and then the arts, and so on throughout the Earth. Creative items also have their own hierarchy. Visual arts and music are prioritized over theater and choreography.
There is no educational system where dance is taught like mathematics, every day. Why? Why not? It seems important to me. Math is important, but dancing is also important. Children start dancing at the earliest opportunity, like we all do. Do we all have arms and legs, or am I missing something?
Here's what happens: as children grow up, we begin to form them, moving up from the lower back until we stop on the head, or rather, its left side.
If you look at state education through the eyes of an alien and ask the question: what is its purpose, then, looking at the results, at those who succeed, at the excellent students, at the children who do everything that is expected of them, you as an alien would come to the conclusion that the goal public education systems around the world is the production of university professors.
Is not it? This is who the result is. And I was one of them, so and so!
I have nothing against the professors, but one should not think that these people are an indicator of the achievements of mankind. They are just a special species, a different form of life. I must say, strange - I say it lovingly. Most of the professors I met, not all, but most, live inside their heads - up there, mostly on the left side. They are incorporeal, almost literally. They view the body as a means of transport for the head. Do you agree? The body for them is a way of delivering the head to meetings.
The diploma suddenly depreciated
The ideal of our educational system is the scientist, and there is a reason for that. State education systems were built in the 19th century practically from scratch. They were adapted to the needs of the industrial revolution. The item hierarchy is built on two pillars.
First, priority is given to disciplines useful for finding a job. At school, you were probably mildly distracted from interesting subjects and activities, since you would never be able to make them your profession. “Don't make music, you won't become a musician; give up drawing, you won't be an artist. Good advice, but, alas, wrong. Our world is in revolution.
Second: the matter is in scientific activity, which has become for us a model of intellectual ability, since universities have developed this system for themselves.
If you think about it, the state educational system in the world is a prolonged process of entering the university. As a result, very talented people do not consider themselves as such, since no one values their favorite school subjects in the least. But, as it seems to me, this cannot continue.
Over the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, universities will graduate more people than in all of human history. All this is a combination of factors that we talked about earlier: the impact of technology on professional activity, a huge population growth.
The diploma suddenly became worthless. Is not it? When I was a student, if you had a diploma, you had a job, and if you didn't have a job, it was only because you didn't want to work, and to be honest, I didn't want to work.
Now, right after graduation, students go back home to play video games, because where a bachelor's degree was previously enough, now they require a master's degree, and a candidate of sciences is needed in his place. This inflation of education is a sign that the entire educational structure is crumbling under our feet. We must rethink our understanding of the mind.
“Gillian is not sick. She is a dancer"
We know three things about the mind: first, it is diverse. We think in the same way we perceive, that is, with visual images, sounds and tactile sensations; we think abstractly, we think in motion.
Second, the mind is changeable. As we learned yesterday from a series of presentations, judging by the exchange of information within the brain, the mind is extremely mobile - the brain is not divided into independent boxes. Creative acts, which I define as the process of the emergence of new valuable ideas, arise as a result of the interaction of fundamentally different ways of knowing the world.
And the third thing I want to say about the mind. Each has his own. I am working on a new book called Revelation. It is based on a series of interviews about how people discovered talent in themselves.
I am amazed at how people go this way. I was prompted to the book by a conversation with a wonderful woman, whom many have never heard of, her name is Gillian Lin. Have you heard of her? Some of you. She is a choreographer and everyone is familiar with her creations. She has directed the musicals Cats and The Phantom of the Opera. She is gorgeous.
In England I was with the Royal Ballet, which is obvious. One day at lunch I asked Gillian how she started dancing. It's an interesting story. She said that at school she was considered hopeless. It was in the 1930s, when her parents were told from school that the girl had problems with her studies.
She could not concentrate, she was always fidgeting. Now I would say that she has attention deficit disorder. But in the 1930s, this syndrome had not yet been invented, this disease was then unavailable. Nobody knew that this kind of disorder existed.
So, she was taken to the doctor. The oak-paneled room, she came there with her mother, was seated in a chair at the far end of the room, where she sat with her hands under her feet for twenty whole minutes while the doctor talked about her problems at school. She interfered with everyone, handed over her homework at the wrong time - at the age of eight. In the end, the doctor sat down next to Gillian and told her that after listening to her mother about all the problems, he should talk to her one on one. He asked Gillian to wait a bit and left the room with his mother.
Before leaving, he turned on the radio on the table. As soon as the adults left, the doctor asked Gillian's mother to take a look at what her daughter was doing. She immediately jumped to her feet and moved to the beat of the music. They looked at it for a couple of minutes, then the doctor turned and said, “Mrs. Lin, Gillian is not sick. She is a dancer. Send her to a choreographic school."
I asked what happened next. She said, “Mom followed his advice and it was wonderful. We entered a room where there were people like me - no one could sit still. People who had to move in order to think."
They studied ballet, step, jazz, and were engaged in modern and contemporary dance. Over time, she was admitted to the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, made a brilliant career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lean Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber.
Gillian has done some of the most famous musical productions in history, brought joy to millions, and became a multimillionaire. But another doctor could put her on pills and make her calm down.
Gillian Lin at the Laurence Olivier Awards, London, 28 April 2013.
I think it all comes down to one thing. Al Gore recently gave a lecture on ecology and revolution that was instigated by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to embrace a new concept of human ecology, one within which we begin to rethink the wealth of human ability.
Our educational system has emptied our minds, as we empty the bowels of the earth in pursuit of specific goals. But we cannot use such a system further. We must rethink the basic principles of teaching our children.
Jonas Salk once said: “If all insects disappear from the face of the Earth, in 50 years the planet will become lifeless. If all people disappear from the face of the Earth, in 50 years all forms of life will flourish. And he's right.
TED is a tribute to the human imagination. We must try to use this gift wisely to avoid the development of events in question. The only way out for us is to appreciate the diversity of our creativity and value our children as they are our hope. We must teach them holistically so that they cope with the future, which, I note, we may not find, but they will definitely find it. And we must help them shape it.