Sir Ken Robinson: Creativity Expert, Author, and Viral Ted Speaker

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Hello, this is Guy Kawasaki. Welcome to the next Remarkable People podcast. My guest today is Sir Ken Robinson, Professor Emeritus of the University of Warwick and a British author who has excelled as a teacher, researcher, writer and speaker. Acclaimed by Fast Company as one of the world's elite thinkers on creativity and innovation. He's also a member of the Thinkers50 list as one of the world's top management thinkers. Robinson's book the Element How Finding youg Passion Changes Everything became a New York Times bestseller. It was translated into 23 languages and sold over a million copies. Robinson achieved international acclaim for his 2006 TED Talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? This has been viewed by 64,333,554 people. He wants you and I to be part of a revolution in education. In a nutshell, he thinks that creativity is as important as literacy and that schools are stifling the creativity of our children. Growing up with polio in working class Liverpool, he knew he'd have to earn a living by using his head, not his hands. In 2003, he attained his greatest honor. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts. Have you ever wondered how one gets knighted? Keep listening and you'll find out. When we began our interview, I tried to explain who I was. He said he knew who I was and proceeded to tell me a great story about the humility of Herb Alpert. I'm Guy Kawasaki and this is the Remarkable People podcast. And now you. Here's Sir Ken Robinson.

Do you know Herb Alpert? Herb Alpert, Yeah.

Tijuana Brass.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

That's how old I am.

Well, likewise. Yeah. So he's become a very good friend of ours. He's 82, 83. He won a Grammy last year. He's a painter and a sculptor as well as everything else. I had an email from him. I knew of him because he'd funded a school down in Santa Monica, so I knew of him. But I'd never met him. I mean, I knew his work. So I got this email completely out of the blue, and it said, dear Sir Ken, my name is Herb Alford. I'm a trumpeter. Is that wonderful? Just wonderful. And he said, I. I saw your TED Talk last night and I was very affected by it. You're talking my language. If there's anything I can ever do to support you, I would love to meet. Of course, if you don't have time, I understand. And I send you my very best wishes for all that you're doing. Really, it was so humble. Of course I contacted him. He said, if you're ever in la. That's right. It turned out our offices were like four blocks apart. But because of that, it took three months to arrange the meeting. And because he was true. It's like with you trying to organize an eclipse, all these moving parts. But we eventually got together and we've just been firm friends since. You find that often that people who have achieved great things aren't bumptious about it. They're doing what they think is important. And they often take for granted and underplay their own achievements and their own abilities. And the blowhards are the people you tend to avoid.

I want to start with that 64 million view YouTube. Did you do anything to optimize the virality of it?

No, I didn't do anything to personally to promote it. I mean, I had thought of having basements full of small children tapping on the keyboard and.

Donald Trump Jr. Buying books.

Exactly right. Or adapting some form of Morse code system. It just kept tapping. Yeah, but no, I showed up for the event. I hadn't been to TED before I'd heard of it, and it was a remarkable event. This is when it was held in Monterey. It's a small private conference. I say small, there are 1200 people there. But it was a regular crowd and they'd been meeting there often. And it was a kind of industry group, technology, entertainment, design. And its reputation preceded it because to be invited to speak was a thing.

I've never been invited at the time.

Have you? Not TED X's.

Yeah, but not Ted.

Well, we should fix that.

I'm not in the major leagues.

We'll get on that. But yeah, I was invited to speak. People had heard of the work I'd been doing. I don't quite know how these invitations come about. I think it was partly people I knew. I have a really good friend who's also now our lawyer, called Ken Hertz. And he used to go and he said to Me often that you should be at ted. And I think he probably had a word with him and said they're on the lookout for people they thought had something interesting to say. And so I think Ken was the route. But yeah, I sat there. It was a fascinating conference. This protocol of 18 minute talks was interesting. There's no great mystery to that. I think Ricky Wurman, who founded it, decided after experiencing, in consultation with the community, that if you give everybody an hour, then not everybody can hold a room for an hour. That's the first thing. Secondly, eight a day. Yeah, that's right. And that if you start having breakout sessions and panels. Well, you know, panels are often where conferences go to die. And that group wanted to hear everything. So they decided by, I guess, that process that they want to get more speakers on the main stage. So they gave every 20 minutes and he policed it. And you have a minute to get on, a minute to get off, and there you go, you've got 18 minutes. But it became rather mythical that you had an 18 minute thing. So I showed up. I was very interested in it and I'd been traveling and I gave some thought to it, obviously, because it was a big. It was an important event.

That was nice of you.

Well, you know, it's not like I just wandered in, but I. I mean, my style always is to try and connect with the room I'm speaking to. And I can't read speeches. I'm not very good at that. I don't want to. And so I end up, I realized over time with. It's essentially. It's a set list of. Just jot down beforehand in kind of five sections for any talk, whether it's an hour and a half or, you know, or 20 minute one. The key things I want to get over and that kind of rough sequence to it. But after that, it's improv, really. It's playing jazz. I talked to Herb about it, really, and said it's the same thing. I mean, there are riffs that, you know, work that you've tried before and you kind of refined a bit and stories that you feel might be relevant and there's an arc to it, but after that it's kind of freeform.

And you didn't rehearse that talk 50 times or.

No, but, you know, it's what I know about. And I mean, if they'd asked me to go in and talk about the genome, I'd have probably have to spend a bit of time. But you become familiar with certain sorts of ideas. But I Always like to push it when I'm giving a talk anyhow, but I've no idea when I get it really quite how it's going to run or what the stories are going to be. I mean, I didn't know the stories I was going to tell when I got up. But no, it was a speech in that room and it seemed to go very well and it was very funny. They didn't put the talks online at the time. And sometime after the conference, Chris Anderson, who runs ted, contacted me and said, we're thinking of putting some of the talks in this year's event on the website so people can get a feel for what happens at ted and we'd like to put yours on. Would you be okay with that? I said, yeah, could I see it? Could you send me it? Because I couldn't accurately remember how it looked. I said, can you send it to me? So we did, and I showed it to my wife and I. Terry and I have been together 42 years now, and we've always worked together. She's my kind of mentor in lots of areas. So we sat and watched it and said, what you think? And she said, it's all right. She said, that's all right. She said, I wish you'd worn a different shirt. I thought, come on. So it went on and, you know, it didn't. It wasn't an overnight sensation. It took a year or two to build, but then the flywheel starts to turn and people recommend it. So, yes, it's been a great thing. I'm delighted about it, partly because I'm passionate about the ideas and getting them out there. I think that ted's motto of ideas worth spreading was tailor made for me because it's what I do, I hope, and therefore it getting out there in the way it did was very important. But it was interesting to TED it off. It's an interesting thing because I have worked in this world for a long time. And I remember speaking, I did an event a few years after that TED Talk, and at a university and over lunch, some guy said to me, you've been at this a long time. I said, what's that? He said, trying to change education. I said, I have. Yeah. He said, what is it, seven years now? I said, how do you mean, seven years since that TED Talk?

Well, that's when they start the clock.

Yeah. I said, yes, but I was alive before that. That was for me. It was just. It was a moment. But it turned out to be a seminal moment for me because it got so Much attention. Chris would say the same for ted. I think it shaped their idea of what a TED Talk could be. And when they asked people subsequently and have done how they found out about ted, an awful lot of people said it was because they came across that talk and wondered what TED was. So there was a very interesting synergy. But to the point I could have given that talk 10 years before, probably did in some version somewhere. But it was that confluence of the growth of social media, YouTube, mobile devices, and more and more people going online that found the flame of that. It wouldn't be. It's like Uber couldn't have happened without the technological climate in which it was conceived. So, yeah, I had a great story.

Recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was 6, 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. And the teacher was fascinated. 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.

I watched many of your videos and I want to ask you.

Me too. How spooky is that?

I want to ask you how you find your quotes.

Because.

Your quotes, you know, the stories and the quotes and the things, are just spot on.

Oh, thank you. I read a lot. Not always the entire book. Well, you know, you get a feel for the DNA and the energy of a book quite early on. You know, you kind of think, okay, I got this. And I sort of jump around it a bit. I mean, some books I read and live with for a while, I read widely and absorb things, you know, and some things stick in my mind the way they do. You think? That's beautifully said. I was writing something this morning about dance and I was remembering. It just. It's always stuck with me that there was a famous British conductor called Thomas Beecham, Sir Thomas Beecham, very celebrated. And he was asked at one point about the popularity of these prom. Of the prom concerts that are held in London every at the Albert Hall. And during the course of his comments, he said, you have to understand. He said that the English don't understand music, but they love the noise it makes.

I mean, I rest my case. You just pulled that quote out of the air.

But that's such a beautiful observation. Isn't it true? They love the noise it makes. I think that's great. I tend to absorb vivid comments of that sort. And you want to credit the people who come up with them. So I don't know. A lot of what I do is about trying to be as clear as I can on the things I'm saying. And if I feel somebody else has said it better, or more aptly, then I'm very happy to enlist them.

Are you ever struck by perhaps the irony, or maybe more negatively, the hypocrisy of people listening to your thoughts about education and creativity and, you know, anti standardized testing and the tiger moms and all this kind of stuff, and yet many of your audience is sitting there, they went to Ivy League, they're trying to get their kids into Ivy League. Their kids are getting tutored in SATs, and they love what you say, but then they go home and you got to get into darkness. You got to get into kindergarten right now. So you're ever struck by that irony or.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not the only people I talk to. But you're right, there's a significant proportion of people in any group that nod away left liberal. This is absolutely right. Yeah. It's like. And I. And I think it's an exact analogy. It's like with the environmental movement and the climate movement that people pay all kinds of lip service to, and they say, this is awful. You know, I'm not going to buy any more plastic bags. That's me finished with that. And then they go home, have a nice sirloin steak, and he gets a private jet home. Well, yeah, that's the most egregious example. But it is right. And I'm not overly cynical about that, because these things are difficult. It is a struggle, particularly when you're asking people, as it were, to change their minds, to change how they think about something. That's the first thing. People find that very difficult because you grow up with a community of ideas. And it's one of the features of cultures, isn't it, that we mistake our own cultural perspectives for common sense. And it's why other people's cultures strike us as odd, exotic or nonsensical. And I remember years ago, we were in an event in New Zealand, and anyone who's been then you would know that the ceremonies always begin, don't they, with the Maori dance, the hakon. Yeah. And. And in this particular case, in this theater, it was a beautifully done thing. But you can sit there comprehending of it and think, if you just look at it at face value, you think, what is this? The guy puts a leaf down on the stage and screams at it, and then screams us not to go near it. And we're not going to. That's the point. We have no intention of going anywhere near it. But it's. When you stand outside of a cultural frame of reference, what other people do can seem bizarre, nonsensical, totally irrational. But for them it's deeply invested with a powerful set of meanings. It's like years ago, I helped to set up an academy in Hong Kong for the performing arts. And the first time I went to Hong Kong, we were taken to a Chinese opera. That's very hard work if you're not from that culture. It just is.

Opera in any culture is hard.

Well, that can also certainly be true. But with Chinese opera, if you're unused to it. Well, firstly, it happens in a stadium. That doesn't happen with opera in the West. I mean, you have big theaters, but not in indoor arenas. You're not at the Staples center, which is the equivalent of Chinese opera. It's a night out. Families there, they're getting popcorn, drinking Cokes, waiting for the opera to start. And that's very interesting and so deep. It's more like British pantomime or European commedia dell', arte, I should say. People have stock characters and they specialize them throughout their career. There are standard stories they tell. It's a bit like the fairy tales of myths. And often the companies will be brought together and will go on with very little rehearsal because they're there to tell this well known story using characters which are beloved. But then there's the aesthetic of the music, which is dissonant to a European, to a Western ear. And I worked out quite early on that this performance, which was quite long, that if I could find some way of getting hold of the percussionist and Sanin singing, it would have made the whole evening much more enjoyable because it's that kind of boing, boing, boing when anybody moves but the crowd is absolutely laughing. It's exactly like listening to a foreign language where people are communicating easily, comfortably, fluently because it's their language and you listen to it. And if you stand outside of a language you don't know, it's simply an extraordinarily incomprehensible series of noises. And you think, how can this possibly mean anything? But it does. And so yes, that, that, that when you face audiences with ideas which challenge what they've grown up with, what they consider to be common sense, what they believe to be the only way to do things, you can sense they're taking it in at one level, but you're asking them to change their whole worldview so they can entertain the idea. But where they can act on it, some simply can't. But enough people do, I think. And when enough people do think the times come, or the evidence amounts to something that's substantial, or they've heard the message so often that it starts to really get through, like this is what we mean, then you start to see a shift happening. So I don't give up on that. And I accept the fact that people do find it difficult to think really fundamentally differently.

Was there some formative experience that.

Cause.

You to become this evangelist for education? Can you look backwards and say, okay, so that was it. That's why I'm where I am?

No, not one single thing. It's an accumulation. And I feel it's generally. Sometimes there's a straight line. You can point to a crossroads and say, that was it. I did a book, as you know, called the Element Finding youg Passion Changes Everything. And originally we were going to call that book Epiphany because I'd spoken to a number of people who had had that moment in their lives. And at the time I did the first TED Talk, I mentioned the book, and it was at a time when it was being called Epiphany, and we subsequently changed the title. So that talk has done wonders for subsequent books which were called Epiphany. But it didn't have much bearing on the book I was referring to because we changed the title of it. I talk in that book about how people find a calling in their lives. And sometimes it is like falling in love at first sight. Some people, it's like that. And I mentioned quite a few people in the book for whom that was true. But more often, I guess I think it is more often people find that they fall in love with something. It's like when people suddenly find that they fall in love with somebody was an old friend, you know, and you hear that from time to time. They've known each other. They grew up going to school together or something happened to a previous partner. And this is somebody they'd known for years. And they're chatting and suddenly they realize they're looking at each other differently. Something happened between them, the energy changed. And I think that's more common because people take for granted their own interests and their own talents. They think, if I can do that, if I'm interested, presumably anybody could be. But either way, I think that typically there are lots of influences on people, and there certainly have been in my life, I mean, there are some things, looking back, I can psychologize about. One of them, there's no question has a bearing on it, which. When I was a kid, I was brought up in a large family in Liverpool and I was surrounded by people who greatly dislike their education and didn't feel they had any benefit from it and couldn't wait to get out of it. And the only reason I got pushed more deeply into it was because I had polio as a kid and my parents wisely recognized I had to focus on my education because I wasn't going to be able to do manual work, which is what the rest of the family was capable of doing and where we came from. So my dad was always very insistent on that and I didn't really want to do it. This was Liverpool in the 1960s. Beatle mania was happening down the street and my brother was in a rock band. So the last thing I wanted to do was sit at home and conjugate irregular Latin verbs. But there's a whole backstory to that, which I told somewhere about how it came to be that I went to the local grammar school and that was because I had certain people come into my life, certain teachers who saw something in me without whom I wouldn't be sitting here now talking to. Absolutely not. They had a massive influence, as did my family and I found myself in the company as a kid I went into special ed and so I spent five years in special ed surrounded by people with all kinds of physical disabilities.

Particularly this was before ADHD and stuff like that. Yeah, this is physical special ed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it was interesting in Liverpool at the time that they distinguished between the physically handicapped and, as they called them, the mentally handicapped at the time. We weren't very good at euphemisms in the 1960s hadn't quite got the hang of them, or the 1950s, I should say. And there were two separate schools. If you were judged to have a mental disability, or mental handicap, as they called it, you went in one direction and if you had a physical handicap, you went in a different direction. Although people always mingle them up. I mean, I found that as good. I still do sometimes, you see, if people these days, I tend to get into wheelchairs in airports because my family had an intervention with me and I never wanted to do it because I spent a lot of time as a child in a wheelchair and it was a triumph to get out of it, so I didn't want to get back in it anytime soon. But a few years back. They were just so fed up with me taking my time getting through airports. I said, for God's sake, get in the wheelchair. So. And now, of course, I get off the plane and think, where's my wheelchair? I'm all outraged if it's not there. But I find that if you're in a wheelchair being pushed and you go to the desk, the check in agent will normally speak to the person pushing the wheelchair, not you. They'll say things like, does he have his boarding pad?

That's interesting.

They do.

Still, because you have a physical issue, they think you have a mental issue.

It's associated with it that you're somehow dependent. You're not fully independent as a person. I think that's it. A friend of mine, years ago, he was blind and he had a show on the BBC, it may still be going, actually about attitudes to disability. And it was called does he Take Sugar? And it's very telling because there is a. So at school there was always that tendency for people to kind of mix the two things up. But something that struck me at school always was I wasn't planning. This wasn't a career move. It was just an observation as a child that there were kids there with all sorts of handicaps, as we called them then. They had people with polio that was very popular, it was very passionate at the time. And there were people with cerebral palsy, all sorts of disabilities, but they. And I didn't identify themselves bad. It was just something that was. That you had. What you were drawn to with people was, you know, were they interesting, were they funny? You know, were they good to hang out with? And it was certainly. It's been a motif in my work that everybody. I haven't found anybody yet in my life. Everybody has special needs somewhere. Something. There's something. There may be lots of things. And often for kids who've got physical disabilities, that draws people's attention and they think that's what they're dealing with. But that may not be what they're dealing with at all. It may just be something else. They have the full palette of emotional and social complexities that everybody has. And people who also don't appear to have a physical difficulty may have a considerable one that you just can't see it. You don't know what they're dealing with. So it was a compassionate thing to corral kids off in one direction because they thought these people need special attention. But it created a false barrier, I think, and very often people were misjudged and underestimated. Because in education, I mean, it's certainly one of the roots of the way I think about this is that education works on such a narrow view of ability that we've created a very large conception of inability or disability as a consequence. And part of the view of ability we have is rooted in academic work, which is mainly transacted through speech and writing and mathematics. So if you have a difficulty with any of those, you're judged to be deficient somehow. When these kids often had brilliant minds in other directions, but what's true of them is true of every kid. The kids who don't flourish or have an interest in a particular way of thinking or particular sort of study, and also because a lot of it is so crushingly boring, are thought to be the problem. And so there are remedial programs to deal with the problems they're presenting. And they're not presenting problems, they're just having a problem with it. It's why I tell the story about Gillian Lin, the dancer, that she was judged to be a problem, and as that doctor famously said, she's not. So excuse it, answer. So as soon as you broaden out your conception of ability and capability and possibility, these things that appear to be problems disappear and the system creates the problem. And then we pathologize people for being in the system. So to me, it's. Yeah, it has roots in my own experience. They're not causal roots. I just look back on them and think, there's been a long history to me thinking about this stuff. But also, I think it's a human rights issue, genuinely. It's a matter of giving people their due to live the life that they are capable of having and having the fulfillment in their lives that we all want and deserve. And that's not just an opinion. It's set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in every political tract, including the much ignored Constitution of these United States.

That would be a whole other conversation.

But I became a citizen here 18 months ago, so I had to take the citizenship test. And that requires reading the Constitution and being able to answer questions on it, which is how you can distinguish naturalized citizens from members of Congress, as it turns out, because, oh my God, we've actually read it and we know just how appalling it's being. Appalling. It's being abused just now.

I'll tell you a funny story. So a few days ago for this podcast, I interviewed Leon Panetta. And Leon Panetta is the band he said when he was a freshman congressman, his mentor said there's two things, Leon. You always do what's right for your people in California that elected you. And the second thing is you have to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning. So I said to Leon, does the Senate bathroom have mirrors? He started busting up. And then I said, or does the majority in the minority bathroom, is it different? Does one have mirrors?

No, they're not.

So I don't know what Mitch McConnell.

Sees, but okay, so, well, we know the White House has wall to wall mirrors. That doesn't seem to make any difference.

You briefly touched on a subject that I'm wrestling with, how you put two and two together here. So, like you, my writing, and I think a lot of my development is largely the result of one teacher in high school. Name is Harold Keebles. He taught English, and he was the most hard ass English teacher. He would make you write essays. He would circle mistakes. If you made a mistake, you had to write the sentence incorrectly, cite the rule that you broke. Dangling prep, lack of serial comma, whatever. It was passive voice. And then you had to rewrite the sentence. And so there was no negotiation with him. So he was a huge influence on me at the time. I hated it. Twenty years later, I've discovered he was the best teacher I ever had. So now that's how I think of Harold Keebles. And then I look at your body of work and I may be paraphrasing this wrong, but your body of work is all about creativity and flexibility and realizing people have their bright spots and whatever. So how do you put two and two together? Hard ass Harold Keebles telling me to put a comma there and don't use the passive voice. And at the same time you're saying, well, everybody's beautiful, everybody has a talent. Well, doesn't the Harold Kieble's approach stifle the person who doesn't want to write incomplete sentences?

I don't know, Harold, okay? But some of the best teachers I had in school were sticklers. English teachers, Latin teachers, some of the mathematics teachers. Though I didn't frankly enjoy maths very much when I was at school. No, there's no conflict between rigor, discipline and creativity? No. How Harold taught, I don't know. That's about style. And there's a lot to be said about pedagogy, about how you do it and what works best. We had a Latin teacher who was an absolute authoritarian. He used to walk around the classroom. He looked a bit like Mr. Bean.

And don't all Latin Teachers look like actually not.

No, no, some don't. Some look like Batman. But he had used to stand up and cradle his cheek in his hand as he walked around. And he had a cane, more like a baton. And he threatened you with it, but in a pretty lame sort of way. But we lived in at a time and in a world where corporal punishment was still fine, as it is actually in some states in America still it shouldn't be, but it was just taken for granted. But he had a style and a way of getting you involved in it by challenging you and demanding that you got it right eventually. Because he had a belief that you would get it right. But he used to feign this authoritarian attitude. And we all kind of went along with it. But we knew his barkers worse than his bite. But that was his style. So it depends. A lot, a lot of that is about teaching personality, which is maybe why Harold Keeble had such an impact on you. But in terms of creativity and relationship discipline, it's profound and necessary. And there are lots of misconceptions around creativity.

Well, what's profound and necessary?

The relationship between discipline and creativity is close and profound. You have to define it first. I mean creativity. There are two key terms in this for me. One is imagination. The other is creativity. Imagination is the capacity we all have, we're born with it as human beings. To bring into mind things that aren't present to our senses, to transcend the here and now, to anticipate the future, to reflect on the past, to step outside, to speculate, to ask, what if? It's not a single power, it's an amalgam of many powers that we have. But the ability to bring to mind things that aren't present is the root of it. Creativity is a step on from that. It's putting your imagination to work, it's applying it in some specific way. And I often ask people how creative they think they are. At conferences. People give themselves low scores for that. And one of the reasons is they think what they've just been asked is how artistic are you? The arts are certainly centers of creative activity, but you can be creative at anything that involves your intelligence. Mathematicians are among the most creative people I know. You can be a creative cook, engineer, business leader, anything. If you consider creativity as the process of having original ideas and have value. It's why people struggle when you give them a new idea, because it bends their head into odd shape. Now, I often talk to business about this. Some business are very good at generating new products. Apple was famously Good at that. But some of the biggest businesses haven't come up with any products like Walmart, they didn't create any products. But they're very good at systems and supply chain management and things of that sort of. There are organizations that are very good at services. It's like Starbucks. They've created a culture around coffee and all sorts of bizarre versions of coffee as a consequence, to me, bizarre anyway. So it's a practical process. You can't be creative if you don't do anything. And if you're doing something, you have to be working in a medium of some sort of. Now, it could be numbers, it could be an intellectual medium, it could be sound, it could be playing an instrument. But you can't be a creative musician. To go back to Thomas Beechen. In the end, if you can't control the instrument that you're playing now, it doesn't mean that you have to be a virtuoso on the violin before you can do anything creative. I grew up in Liverpool. I'm very quick and fond of talking about the Beatles, but the Beatles changed the face of popular culture, those four guys. And when they first got together, they could hardly string three chords together. Didn't stop them getting on. If you look at the arc of their musical development over the course of 10 years, it went from musically fairly rudimentary songs, though very powerful ones, to the White Album and beyond, where they're dealing with complex harmonic forms and multiple forms of orchestration and instrumentation. And they were sponges. They learned from everybody around them. I did a documentary recently called In Search of Greatness with Gabe Polsky. It was about people who've achieved enormously distinctive reputations in sport. So they had Pele, Wayne Gretzky, Jerry Rice, Serena Williams and me. Guy, I mean, who's going to call.

The kid with Paul Eels?

Who are you going to call? Right. But I was talking about some of these issues, but to listen to them, it's very important. Jerry Rice said he doesn't think he'd get selected these days because all the selection procedures are so standardized, he said. But he said, I had a great career, but I wasn't bigger or faster than anybody else. I just read the game differently. Wayne Gretzky said the same thing. He said, I studied the game. I'm not a big guy. I was up against all these big guys, but I figured the game out differently. And they talk about the need for creativity in sport, but you can't be Wayne Gretzky. You can't be Muhammad Ali. If you're not in shape if you can't do it.

There's a baseline.

Yes, that's the baseline, but you get better at doing it. So. And often what brings the best in people is when they talk about the elements, about. It's when they discover their medium. You know, Wayne Gretzky is a fantastic hockey player, you know, but nobody's saying, well, that's all very well, but how are you on the. On the trombone? We have to modify our opinion of you because, frankly, when it comes to the tuba, he's pretty poor. People can excel, actually. It's what Herb Alpert said. When Herb Alpert was a teenager, he was at some kind of musician, and he picked a trumpet up off the table and he said, my life changed in that moment. He said, I blew into his sink. And I realized. He said, I could speak through the trumpet better than I could speak in language. And so. But he is now a virtuoso. It became so. So there's no conflict between the idea of discipline and coming up with original work. In fact, they depend upon each other as long as you understand the pedagogical principles that underpin it and that the. And that there are different levels of originality. So to go back to your teacher, there are conventions of grammar according to what part of the world you live in. I mean, one of the great transitions moving from England to America is becoming used to different forms of spelling and conventions of speech and things that you can say and you can't. But also, some things are nonsensical if you don't get the grammar right. But the other thing is also true is that language does evolve. It's not static. It's really not set in stone in the sense that it's unchanging. The French tried to make it that way through the Academie Francaise. They tried to pin it down and not let it all, but they still let words in, like the weekend and the laptop and all of that. But it is evolving. There was a wonderful interview years back on the BBC where they were interviewing on the kind of flagship. On their flagship news program called the Today program on the radio. They were interviewing an American academic, and in particular, the interviewer was asking him, with some irritation, about why in America, people insist on turning nouns into verbs. He said, how do you mean? He said, well, like to action. Why we've got perfectly good verbs. Or like to do, to perform, to bring about to action. When did that become a thing? And you can go on with these. There are lots and lots of Them. And the guy defended it, and he said, well, but language does evolve in its use. I mean, look what happened in rap and in patois and in local accents. If you travel around the UK and if you're from one part of the world, I can guarantee people could learn English at some of the best programs in America. And you go to Liverpool, you wouldn't know what the hell people were talking about because it's so mangled. It's like people from England would have a hard time in Brooklyn, you think, what are you talking about? So he said, no, but language is like that. It's a living form, and people change it in its use and conventions change. So, for example, in America, it's okay to have a capital letter after a semicolon. You'd be marked down in England for doing that. Is that right? Absolutely. Why would you have a capital letter in the middle of a sentence? It doesn't make any sense. But here it's fine. It's just a convention. So this guy defended all of that. And so this interviewer said to him, well, do you think? Can you see any end to it? And he said, I loved it. He said, no. He said, I can't think of a noun that couldn't be verbed. And he meant it. So there's no conflict. That's what I'm saying. But there are conventions and rules, and you can spot it when people just don't know what they're doing. That's different. It's not a free for all, I don't think. And the community figures it out.

And what if some tiger mom or tiger dad listens to this podcast and says, you see, even Ken Robinson says that you need to study math, you need to study grammar. You need to do that. I don't care if you want to be a dancer. You need to.

Oh, I didn't say that. Oh, I didn't say that. But I do think that mathematics and numeracy and literacy are vital cultural and social skills, no question about it. But they're not the only ones, and we shouldn't sacrifice all the other ones to those. And that's my problem with standardized education just now. We've become obsessed with these particular disciplines, like the STEM disciplines. They're very important. We at the end of the TED talk you mentioned, I said there or somewhere else that dance is as important as mathematics in school. Actually, it was very interesting for me. They did a profile of me on the BBC because I'm a very distinguished person guy. I'm just saying, I'M Mommy around? Yeah. I'm just saying as part of it. They took me back to my old school, the one I mentioned, the special needs school. It's now empty. I walked around and I remembered all kinds of things that happened there. And then we went to the studio, and the interviewer, who is very smart and gracious and insightful, done all sorts of things. But at one point she said to me, you said, didn't you in one of your talks that dance is as important as mathematics in school? I said, that's right, I did. And she said, you can't be serious. I said, why wouldn't I be serious about that? She said, but it's obviously not as important. I said, go on, why not? And she said, well, mathematics is a vital part of being able to function the words. She said, I mean, how many people will leave school and go on to be dancers? I said, well, but how many people are going to go on to be mathematicians? That's not the point. And you don't teach mathematics to produce a new generation of mathematicians. You'll produce some who are happy and interested and engaged with it, and you don't. I'm not arguing for dancing schools to create the next generation of dancers. Some will, but most people won't. It'll just become part of their general education. And the fact is that because of the way our systems have evolved, the way our cultures evolved, we tend to associate intelligence with a particular type of analytical activity. But the fact is we all live in bodies. And as children grow, what they become, who they become, has everything to do with how they understand their own embodiment. And I'm not saying it's more important than anything else, but it's as important as everything else. And the evidence always is, if you have good dance programs in schools, a lot of the problems that you see in schools, like lack of attention, start to clear up. Like tension between genders start to go violence. I quoted in this talk. I gave a whole lecture on it in London at the London School of Contemporary Dance. There are programs of ballroom dancing which have been used in schools in New York, in Brooklyn, some of the toughest schools in Chicago. And the effect on the school culture, on relationships, on sensibility, on easing the social anxiety that kids have and also making them feel more holistically engaged in their own growth and development is remarkable. And the consequence of seeing a broad view of education isn't theoretical, it's actual. I can take it to schools and show this is how it works. And it's not Saying it's more important than maths. It's just as important. But incidentally, there are lots of studies to show that if you have a good arts program in schools, particularly and including a good dance program, kids do better at maths as it hands.

But I mean, education is underfunded and dance and arts are underfunded in the underfunded.

Yeah, that's right. I mean. Yeah, well, that's right.

Can it get any worse?

No, not really. So it has to get better. But that's the thing, you know, people often assume that we can't afford these things, but we can. I did published a book a few years ago called Creative Schools, which is terrific, by the way. I'm just saying you should read this book. It's well worth anybody's time. But it was to set out not just the principles but the practice of how this works out. But at the time when we're doing the research, in 2013, it was. Now we were looking at the different economic sectors when this legislation in America became law. No Child Left behind, and it's not unique to America. A lot of countries have gone down this standardization route in education. But in America, no Child Left behind required that schools administered standardized tests at key points throughout a child's career in those disciplines. Science and maths and numeracy, partly because they keyed in with these international league tables. And politicians wanted to know how America was doing, but they didn't provide the test. They threw that open to the commercial world. So this has been a bonanza for the publishing companies. They love it. So in 2013, the best we could make out, we did the figures. The National Football league was a $9 billion enterprise. The US cinema domestic box office was about 11 point something. 11.2, I think. The education, testing and support industry in America was a $16 billion business.

Really?

$16 billion in tests. States spend millions of dollars a year on tests to the companies. Then they spend millions of dollars training people to administer the tests. And then they allocate huge amounts of teachers time to prepping for the tests and marking the tests and recovering from the tests. And they base other funding decisions on the test. They base promotions on the test. Why they're called high stakes tests. And it's all been a catastrophic waste of time. It's done nothing to raise standards in school. It's done everything to depress morale. It's accelerated teacher turnover. It hasn't remedied the dropout crisis. And America is still pretty much where it was on the international league tables. 20 years ago. It's just lined the pockets of the testing companies.

What would you do differently?

Well, can you imagine what you could do differently? These are public tax dollars, by the way. I said this recently at national meeting at the school boards. Can you imagine what you could do to improve education in this country with an extra $16 billion a year to spend on it? If you invest that in the selection of teachers, the professional development of teachers, in facilities, in infrastructure, on cultural programs, on links with the community, on parental engagement programs, $16 billion would go a long way. But all this has been just drained away in the interests of an unsubstantiated belief that testing people until they pass out with anxiety is a good way to improve education. It's insanity. By the way, there are other countries in the world who don't do that or who are moving away from doing that. The example that's always given, and it's a good example, is Finland. This whole standardization mania began in America 40 years ago under the Reagan administration with a. A report called A Nation at Risk, which drew proper attention. It's not that there wasn't a problem. There was a problem. Kids weren't doing as well in schools as other countries seem to be doing. But it's one thing to say there's a problem, but then if you misdiagnose it and make the wrong prescription, you don't solve it. You just compound it. 40 years ago, this is when it began. 40 years ago, Finland diagnosed a problem, but they went the opposite direction. Their system has no testing in it, no standardized testing. They have a full and rounded curriculum which includes the arts and dance in most schools. They have vocational routes after high school. They promote collaboration, not competition. And they outperform America on every index. And America could be doing that if they'd gone in the same direction. But instead, it made this fatal mistake to standardize everything in practical terms.

Is that something that an enlightened president, secretary of education, governor, superintendent of education decides to do, or is it something that parents demand? Is it top down or bottom up?

It's all the above. The decisions to move in this direction were taken politically by a succession of presidents, and none of them in recent history really has fully understood, I think, the genuine challenge of education. George W. Bush didn't. And no Child Left behind was a bipartisan piece of legislation. He didn't. Sadly, the Obama administration didn't get their arms around it in the way they could have done. And this administration certainly isn't getting their arms around it in the way they Should. But this is a big deal because it goes from the implications for children as individuals and families and communities, which are considerable. America continues to have an enormous problem of non graduates from high school. I'm not arguing against schools, by the way. I'm all for schools, but we have to rethink what a school is. But a lot of kids leave school early and don't graduate. And there's ample evidence to show that kids do better economically and so on in the way things are now if they do complete high school. I say now because the world's changing rapidly, so we've got to change what we do in high school as well. But a lot of kids who leave school early, they may go into the forms of education, a lot don't. And it's not true to say that if you don't complete high school, you end up in jail. That's clearly not true. Not true at all. What is true is a very high proportion of people in the correctional system didn't complete high school. So there is a correlation. And it's mainly young men of color who end up there. And one of the reasons for that. Well, there are multiple reasons for it, but one of the reasons the correctional system is doing so well out of all this is because it's a commercial enterprise as well. And it costs a lot more to have somebody in prison for a year than it does to keep them in high school and educate them properly. So it's an example, I think, of a culture that's beginning to turn in on itself. And it's a big deal for individuals, but it's also a big deal as countries and globally, because we've created two massive crises in the last couple of generations. One is the natural environment. We're teetering on the edge of an abyss here. And I think, I don't know why people are resisting the idea and not wanting to grapple with it. But also we have a crisis in the human world, the crisis of culture. And that's not a fantasy, it's simply true. If you look at the levels of depression, suicide, drug dependency, these are off the charts. Education is not the cause of them all, but it contributes to them. And it's the old thing. If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. And there's a lot education could do to remedy these things. The reason I'm saying my life's not a straight line any more than yours was. If you look at social media, when I gave that talk in 2010, 2006, I'm sorry, the smartphone wasn't available. It didn't come out till 2007, and the tablet didn't come out till 2010. And now people are behaving as if civilization is impossible without them. But look, 10 years out from here when AI and machine learning really starts to kick in, these are transformative, revolutionary devices. But nobody along the way anticipated social media in the way it's grown. I mean, Twitter, really, nobody was talking about that. In 2006, Facebook was a kind of glint in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, and now it's fermented the Arab Spring. All these things ricochet and have a cumulative and largely unpredictable effect. And education is our only buttress against that. To help people not just navigate their own lives, but to anticipate, to collaborate, and to. As a species, we have to think very differently. So I think we're playing for big stakes here with education.

Let me offer a theory. So if you look at the job postings of many companies, companies that you would want your kids to work for, when you come down to the job posting, and there's the educational requirements, it's always BS, MS, PhD, and it seems to me that parents see that and then they tell their kids, you've got to do STEM or you won't get a job. Because Microsoft doesn't have a thing that says dance required. It has BS Computer Science. So that until companies realize that innovation and creativity happens from people without these kind of strict disciplines, parents are always going to force their kids into those curriculums.

Well, it's interesting. A chap called Vivek Wadhwa did a survey a few years back on the educational qualifications of leaders in Silicon Valley. You'd have to check it, but from memory, over 2/3 of them had degrees in the humanities. Yes, it's not a straight line. I'm not arguing against people doing college degrees or getting deep into discipline and becoming expert at it at all. But it's not the only route to success. And for most people, it's not a straight line anyhow. I mean, look at the numbers of lawyers who get churned out of the American university system. It's no wonder we're in such a tangle, because all these people have to do something. And what they mainly seem to spend their time doing is inventing more legal snags that they can help to unravel and charge for it. But an awful lot of them don't end up in the law at all. They go in all kinds of odd directions. I know people who did dance at school, who've gone in all. You know, they're in senior management positions and they. I mean, Sergey Brin and Larry Page went to Montessori schools. And they credit their success with the fact that they had this opportunity to develop at an early age in a way that has stood them in such good stead since. So that's what I mean about breaking the spell here for parents to think that the only way we can do it is the way it's currently done. There's a film called War Horse I don't know if you ever saw was a stage play as well, but it's about the cavalry in the First World War. A very good friend of mine, David Putnam, Lord Putnam, as you know, is, was a film director. He did Chariots of Fire, the Mission, a really very strong record with Hollywood movies. But he went to focus on education. But I was talking to him recently, he does a course now on filmmaking. There's a scene in War Horse, he shows a clip of it where the cavalry are charging towards the enemy positions and they're hidden kind of in some bushes and the enemy pull back the disguises they've been wearing and they're there with machine guns and they just slaughter the horses. And it's a very graphic illustration of two cultures colliding technologies colliding. There was a time when the horse was the best technology we had. But then you meet this thing and there's a sense in which that is happening in the culture, which is his point, that we're still educating people for a world that's disappearing and these new technologies are going to scythe down a lot of these ideas. And so giving kids a broadly based education, during the course of which they can discover the things they're particularly good at, but also doing it with an understanding that a lot of the jobs and occupations that we've become used to in the past may not exist in the current form in future. It's just pragmatic common sense. And I say this a lot. I did a book for parents called you'd Child in School and saying to them that you have to look at your child. And a lot of the parents know their kids aren't happy. But you're quite right to say that that one of the impediments to big change in education is the current set of parental expectations. I get that they do, but we're in the middle of a paradigm shift and a paradigm shift, it's a word that's overused. But you see it throughout history that when you see a big shift in the way things work. Like from the farming community to the industrial revolution, from the industrial to the information economy. People cling on to, a lot of people cling on to the old model. In fact they double down on it because it's what they know and they think, well it worked for my parents and they think they're doing the right thing. So part of this evangelizing as you described it, which isn't wrong, is as well to say to parents, are you sure you're doing the right thing for your kids here? We all want the same thing. We want kids to live happy, fulfilled, productive lives. We want them to become economically independent. God knows we do. We want them to find work that's interesting and fulfilling. But what is that then? What type of education do we need for the world we now live in?

In preparation for this last part of the discussion, I thought I would be doing something very clever and I would go to the Apple job listings and prove to you that even Apple, known for its creativity and innovation has dumbass job and education requirements. Okay, so I want to read you something. Apple is seeking a conceptual director to work in a team responsible for developing global multi platform marketing campaigns for Apple services which includes Apple Music, Arcade News, Icloud, Apple Care and more. So, okay, and more about the person. You know how to tell stories on any platform that drives engagement. You have a pulse on new and creative trends in digital marketing. Creative sensibility that extends across content genres. You excel at building cross functional relationships and fast paced organizations. This is going to be just great because when I come down to the education requirements it's going to say Masters of fine arts or whatever. Computer science. Okay, so you ready? The educational requirements on the Apple website for the position I just read is bachelor degree or equivalent work experience preferred. That blew my mind because I was fully expecting some kind of typical bachelor of Art final, you know, whatever.

Right?

Some kind of. It's so flexible. So maybe that's why Apple's so creative, because it's permeated even the job listing. So you don't even need a bachelor or equivalent work experience. It's just preferred, not required.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean is that an enlightened, your dance instructor, your dance student would qualify?

Absolutely, yeah. Yeah.

Which is a beautiful thing.

And I think Google's done that and number of other firms as well have said that we don't stick rigidly anymore to the idea that you have to have a college degree. None of this is an argument against having college Degree, but it's a kind of article of faith. It's like a sacrament, it has been for a long time that we need a degree. Why? Particularly when you see the experience a lot of people have in universities these days where it's a kind of. It's like a holding camp to, to keep you away from the job market for a bit longer and they're leaving with huge amounts of debt. The system's not working. It's true in other Asian countries as well. It's not just in America. But. No, I think that's good as you read it. Yeah, I mean that what it, what, what it says effectively is that we're prepared to look at all candidates and to judge them on their merits and on their experience. What a concept. Yeah, yeah, what a concept. It's like I was talking to somebody recently who spent her life in books and devoted to books and literature and she was looking at a job as a librarian. I forget which state this was in now. I was on the road and she's in her 40s but she wasn't allowed to apply for it because she didn't.

Have a degree in library sciences.

No, she didn't graduate high school maths. And she said, but it's got nothing to do with, I mean she's lived her life in books. It's that fixed mindset, you know where. Yeah, but you don't have that, so you can't do that. And so loosing that up, it doesn't mean it's a free for all. Because the people who are making this appointment will look at people's resumes, they'll look at what's involved. And I'm not saying there are commanding, there are commanding problems here. The numbers of people on earth just now, the way the job market's shifting. But we're much more likely to engage with these things if we think differently. It's exactly parallel, I think, to the climate movement. The system creates the problem here in the environment. We know that intensive industrial farming, which essentially sterilizes the environment so that eventually decays and erodes. It's a suicide note. And the way you start to get around it is to recognize that nature is a living entity. And if you create conditions for growth, if you go back to the way we used to think about these things, it will begin to revive itself. And it's a key thing for me about innovation is that innovation isn't always about doing something brand new. Sometimes it's doing things that we forgot worked.

Could you just in broad terms describe the education system that we should be aspiring to.

Okay, how long have we got? Well, it starts for me with the individual. In fact, I'm currently writing a kind of manifesto for all of this at the urging of my literary agent. I may never forgive him. I can't remember. Somebody listening to this might remember. I could have checked it, or you may remember, but somebody once said they were writing a letter and they began it. It's a well known author, but it was quite a long letter. And it began by saying, I'm writing a long letter because I don't have time to write a short one.

They attribute that to Benjamin Franklin.

Yeah, it's Franklin. So I can never tell if it's Franklin or Churchill. It's always one of them.

Those are only two smart men.

But you know that producing something condensed is trickier. So that's partly what I'm trying to describe. But it has to begin with a child. It's like if you're looking at, if you're reinventing agriculture, you have to start looking at the conditions and how organisms behave and how they behave in different conditions. So we have a grandchild now, my wife and I, and by, you know, a remarkable coincidence, it turns out she's the most beautiful gifted child who was ever born. So what are the odds of that? What are the odds going, what are the odds? You know, we're feeling pretty, pretty pleased about that.

You know, you're making her study math, right?

That it should be we who have been graced with this golden child. But she is great. But the good thing about having grandchildren, we realize we told it for years, as distinct from having your own kids, is you have more time to enjoy.

Them and give them back.

And give them back. Yeah. Where you're not being harassed with anxiety and sleep deprivation. So you get to enjoy them differently. But it's just a function of getting older too. But a couple of things strike you about babies like this. She's 21 months now and it's the right place to start. Children are born with endless possibilities. And again, that's not a slogan. I don't mean it that way, but they are. And language is always a very good example of that. Most kids learn the language they're exposed to. But I meet kids that may be true of you, I don't know, who speak three or four languages effortlessly. Not because they're gifted linguistically. They might be, but it's not because of that. It's because they grew up in cultures where they, they just took it in through their Skin. And the fact is, we could all be multilingual if we were exposed to in that way. It's effortless. Kids learn to speak not because we teach them how to do it. You can't. They learn to speak because they want to and they can. And if they are exposed, they'll learn all of them. So this is just one example. What's true of language is true of a multiplicity of other talents and abilities, from music to science to drama to dance. And if you look at people who've excelled in different areas, there's normally some point of exposure in their life or some influence. And then there's that little spark, you know, that goes when the Paul McCartney. I may have mentioned the Beatles guy, I don't know, but Paul McCartney was on Stephen Colbert the Late Show a while ago. It was just great little things. Stephen Colbert said, how do you write all those songs? How'd you get to write Beatles songs? And. And he did a whole thing about. When he grew up in Liverpool, he was surrounded by music. His dad played the piano. There were family parties, sing alongs. He was just exposed to all the old show songs, the great Oscar Hammerstein and all the great musical songs. And people would sing them as a big community thing. So my dad played the piano. Then when he couldn't play the piano, I started playing the piano. So I had a lot to draw from as all this stuff coming in. He said a lot of things to draw from musically. And he said, plus, I'm a genius. I thought it was great. I was like, yeah, yeah, plus you're a genius.

You are the man of quotes, man.

You should just.

You should just edit a book of quotes and why bother writing?

Why bother the other.

You got to know what to steal. That's a skill.

Why make it up? Yeah, but what it means. So there's that balance between nature and nurture. You know, we're all born. And there was a whole debate for years, you know, about were children born as blank slates and was it all environment? And I think whoever thought this up didn't have kids. This is just such patent bs, you know, because anyone who's got children or lived anywhere near a child knows they come fully loaded. When you're a parent, you just have to wait and see who this is that's landed in your midst. Like, who are you? And they'll tell you who they are. So we're all part of the genetic inheritance from our families, our ancestors, and we're all commingled and we come fully loaded what becomes of those talents has everything to do with our experiences then with what we're exposed to, with the constraints that are placed on us, with the way culture infiltrates the way we think. So you have to start with that. The children have fantastic capacities, and they grow and flourish in certain conditions. And this isn't new. Frieble, who developed the concept of the kindergarten. Montessori, Krishnamurti, the great pioneers and voices for a humanistic form of education have all recognized that. And it's why early years education has to be one in which children are allowed to socialize, to move physically, to play, but with certain structures in place so that we can guide them in particular ways. So my ideal education would begin with being clear what young children need to flourish. They need to be physically active. They need to be able to socialize. They need to learn from each other, because learning is a social process. It's why we all speak similar languages. We don't make. There aren't seven and a half billion languages on Earth where nobody understand what the hell we're all talking about. I mean, there was. We speak of sound language and still don't know what we're all talking about. But at least, no, we end up with accents not because we're peculiar, but because we're exposed to it. And then, as children progress, as they get older, there are elements of education. One of them is the curriculum, another is teaching. A third is the culture of the school. And the fourth, a fourth one is its place in the broader community. I want to invent schools because we've come to think of schools as particular places. But if we go back to the beginning, a school is a community of learners. That's it. A place where people come to learn with and from each other. And children learn as much from each other as they do from the teacher. They may not learn what the teacher wants them to learn, but they're learning all the time. They're working this out, what's okay, what isn't okay. So throughout education, my ideal system would have a very broad curriculum that would include the arts, the humanities, sciences, mathematics, physical education, languages. It would include a lot of outdoor activities, connection as far as possible with nature. If you're not in a rural setting, as most of us aren't, there are still ways of bringing nature into schools because we learn everything from that. I would have a very flexible schedule, because at the moment, the schedule drives the learning. We don't do it outside schools, and we have a rough timetable. We've got one now, but outside Schools, we wouldn't begin to think, we'll do this for 40 minutes, then we'll just do something else. Another 40 minutes, we'll go to another room and do that. If you did that in business, you'd be broke in a week. So you want a flexible schedule. I would be very flexible about age groups. Kids learn a lot from each other. The only place we segregate them by age is school. And that creates a problem on its own because kids move at different rates in different disciplines. A kid may be well ahead of everybody else in a particular discipline, not so much another one. So having cross generational education is very important. And I'd have a kind of an agreed broad base of disciplines in the early years. But then that allowed kids to specialize as they go through into areas that they find more interesting. I'd want schools, and these aren't theoretical, where kids have a big say in what goes on. There's a whole movement in democratic schools where children learn the principles of democracy by living them in the way the school is organized and run. Kids can be very astute and responsible from a very early age if you give them the right climate. There's a great organization called aero, the Alternative Education Resource Organization. The guy runs that. Jerry Mintzer spent his life working in democratic education. A good friend of mine in Israel, Yaakov Hecht, has been one of the leaders in democratic education and education cities. So they have to be democratic if we want to preserve our democracies, if we do. And also they should be networked so they're not seen as isolated facilities, but hubs of learning so other people can go there as well, subject to the ordinary rules of safety. And there would be multiple pathways out of school to apprenticeships to college, if you choose to go to it, thinking of college more broadly. But every child beyond a certain age would have a personal learning plan. There's a great network at schools called Big Picture Learning, where every kid has. They sit down with their teachers, their parents and others, and they work out. These are things I want to do over the course of the next few years. So it'd be very personalized, but also customized to the area. There's no reason why a school in Kentucky should be just like a school in Juneau, up in the foul north of America. There's no reason for that. And there should be some things that teach in common, but it should take account of local culture and circumstance. So there's no one way to do a school. But there are principles on which schools should be Based. But none of that works. If we don't have great teachers and great school principals, none of that works. That's all a theory. Unless we've got great teachers. And all the great education systems know that they select people carefully to be teachers. They select people even more carefully to be school leaders. And they don't, as sadly happens in America, disparage the profession and underpay them. Some of that $16 billion of wasted public money should go into respecting, remunerating and training and developing a much better teaching force.

We should take, we should take investment banking and teaching and reverse compensation.

That would help, wouldn't it? You know, it's one of the most important professions that we have and it's one of the least respected here in America. It's not true everywhere. It's true in a lot of places. It's not true everywhere. There are some countries which have a much more enlightened approach to it. And then we need a broad framework for that, for accountability. But we should let people do their job. And we should, if we train our teachers properly, if we train our head teachers properly, then they need a degree of autonomy to get on and do what they do. And I always make a distinction, or I don't always, I mean, I've made it for a while, as it turns out. I occasionally make a distinction. I think I did one of the TED talks between fast food and Michelin starred restaurants. You know, fast food systems work by standardization. So whichever of your favorite fast food outlets you go to, wherever it is in America, you know exactly what you're going to get. It's all absolutely guaranteed. It's normally horrible, it's guaranteed, it's got an immediate satisfaction. But you go to a restaurant with a well qualified chef and well trained staff, they're all great and they're all different and, and I think it's a pretty good analogy for that. So it's about principle. It's not prescribing how it's done, but you want people to be respected as the professionals there in doing it. And again, this isn't theoretical. There are lots of examples of these schools around the world. In fact, we're about to launch a new platform called Boundless. Myself, Ted Dinsmith, Andrew Mangino and the CEO we've just appointed called Emily Leebtab. And this is a global platform to empower, inspire and facilitate grassroots change in education. And part of it is to bring to the surface examples of great schools around the world so people can be in touch and collaborate.

I Think the biggest barrier you'll face for this in America is that many people believe that the purpose of education is to prepare you to get a great job. And what you just described seems like the antithesis to qualifying for jobless.

No, it's not. It's generally not. But the job market is constantly changing and evolving, and it seems pretty likely. Nothing certain, but it seems likely on current trends that a lot of the jobs that we've associated with human beings and a thought hitherto can only be done by people, are about to be done better by some forms of machine intelligence. And that's not just in checkouts, as you know, in supermarkets. It's in medicine, banking, accountancy, even in therapeutic settings where there's a lot of evidence that often these. If they're properly programmed. But even so, machine intelligence, it's a misnomer, I think, because these machines aren't intelligent. Not like you and me. I mean, who is intelligent like you and me, Guy?

True. What's the odds of two of us being in the same room at the same time, honestly?

And if light were to strike here now, God knows what life form would evolve. But it's true, isn't it? They're not. They're not intelligent in that sense. They're very smart algorithms, but they're not intelligent in the sense that human beings are, with all of our faculties, senses, embodiments and senses creativity. And creativity. That's right. But. So, no, I'm not. This isn't a creed for unemployment. No, but it's to say that if people are to find fulfilling work, we have to keep reinventing jobs, creating great companies, great organizations. It's interesting. Like Uber, for all its problems and Troubles, wasn't conceivable 10 years ago. It is now. It's out there. And it was not only made possible by the technology, because there had to be an environment for that to work technologically, but it also revealed this global workforce of casual drivers. I mean, we didn't know they were there in 2006, but they were. They were all queued up to get involved in it. And people commonly make mistakes like this. Like when the telephone network started to evolve in the 19th century, famously, people were saying, I mean, you know, the way things go, and there's going to be a telephone in every town. You know, I remember when the mobile phone, the phone came out, I was taken aback by it. When there's a time when businesses had telephone numbers, houses. But why would a person really. I mean, I'm old enough to Thought, what the hell? Why would a person want a telephone number? What do you mean? You can have your own phone. What for? So all the things that we just take for granted, now we know all this. We're just saying it to accompany each other. But. But these things were inconceivable. My dad was born in 1914, died in 1977. If he came back now and wandered about, all the Wright brothers would come back. Now we're sitting there complaining because the plane's 10 minutes late. What, so it's not a stretch to think that 10 years from now, 15 years from now, most of what we take for granted, not all, but a great deal of it, will be different. So this isn't irresponsible. It's the opposite. Yeah.

I would make the case that Steve Jobs came back. Now he would be astounded, and he didn't die that long ago, and he was way ahead of his time.

Yeah. I think he'd be appalled as well.

Well, yes. Yes. Two more questions.

Okay.

First, how does one become a knight?

Corruption, Hidden cameras.

Did the queen call you up and.

Say, pays off eventually?

Ken, what are you doing today? I'd like you to, you know, take us. Take a knee before me. Is it like getting the MacArthur Award winner? They just call you up the Nobel Prize?

Hi.

This is the queen you've been choosing. You've been chosen.

Well, it's not unlike that, truthfully. But seriously, there's a whole process of nominations. Okay. You can't nominate yourself. That rules it out. Okay. But in the uk, it's. Knighthoods are part of a broader honors system. It's same in America. You know, where they.

What? Same in America.

We have the Presidential Medal of Honor here.

For Rush Limbaugh.

Yeah. Just for Richland.

Rush Limbaugh and Rosa Parks. Those are two names.

They're the two people. People who've really brought value to life and have offered a vision of the future that we can all buy into. Yeah. But there are civil and military medals and awards and honors that are given here in America. In Britain, it's. It's called the honor system. And there are a whole network of civil and military awards that are given, which include knighthoods, which. There's a particular category of knight called Knight Bachelor, which is a personal award by the queen. Okay. And so. So it's the oldest form of knighthood. It dates back to the Middle Ages, where the sovereign would knight somebody for valor on the field of battle. Okay. And they would get the title sir, and often lands that go with it. We seem to have dropped the lands bit at the moment, which is a bit irritating. So, yeah, so there's a process of nomination for honours. They go to a government group organization. It's housed in something called the Central Chancery for Knighthoods, and they sift through these awards, a bit like the Academy, they go through. And it's not a popular vote, it's a group of people and they go through it all. They take up references so the nomination forms can be submitted by anybody on your behalf. And the more people who think so, the better. And they say, you know, we think this person's done something that's egregiously important for the country and we'd like to nominate them for an honor. And then they provide evidence and references.

Did you know it was coming?

Is it a. No, no, no, that's not. I was asked by the person who put it together if I would mind being nominated, but that was several years before anything happened. So I said, because I was doing quite a lot of stuff at the time at the national level in the UK and I'd been involved in the peace process in Northman and stuff like that. And I said, well, if you think so. They didn't say, would you like a knighthood? They said, we'd like to nominate you for an honor. How would you feel about that? And I said, okay. So that goes together. And then there's a process where it's evaluated. People take references if it's true. And I don't think they tail you, but they. They figure out, make sure that you're not doing it. Appalling. And then if all that checks out, there's apparently a formal recommendation goes to the Prime Minister, and if it gets the Prime Minister's approval, it's presented to the Queen for her decision. And they say, you know, mom, your Majesty, the collective view is this person merits this. Does she ever say, no, we don't know that. Oh, okay, we don't know that. But sometimes people refuse them when they're off with them. Really pretty unusual. And so what happens, to answer your question, is that when all that has happened, you're contacted by letter or by phone by a relevant person to test you out on it. So in my case, I was living in Los Angeles. I had a call from the British Consul General, who was a friend of mine at the time, who said he had some exciting news. I thought it was. He was being posted to Barcelona, and he said that. He said, I've got very interesting some exciting news. I said, what is it? And then his voice changed. He went into a kind of odd mode. And he said, I'm informed by Buckingham palace that Her Majesty the Queen is minded to appoint you as a Knight Bachelor and she would like to know if you'd accept. I said, what are you talking about, Peter? Are you all right? But the language is important. Basically, he was saying, decoded it. The Queen is willing to offer you a knighthood, but wants to know if you'd accept it if she were to do it. And that's important because she doesn't want to give it to you or to Siesta. And you say, no, I'm good, thanks. I'm okay for knighthoods right now. Because people may, for reasons of conscience or political reasons, decline it. And some people have in the past, so they want to avoid that kind of. But I was absolutely inclined to do it. I was thrilled. And I said, of course, yeah, because it was a genuine honor for me, because it represented a recognition of the work I had been celebrating, not work I felt I had done so much as the work I'd been promoting that other people were doing. And it was important for the family, you know, that my family were thrilled. I mean, I come from a large working class family in Liverpool. You know, my parents were born in 1914 and 1919, respectively. They went through two world wars. Well, my dad did, you know, I mean, he lived through it, didn't fight in it, didn't fight in the first one for that generation especially. And also, you know, we got through some hard times as a family. Yeah, I had that. I'm not making a big deal about what happened to me, but when I was nine, my dad, who'd been in manual work most of his life, had an industrial accident, broke his neck. So he was a quadriplegic the rest of his life. And, you know, money was hard to come by. And so. And I know, and I have an extended family. My mum was one of seven. They had lots of kids. So when we gathered, it was like a meeting of the clans, you know, so. And my family is very close knit. I mean, the central core was very close knit. And they're all very, very funny. And they all. We all. We've been very close. And so to me, it was. It was a kind of an honor for the family as well as me, because whatever I've done came out of the sport my family gave me.

And does life suddenly change? I mean, you can just walk into Nobu and not need a reservation.

Pretty much, you Know, I mean, people. You enter people. Drops their knees almost instantly, stuff like that, you know, I mean, the crown gets to be a bit of a nuisance after a while.

Suffrages has a separate, like, corner for.

You, you know, it's all very intangible, honestly. I mean, I think it's a title that people respect and take seriously, which is great.

Do you ever get together with all the other knights?

There is actually something called the World Knight Forum. No, it's the. Oh, God. The actual formal title's gone in my head. But it's an organization of people who've got this form of knight, the Knights Bachelor. And it's a society of knights.

It's a bachelor party.

Yes, bachelor party. And so it's the same form of knighthood that Paul McCartney.

John I've.

Jony. I've has a different form of knighthood. There are three or four different versions of it, according to the. But, you know, people like. Well, lots. You know, I mean, Elton John, all the people you recognize. So, yeah, it's. Truthfully, I'm not being quirky in saying it. I don't. It's not like I insist on the title at all, but people do use it quite a bit, and it's become associated with me now in a way. And all I ever say to people is, if we're using titles, that's mine. But I answered again and everything else. I used to be professor and doctor, so now it's that. It's a long time since I was a mister, But I don't mind. I mean, I get checked hotels in all kind of way. I've been checked in as Mr. Sir Ken Robinson. And I think in some place, people think Serkan is. I'm an Indian person of some sort from the subcontinent. I've had that, you know, Mr. Mr. Serkan Robinson. Yeah.

So you're Muslim.

Yeah, I'll take it, whatever you got. But it was a recognition of the importance of the field of work as well, whatever contribution I made to it. And also I say I took it as a family honor as well, which is great. And also my wife and I have been together for 42 years now. We've worked hand in glove, as I said, on everything. And the great thing about that is that with a knighthood, she also became Lady Robinson, so she shares the title, which is great. So, I mean, it's effectively, it's a joint honor. It's a recognition that there's a partnership.

It's like when you get United Global Services and your spouse gets Global Service status, too.

Yeah, well, there you go. It's very similar. Okay.

And my very last question, I promise you, is, do you know whatever happened to Sarah?

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, and 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. He said, I'll never find another girl like Sarah. And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was. She was the main reason we were leaving the country.

That is one of the best lines I have ever heard in a video. Poor Sarah. Did you scar her? What happened?

You know, I don't know. You got. When I gave that talk, I didn't know that it was going to go on the Internet. I was just talking to that room for the people.

Sarah is scarred, and we don't know.

We didn't know her all that well, so. But I. I live in fear that one day the phone's going to ring and hang on, finally, she's going to see this TED Talk and make a connection. But I don't think so. I think she's fine. I think they weren't a good fit, but, yeah, that's a lot of unintended consequences, isn't it?

At least now you know what it takes to get knighted. I hope you found Sir Ken's thoughts valuable, insightful and challenging. It's going to take a lot to change our educational practices. So let's start. I'm Guy Kawasaki, and this is the Remarkable People Podcast. My thanks to Jeff C. And Peg Fitzpatrick. I'd knight them both if I could. Special thanks to Esther Wardcicki for introducing me to Ken Robinson.

This is remarkable people.