'Education systems too narrow': Sir Ken Robinson
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Sir Ken Robinson, a leading thinker on education, creativity and innovation, who has advised various governments and major global corporations says that most education systems around the world including Australia's, are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age, were already narrow and are getting narrower.
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KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: Kevin Rudd's promised education revolution was a key part of his election victory, an agenda that includes benchmarking schools and raising teacher standards. But a leading expert on education, creativity and innovation who advises governments and major global corporations says that most education systems around the world are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age, and if anything, are getting even narrower.
Sir Ken Robinson chaired a high-powered commission for the Blair Government to define an education strategy for the future. He's since been knighted for services to the education and the arts. Sir Ken Robinson has just written a book called 'The Element' which draws on the stories of a wide range of very successful people whose talents went unnoticed at school.
I've interviewed him at length while he's in Sydney for a conference, and because of the interest in the topic, we're going to run that interview over two nights. Tonight, part one.
Ken Robinson, you tell the stories of a number of famous people whose traditional education failed to help them identify their real talents before they went on to brilliant careers, Paul McCartney, for instance: you say he went through his entire education without anyone noticing he had any musical talent at all. Are you saying that's a common story?
KEN ROBINSON, EDUCATION & CREATIVITY EXPERT: Yes. I mean, I don't mean to say that you have to have failed at school before you can be a success, but an awful lot of people who did well after school didn't do well in school. Paul McCartney went to school in Liverpool and, as you say, he went through the whole of his education there and nobody thought he had any musical talent. One of the other people in the same music group - music class - was George Harrison, the lead guitarist of The Beatles, and he went through school as well and nobody noticed had any talent. So I was saying this recently that this one teacher in Liverpool in the '50s had half The Beatles in his class and he missed it. And the point about this is that, you know, talent is often buried deep; it's not lying around on the surface, but our education systems at the moment are still very focused on a certain type of ability, and the result is very many brilliant people are marginalised by the whole process.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But it's also true that we can't all be Paul McCartney or some other famous person with a brilliant career ahead of us. But are you saying that there is a sweet spot in all of us where our talents intersect with our passions and that that is not being mined, is not being found, is not being looked for?
KEN ROBINSON: Yes, that's exactly the point. And, the thing is, I've interviewed a lot of people for the book, and, you know, there was a time when Paul McCartney, so to speak, was not Paul McCartney. You know, it isn't that all these people were born as celebrities; they achieved some celebrity because of pursuing their own particular talent and their passion. And I do think we all have that in us, yeah. The people achieve their best when they firstly tune into their natural aptitudes - and lots of people I have interviewed aren't musicians, they're mathematicians, they're business leaders, they're teachers, they're broadcasters, you know, they've found this thing that the completely get. But the second thing is that they love it. And if you can find that - a talented and a passion - well that's to say you never work again. And it is true, I think, that our current education systems are simply not designed to help people do that. In fact an awful lot of people go through education and never discover anything they're good at at all.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Well in fact one of the things you argue is that in many cases it's not just that their talents aren't discovered, but they're actually driven away from those talents.
KEN ROBINSON: Yes, I think they are in some respects. I mean, I'm always keen to say this, you know, but we're all born with immense natural abilities and talents. But they tend to be inhibited as we get older. I write a lot about creativity. And I came across this great story which I'm very fond of a little girl who was in a drawing class. And her teacher said she normally didn't pay attention, but in the drawing class she did. It was a six year old kid. And she said she spent about 20 minutes huddled over this piece of paper. And the teacher went over to her and 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 love that.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Is that a girl who's just oblivious of her boundaries, or is ...
KEN ROBINSON: Well it illustrates two things for me. One is that we're all born with tremendous creative confidence and abilities. Young children are full of great ideas and possibilities. But that tends to be suppressed as we get older. And it happens in part through this culture of standardised testing that I think is now a blight on the whole of education. But the second thing is that we all think and learn differently. I mean, some people are highly visual; you know, some think best when they're moving; some think best when they're listening; some people respond well to words, some people don't. And getting the best from kids in schools is about understanding the way they think, as well as what it is they're supposed to be thinking about. And I think that's also why some people get through the whole of their education and don't discover themselves at all.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But how does a teacher in a classroom of 30 kids manage to adapt their teaching methods to all of those different traits in different kids who might require a different approach?
KEN ROBINSON: Well, that, to me, is the whole business of teaching. You know, every education system in the world currently is being reformed. I know it's true here in Australia, but it's true wherever you go - Asia, Europe, America. And it's happening for two reasons. One of them is economic; everybody's trying to figure out, you know, as parents and as employers and as students, how on Earth do you educate people to find a productive life in the 21st Century, you know, when all the economies are shifting faster than we've known them. So the economic thing is really important. But it's also about culture, you know, about how do you give people a sense of identity and what do they need to know to be literate and fluent in these extraordinary times as well. The thing is that most reform movements are looking backwards; they're looking back to the old system that was the result of the industrial revolution.
KERRY O'BRIEN: When you talk about the narrowness of education systems now, if you look at the secondary school system in Australia, there are compulsory strands like English, maths and science, but there's also a big range of other subjects that kids can choose from to complete their course, a lot of electives. Isn't that going to help students, teachers and parents to discover and nurture the talents of their child? Aren't there some kids who are never going to do well in a structured school system?
KEN ROBINSON: Well, my starting premise is that every one of us - all our children - have great natural abilities and talents and they're all unique. And that education clearly has to cover some common ground for everybody. You know, we all need to learn to read and write and so on. But there's much more than that. You know, it always has distressed me that most education systems have this hierarchy - you know, maths and science at the top and languages. And they're very important. And then, the humanities and the arts somewhere near the bottom. Well, you know, that all seems OK, except that when money gets short, you know, when politicians talk about tightening their belts and raising standards, they always focus on these top, apparently, subjects of maths and science and languages. Well, they're very important. But so is music and dance and art and poetry and all the things that the arts teach, and humanities and history, and all of those things which speak to the nature of what it is to be a human being and to be able to make your way in the world. And a lot of the work I've done hasn't been to argue against sciences and maths but to say we need a balance here. Some kids really excel in mathematics and some don't. And they should have the opportunity to do other things, not as a default, but as an entitlement. Because what ends up happening is we get this narrow focus.
I ran a big commission in the UK on creative education, and we had scientists on the group, we had Nobel Prize winners, we had economists, we had musicians, we had dancers, two comedians. And what was interesting was that when they came to talk about the process of creativity, it was the same in every discipline, and also that these things interact. You know, some of our greatest scientists have been inspired by the arts and some of our best artists work on deeply scientific principles.
See, what I think we need here is a different conversation about education. You know, we are still always locked into this conversation about the old system. And all attempts to improve will be like getting a better steam engine. What we really need is to rethink some of the basic terms of the conversation. We need to get back to what it is that drives people to learn and achieve in the first place, and that's what we've lost. And if we know anything about education, it's all about individuals, it's personal. You know, I can't think there's a kid in Australia who gets out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise their province's reading standards. You know, it's about them and energising them. I think the problem often is that politicians think it's like bailing out the auto industry. It's like refining a manufacturing process. And it's not; it's about cultivating individual passions and talents. And if we don't get that right, nothing else will ever work.
KERRY O'BRIEN: And you've also got a bureaucracy which is endeavouring to take policy that comes from the government and fashioning it in a way that will work through a system covering a state or a nation, and you've got a principal who might have a school of 1,000 kids that they've got to pump through that system. Now, I just wonder, how much you can allow for individuality and how much personal attention you can have from teachers and pupils and how much diversity you can really encourage.
KEN ROBINSON: You can't achieve educational improvement for everybody with a standard template. In the end, you know, every child goes to a particular school, works in a particular classroom with particular teachers. You know, this doesn't happen in the committee rooms of Canberra. This happens in these neighbourhoods with these kids. And great head teachers always knew that. And what I would like to see is politicians giving teachers room to breathe and do the job they're being paid for. And instead what they aim to do is to try and make education teacher-proof, as if it's all machine minding.
KERRY O'BRIEN: But part of the process is actually the teacher training as well, isn't it?
KEN ROBINSON: It is, absolutely. You see, his is the heart of it, if I can say this, that if you think of it, there are several big bits to education. One of them is the curriculum, which is what it is we want people to learn; then there's teaching, which is how we help them to do it; and assessment, which is how we make some judgments about how they're getting on. What policymakers tend to do is focus on the curriculum and then they focus on maths, science and languages, and leave the rest. And then they go to assessment and they do standardised tests, as if the whole thing were like pumping out widgets. And the bit they leave is the only bit that will ever make a difference which is the quality of teaching.
KERRY O'BRIEN: Do you think that because we are, all of us, going through a technological revolution, we're going through a revolution to which we can't see an end, that there is so much anxiety in the community, and so much of that anxiety gets focused on the children and their education, that the parents themselves are overreacting? That the anxiety kind of ends up with a misdirection?
KEN ROBINSON: Yes, I think that's true to a degree. The reason we can't see an end to this revolution is because there is no end to it. You know, it's being driven by new technologies which are becoming faster, more insistent and more pervasive. I mean, I was told recently by some people at Apple that the most powerful computer on Earth at the moment has the processing power of a brain of a cricket. I don't know how they know that, you know, but - I don't know any crickets. But it's an attractive ...
KERRY O'BRIEN: Or haven't spoken to any.
KEN ROBINSON: And they don't reply. But what they mean is that computers look really smart, but they're not; they're just rapid calculators. But within a relatively short amount of time, maybe five years, the most powerful computers on Earth will have the processing power, they say, of the brain of a six month old baby. And I said, "Well, what does that mean?" And they said, "Well, at that point, computers will be capable of learning." I said, "Which means what?" And they say, "Well, it means they'll be able to rewrite their own operating systems in the light of their experiences." Well that's Skynet, isn't it? For anyone who's seen Terminator. I mean, that's - in other words, computers effectively will star to think for themselves at some point.
Now, that's only one bit of what's going on. You combine that with what's happening in the genome, you know with what we're finding out more about the body and how it works, how it breaks down, how that can be stopped. Combine that with the crisis in the climate, you know with water supply and all the rest. There are factors at play now for which there is no precedent in the whole of human history. And the idea that we can deal with all of that by raising results and standardised tests of reading is nonsense. I don't mean we shouldn't do that too. But the one thing we have as human beings is this extraordinary power of imagination and creativity and the ability to solve problems as well as to deal with ones that we've just created. So, this isn't some whimsical idea.
I mean, I always think this: are kids who start school this year in Australia in primary school will be retiring round about 2070. You know, nobody has a clue what the world will look like this time next year, let alone 2070. So, yes, parents are concerned and they're right to be concerned. I'm concerned. I've got two kids. But I'm concerned that they get an education which is tailored to these circumstances rather than the ones that obtained 150 years ago.
KERRY O'BRIEN: And we'll have part two of that interview with Sir Ken Robinson tomorrow night where he looks at some of the schools that he is impressed with.
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