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His TED Talks have reached hundreds of thousands of viewers. ‘Governments got interested in education for economic He is heralded as the great hope of all educationalists trapped in reasons,’ he said, ‘and that was mostly counter-productive.’ The the Global Education Reform Movement (GERM). His counter cry was for standards to be raised and teachers and students had to the GERM is a grassroots revolution to transform education to be told what to do. After standardisation came the competition through allowing natural creativity to thrive. such as the OECD league tables. Robinson described the likes At the recent International Association for Scholastic of PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment) Excellence (INTASE) conference in Singapore, Robinson was administered by the OECD as being very limited. He saw it in the the star attraction. Twelve hundred school leaders from across same league as ‘The Eurovision Song Quest’, only for Education. the globe had flocked to Singapore to be inspired, and to be Competition from above is unhelpful, he said, and what we given hope by the man who would show them a different way. should have is investment at the grass roots. He talked of the three premises There is no disputing that we for the GERM all of which he live in revolutionary times with said stifle creativity. The first technology and demography of these, he said, is conformity. which have no precedents. Just ‘Conformity is at the heart of sixty years ago, technology the standardisation movement,’ comprised the radio, record he said. It is the lowest common player, telephone and television, denominator, whereas diversity said Robinson. Now we live in of ability is what we want. If there the world of the internet, laptops, are two children in a family, he tablets, social media and smart said, you won’t confuse them. phones, which we can’t possibly They are different. They each are live without, even though smart unique and have talent, potential phones were invented barely ten and possibilities. That diversity years ago. Technology for the of talent will improve all of our merging of machine intelligence lives. and human intelligence has The second premise for already arrived. The pace of GERM, he said, is compliance technological advancement is and this is where the testing and frightening. Sir Ken Robinson connecting with the audience high stakes come in to play. It Population explosion is equally is the minimalist way, and it’s easy to process the results. This concerning. On present rates we could reach a population of ten puts children under pressure. We now have the most stressed billion by the end of the century. Looking at what we need to out generation in history, he said. We must look for the opposite sustain ourselves – drinking water, food and fuel to energise and that is creativity, which is what sets us apart as a species. our activities – how many people can we sustain? If everyone The third premise he listed as linearity – as if you can plan your drank water, consumed food and used fuel at the same rate as life ahead. ‘No you can’t,’ he said emphatically. ‘It’s organic!’ To in India, then the planet could support fifteen billion people. illustrate his point he said that he had recently tweeted ‘Can you But if we consume at the rate of North Americans then we can summarise your life in forty characters?’ There was an answer to sustain only one and a half billion. We have already surpassed that from a complete stranger who tweeted back, ‘I had a lifetime that five times over. So, one might hypothesise that we will need in theatre and now run a Dutch cheese shop in the Scottish five new planets by the middle of this century. ‘These,’ he opined, Highlands.’ Point taken. ‘are big existential challenges.’ Not wishing to plumb the depths ‘Schools must fundamentally change,’ said Robinson. He of existentialism, he said the planet will sustain us but only if we referred to the culture of schools which means creating the live collaboratively and creatively. conditions under which creativity is more likely to happen. Passion, he said, changes everything. We need to encourage His own inspiration, he said, comes from ideas generated one people to find the things they are naturally good at. If we love hundred and fifty years ago when Montessori was solving some what we do and get satisfaction from it then we never work of these issues at the turn of the century. These problems included again, he said. managing educational practices to scale and managing political To illustrate his point, Robinson told the story of Bart Conner ‘headwinds’. from Illinois. When Bart was five or six years old, he could walk
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on his hands just as readily as on his feet. This didn’t seem like a talent that would be of any great use to him although it did have its entertainment value. When Bart was ten years old rather than dismiss this unusual ability, his mother requested of his school that he be admitted to the gymnastics centre. Bart later said that he will never forget walking into that gym for the first time. He described it as a mix of Disneyland and Santa’s Grotto. It was an exhilarating experience for him to see the trapeze, the bars and the rings. Eight years later he was in the World Gym Squad and winning Olympic medals. By the end of his career as a gymnastics competitor he had become the most decorated gymnast in American history. He is now married to Nadia Comăneci, made famous by her perfect ‘ten’ scores in Olympic gymnastics. Today they are world leaders for the Special Olympics and run their own gymnastics business. As Robinson said, by the time Bart was ten, his mother might well have said, ‘Stop it, we’re over it!’, but instead she recognised that this is what got Bart’s energy going. At the same time she couldn’t possibly have seen what gymnastics would lead to or that her son would one day be married to a Romanian super-star gymnast because life is not linear, but organic. ‘You create life as you live it,’ said Robinson. His message was clear. Not many people end up doing what they thought about at age fifteen. Everyone is unique. We must believe in the power of creativity, recognise talent and work on that. It is a mistake, he said, to ‘raise standards’ in school and
generate competition, because that is what stifles creativity. Robinson then made the distinction between learning, education and school. Learning, he said, is the most natural process for us. We want to learn new skills and gain new understandings. Humans are intensely curious creatures. ‘Think,’ he said, ‘how babies learn to speak in the first eighteen months of life. No one teaches them. You can’t. It’s too complicated. Children, he said, learn to speak by listening to you speak, no matter where they are. It is a natural process.’ Education on the other hand he described as an organised programme of learning. Whilst most children have no problem with learning, they might have problems with education. School, he described as a community of learners, which has institutional features. He warned that schools can be less about learning and more about efficiencies and cost. Such a system, he said, creates problems. ‘When I talk to politicians about how to solve the problem of disengaged students with low grades who are unemployed, I say to them, stop causing the problems!’ The problems in Robinson’s view are endless testing and school itself. ‘We have what we need to improve education but need to reframe the culture of testing and efficiency,’ he said. Returning to education, he said that in his experience most people say they know what education is until they start talking about it, because it can be controversial. Robinson on the other hand has very clear ideas about what education is for and proceeded to define what he sees as the overall aims for education. His definition is as follows: ‘To enable students to understand the world around them and the talents within them so that they can become fulfilled individuals and active, compassionate citizens’
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He said there are four big purposes for education and the first of these is economic. Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent, he said. The question is what type of education is needed to achieve this? There was a time, said Robinson, when a university degree was a passport for a job. That is not true now because there is no guarantee. Well qualified students can’t necessarily find work to match their qualifications and some employers are not interested in degrees. The workplace has changed dramatically. Even in the creative industries, robots are about to take over. Social and emotional learning is more important now, he said and students need to be adaptable and creative and bring new ideas that they can put into practice. The emphasis on national standards and testing ironically works against them. Add to that the idea that
life is not linear and collaboration and creativity become even more crowded and more connected. Living multi-culturally more important, he said. That is why countries like Singapore provides new opportunities for students to be enriched although and South Korea that have valued standards and testing for differences in belief systems can also create hostility. Schools so long are now rethinking then need to promote their strategies. They are healthy attitudes to living looking to collaboration respectfully with diversity. and creativity which they The third purpose recognise has been absent for education is social from their educational according to Robinson. agenda which has been more Education should enable about drilling their students young people to become in rote learning to succeed active and compassionate in the tests. He noted citizens. Schools should Yong Zhao has previously provide a gateway to pointed out, that there is fulfilment irrespective of an inverse relationship class or race. But today between countries that do we see many inequities well on standardised tests in society with huge gaps and those that demonstrate between rich and poor. entrepreneurial flair. T h e s e i n e qu it i e s are Entertainment at the INTASE conference break The second purpose for reflected in schools. In education he said is to appreciate culture. ‘Education should enable Robinson’s view standards education makes this worse. What students to understand and appreciate their own cultures and to is needed is collaboration within schools so that students can respect the diversity of others,’ he said. That includes promoting learn from and with each other, he said. The second aspect of a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. He defined culture teaching students to be active citizens is also critical. ‘Students,’ as the values and forms of behaviour that characterise different he said, ‘have to live the democratic process. He said they have social groups. ‘It’s the way we do things around here,’ he said. to practice the principles of democracy every day at school and Cultures include belief systems, patterns of work, relationships, democracy has to be reinvented for every generation of students. food, dress, artistic expression and language all interwoven. In that way democratic societies will grow strong and we will Our world is culturally complex now as we have become see improvements in numbers at the ballot box during elections.
The last purpose for education, he said is personal. Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. Teachers, he said, have a huge impact on kids. They can lift them or they can crush them. They have the job of enriching the minds and hearts of these living people. Engaging students as individuals is at the heart of succeeding he said. What people in the end will contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them. The challenge for educators is to pay attention to the individual student’s aptitudes, interests and dispositions, he said. If teachers are ever to draw out individual student’s talents and fulfil the four purposes for education they need access to a broad curriculum, to create the conditions under which students can learn effectively and build relationships with their students, said Robinson. The Global Education Reforms work the other way, he said. They are about telling teachers what to teach and then testing the kids to see if they have retained it. We have reduced the importance of the humanities and physical education with compliance and testing, he said and that is what must change. Narrowing the curriculum is the opposite of what will lead to student success. ‘If you have flexibility in the curriculum, get the school culture right and build a collaborative climate then engagement will increase and students will succeed. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are not enough, he said. Students need equal doses of the arts, the humanities, physical exercise and play. But more important than any subject content is school culture. It’s all about moving from the industrial mind set to the organic, he said. That means leaving the GERM behind.
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