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Good morning. How are you?

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It's been great, hasn't it?

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I've been blown away by the whole thing.

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In fact, I'm leaving.

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There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference,

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which are relevant to what I want to talk about.

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One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity

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in all of the presentations that we've had

9
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and in all the people here.

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Just the variety of it and the range of it.

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The second is that it's put us in a place

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where we have no idea what's going to happen

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in terms of the future.

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No idea how this may play out.

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I have an interest in education.

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Actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education.

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Don't you?

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I find this very interesting.

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If you're at a dinner party

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and you say you work in education,

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Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education.

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You're not asked.

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And you're never asked back, curiously, that distracts me.

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But if you are, and you say to somebody, what do you do, and you say you work in education,

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you can see the blood run from their face, they think, oh my god, why me?

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My one night out all week.

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But if you ask people about their education,

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they pin you to the wall.

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Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people.

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Am I right?

31
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Like religion and money and other things.

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So I have a big interest in education,

33
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and I think we all do.

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We have a huge vested interest in it,

35
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partly because it's education that's meant to take us

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into this future that we can't grasp.

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If you think of it, children starting school this year

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will be retiring in 2065.

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Nobody has a clue,

40
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despite all the expertise that's been on parade

41
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for the past four days,

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what the world will look like in five years' time.

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And yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

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So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

45
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And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless,

46
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on the really extraordinary capacities that children have,

47
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their capacities for innovation.

48
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I mean, Serena last night was a marvel, wasn't she?

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Just seeing what she could do.

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And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak,

51
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exceptional in the whole of childhood.

52
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What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication

53
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who found a talent.

54
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And my contention is all kids have tremendous talents,

55
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and we squander them pretty ruthlessly.

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So I want to talk about education,

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and I want to talk about creativity.

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My contention is that creativity now is as important

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in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status thank you that was it

60
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by the way thank you very much so 15 minutes left

61
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well i was born no the um i had a great story recently i love telling it of a little girl

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who was in a drawing lesson she was six and she was at the back drawing and the teacher said this

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little girl hardly ever paid attention and in this drawing lesson she did and the teacher was

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fascinated she went over to and she said what are you drawing and the girl said I'm drawing a picture

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of God and the teacher said but nobody knows what God looks like and the girl said they will in a

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minute when when my son was four in England actually he was four everywhere to be honest I

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I mean, if we're being strict about it,

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wherever he went, he was four that year,

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but he was in the Nativity play.

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Do you remember the story?

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No, it was big. It was a big story.

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Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it.

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Nativity 2.

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But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about.

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We consider this to be one of the lead parts.

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We had the place crammed full of agents and T-shirts, you know.

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James Robinson is Joseph.

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He didn't have to speak.

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but do you know the bit where the three kings come in?

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Now, they come in bearing gifts,

81
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and they bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

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This really happened.

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We're sitting there, and they, I think,

84
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just went out of sequence.

85
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Because we talked to the little boy afterwards

86
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and said, you know, are you okay with that?

87
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And they said, yeah, why, was that wrong?

88
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They just switched.

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I think that was it.

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Anyway, the three boys came in,

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little four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads,

92
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and they put these boxes down.

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And the first boy said, I bring you gold.

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And the second boy said, I bring you myrrh.

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And the third boy said, Frank sent this.

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

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

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Am I right?

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They're not frightened of being wrong.

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Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative.

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What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong,

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you'll never come up with anything original.

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If you're not prepared to be wrong.

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And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.

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They have become frightened of being wrong.

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And we run our companies, this, by the way.

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We stigmatize mistakes.

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And we're now running national education systems

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where mistakes are the worst thing you can make.

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And the result is that we are educating people

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out of their creative capacities.

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Picasso once said this.

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He said that all children are born artists.

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The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

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I believe this passionately,

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that we don't grow into creativity,

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we grow out of it.

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Or rather, we get educated out of it.

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So why is this?

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

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In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.

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So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was from L.A.

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

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which is where Shakespeare's father was born.

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Are you struck by a new thought? I was.

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

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Do you?

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

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Shakespeare being seven.

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I never thought of it.

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I mean, he was seven at some point.

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He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?

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Do you understand?

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How annoying would that be?

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Must try harder.

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Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare.

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Go to bed now, you know, to William Shakespeare.

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And put the pencil down.

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And stop speaking like that.

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It's confusing everybody.

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Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles.

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And I just want to say a word about the transition.

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Actually, my son didn't want to come.

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I've got two kids.

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He's 21 now and my daughter's 16.

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He didn't want to come to Los Angeles.

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He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England.

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This was the love of his life.

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Sarah he'd known her for a month mind you they've had their fourth anniversary

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because it's a long time when you're 16 anyway he was really upset on the plane he said I'll

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never find another girl like Sarah and we were rather pleased about that frankly because

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she was the main reason we were leaving the country

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but something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world

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every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects.

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Everyone, doesn't matter where you go, you think it would be otherwise, but it isn't.

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At the top are mathematics and languages,

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then the humanities and the bottom are the arts, everywhere on Earth.

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And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts.

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Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance.

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There isn't an education system on the planet

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that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics.

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Why? Why not?

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I think this is rather important.

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I think maths is very important, but so is dance.

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Children dance all the time, if they're allowed to. We all do.

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We all have bodies, don't we?

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Did I miss a meeting?

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Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up,

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we start to educate them progressively from the waist up.

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And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side.

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If you were to visit education as an alien

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and say, what's it for, public education,

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I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output,

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you know, who really succeeds by this?

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Who does everything they should?

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Who gets all the brownie points?

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You know, who are the winners?

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I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose

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of public education throughout the world

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is to produce university professors.

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Isn't it?

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They're the people who come out the top.

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And I used to be one.

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So there.

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You know.

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But, and I like university professors,

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but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up

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as the high watermark of all human achievement.

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They're just a form of life.

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You know, another form of life.

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But they're rather curious,

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and I say this out of affection for them.

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There's something curious about professors.

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In my experience, not all of them, but typically,

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they live in their heads.

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They live up there and slightly to one side.

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They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way.

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You know, they look upon their body

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as a form of transport for their heads.

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You know, it's...

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Don't they?

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It's a way of getting their head to meetings.

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If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way,

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get yourself along to a residential conference for senior academics

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and pop into the discotheque on the final night.

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And there you will see it,

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grown men and women writhing uncontrollably off the beat.

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Waiting till it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.

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

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And there's a reason.

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The whole system was invented around the world.

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There were no public systems of education really before the 19th century.

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They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.

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So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.

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Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top.

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So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid,

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things you liked on the ground,

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you would never get a job doing that.

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Is that right?

220
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Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician.

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Don't do art, you won't be an artist.

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Benign advice.

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Now, profoundly mistaken.

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The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.

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And the second is academic ability,

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which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence

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because the universities designed the system in their image.

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If you think of it,

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the whole system of public education around the world

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is a protracted process of university entrance.

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And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant,

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creative people think they're not,

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because the thing they were good at at school

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wasn't valued or was actually stigmatised.

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And I think we can't afford to go on that way.

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In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO,

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more people worldwide will be graduating through education

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than since the beginning of history.

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More people.

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And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about,

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technology and its transformation effect on work,

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and demography and the huge explosion in population.

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Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything.

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Isn't that true?

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When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job.

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If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one.

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And I didn't want one, frankly.

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But now, kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games.

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Because you need an MA, where the previous job required a BA,

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and now you need a PhD for the other.

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It's a process of academic inflation.

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and it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet.

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We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.

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We know three things about intelligence.

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One, it's diverse.

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We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it.

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We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically.

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We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.

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Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.

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If you look at the interactions of a human brain,

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as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations,

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intelligence is wonderfully interactive.

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The brain isn't divided into compartments.

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In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value,

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more often than not, comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

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The brain is intentional.

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By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum.

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It's thicker in women.

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Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking.

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Because you are.

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Aren't you?

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that's a raft of research, but I know it for my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at

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home, which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she's good at some things. But if she's

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cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting

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the ceiling, you know, she's doing open heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is

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shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook. If she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, Terry,

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please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here.

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You know, give me a break.

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Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing?

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If a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen?

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Remember that old chestnut?

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I saw a great T-shirt, really, recently, which said,

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if a man speaks his mind in a forest and no woman hears him,

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is he still wrong?

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And the third thing about intelligence is it's distinct.

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I'm doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany

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which is based on a series of interviews with people

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about how they discovered their talent

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I'm fascinated by how people got to be there

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it's really prompted by a conversation

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I had with a wonderful woman who most people

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have never heard of, she's called Gillian Lynn

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have you heard of her? Some have

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she's a choreographer and everybody knows her work

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she did Cats and Phantom of the Opera

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she's wonderful, I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet

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in England, as you can see

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and

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anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day

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I said, how did you get to be a dancer?

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And she said it was interesting.

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When she was at school, she was really hopeless.

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And the school in the 30s wrote to her parents and said,

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we think Gillian has a learning disorder.

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You couldn't concentrate. She was fidgeting.

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I think now they'd say she had ADHD.

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Wouldn't you?

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

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So it wasn't an available condition.

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You know, people...

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People weren't aware they could have that.

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anyway she sent went to see this um this specialist so this oak paneled room and and

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she was there with with her mother and she was led and sat on this uh chair at the end and she

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sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to mother about all the problems Jillian

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was having at school and at the end of it um because she was disturbing people her homework

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was always late and so on little kid of eight in the end uh the uh the doctor went and sat next to

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Jillian said Jillian I've listened to all these things that mother's told me I need to speak to

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privately. So she said, wait here, we'll be back, we won't be very long, and they went

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and left her. But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting

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on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, just stand and

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watch her. And the minute they left the room, she said she was on her feet, moving to the

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music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother, and he said,

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you know, Mrs. Lynn, Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school. I said,

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what happened? She said, she did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room

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and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to

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think. Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern,

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they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School.

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She became a soloist.

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She had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet.

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She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School,

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found her own company, the Julian Dance Company,

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met Andrew Lloyd Webber.

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She's been responsible for some of the most successful

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musical theatre productions in history.

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She's given pleasure to millions,

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and she's a multi-millionaire.

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Somebody else might have put on medication

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and told her to calm down.

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Now, I think...

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APPLAUSE

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What I think it comes to is this.

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Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology

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and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson.

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I believe our only hope for the future

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is to adopt a new conception of human ecology,

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one in which we start to reconstitute our conception

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of the richness of human capacity.

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Our education system has mined our minds

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in the way that we strip-mined the earth

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for a particular commodity.

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

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We have to rethink the fundamental principles

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on which we're educating our children.

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There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk who said,

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if all the insects were to disappear from the earth,

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within 50 years, all life on earth would end.

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If all human beings disappeared from the earth,

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within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish.

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And he's right.

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What Ted celebrates is the gift of the human imagination.

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We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely

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and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about.

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And the only way we'll do it

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is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are

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and seeing our children for the hope that they are.

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And our task is to educate their whole being

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so they can face this future.

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By the way, we may not see this future, but they will.

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And our job is to help them make something of it.

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Thank you very much.

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APPLAUSE

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weren't cherished what if they carried no importance held no value there is a

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place where artistic vision is protected where inspired design ideas live on to

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become ultimate driving machines