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

Guy Kawasaki:
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 Thinkers fifty list as one of the world's top management thinkers. Robinson's book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, became a New York Times bestseller. It was translated into twenty-three languages and sold over a million copies.
Robinson achieved international claim 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 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 here's Sir Ken Robinson.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Do you know of Herb Alpert?
Guy Kawasaki:
Herb Alpert?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Tijuana Brass?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Exactly.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah…
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
That's how old I am.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, life bias, yeah. So he's become a very good friend of ours. He's eighty-two, eighty-three. He won a Grammy last year. He's a painter and a sculptor as well as everything else.
I'd an email from him. I knew of him because he 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 Alpert. I'm a trumpeter.” Wonderful, just wonderful, and he said, “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.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, really?
Sir Ken Robinson:
It was so humble as a-- of course, I'd contacted him. He said, “If you're ever in LA…” that's right.
It turned out our offices were four blocks apart but because of that, it took three months to arrange the meeting, and because he was too excited. Like with you, it's trying to kind of organize an eclipse, all these moving parts, but we eventually got together, and we've just been firm friends since.
You find that, often, 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, their own abilities, and the blowhards are the people that you tend to avoid.
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to start with that sixty-four million view YouTube. Did you do anything to optimize the virality of it?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, I didn't do anything to personally to promote it. I mean, I had thought of having a basement sort of small children tapping on the keyboard and--
Guy Kawasaki:
Donald Trump Jr. buying books?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Exactly right. Or adapting some form of Morse code system. It just kept tapping.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
But no, I'd 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. A small, private organization. I say it's “small.”
There were 1200 people there, but it was a regular crowd and they'd been meeting there often, and it was a kind of industry group. It was technology entertainment design and its reputation preceded it because to be invited to speak was a thing…
Guy Kawasaki:
I've never been invited…
Sir Ken Robinson:
…at the time. Have you not?!
Guy Kawasaki:
TEDx's, yeah, but not TED.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, we should fix that.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm not in the major leagues.
Sir Ken Robinson:
We'll get on that. But yeah, I was invited to speak at people who'd heard of the work I had 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 a lawyer called Ken Hertz and he used to go and he said to me often, “You should be at TED,” and I think he'd probably had a word with them and said, “You know, they're on the lookout for people who they thought had something interesting to say,” and so I think Ken was the route.
But yeah, I sat there. It was fascinating conference. This protocol of eighteen-minute talks was interesting. There's no great mystery to that. I think Ricky Wurman who founded it decided after experiencing consultation with the community that, if you give everybody an hour, then not everybody can hold a room for an hour and that's the first thing.
Guy Kawasaki:
And they all give eight a day!
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, that's right, and that if you start having breakout sessions and panels…well, the 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 everyone twenty minutes, and he policed it and you have a minute to get on, a minute to get off, and there you go, you got eighteen minutes, but it became rather mythical, that you had an eighteen-minute thing.
So I'd 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
That was nice!
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, it's not like I just wandered in but 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 realize, over time.
It's essentially a set of lists, just jot down beforehand in kind of five sections, for any talk, whether it's an hour and a half or a twenty-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, really, and he said, “It’s the same thing.” I mean, there are riffs that 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 free-form.
Guy Kawasaki:
And you didn't rehearse that talk fifty times or?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, but you know, it's what I know about, and I mean, if they've asked me to go in and talk about the genome, I'd probably have to spend a bit of time, but you become familiar with certain source founders, but I always like to push it when I'm giving a talk, anyhow, but I've no idea when I get it ready, quite how it's going to run or what the stories are going to be at. I mean, I didn't know the stories I was going to tell when I got up, but no, it was a speech to that room and it seemed to go very well, and it was very funny they didn't put the talks online at the time.
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?” And I said, “Yeah. All right. Yeah. Could I see it? Could you send it?” Because I couldn't accurately remember how it looked and I said, “Could you send it to me?”
So he did, and I showed it to my wife and I. The two of us have been together forty, yup, forty-two years now and we've always worked together. She's my kind of mentor in lots of areas. So we sat and watched it. “So what'd you think?” And she said, “It's all right.” She said, “It's all right.” She said, “I'd wished you'd worn a different shirt.” I said, “Come on…”
So it went on and 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 that might have been. 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 then in the way that it was very important but it was interesting to tidy it up.
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, “Actually, seven years since that TED Talk.”
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, that's when they start the clock?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah. I said, “Yes, but I was alive before that.” That was, for me, it wasn't 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
And when they'd asked people subsequently and have done how they found out about it, that an awful lot of people said it was because they came across that Talk and wondered what TED was.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow!
Sir Ken Robinson:
So that was a very interesting synergy, but to the point, I could have given that talk ten years before. Probably did it 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 fan 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, yup.

Recording of Sir Ken Robinson:
“I heard a great story recently. I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six 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're 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.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I’ve watched many of your videos and I want to ask you-
Sir Ken Robinson:
Me too. That was spooky!
Guy Kawasaki:
I want to ask you: how you find your quotes? Because your quotes-- yeah, the stories and the quotes and the things are just spot on.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Oh. Thank you. I read a lot. Not always the entire book.
Well, you get a feel for the DNA and the energy of a book quite early on, you know, and you kind of think, “Okay, I got this,” and I said, “I'd jump around a little bit.” I mean, some books I've read very recent and live with for a while. I guess, read widely, and I absorb things, and some things stick in my mind, the way they do, and I think, “That's beautifully said.”
I was writing something this morning about dance and I was remembering, it's always stuck with me that there was a famous British Conductor called Thomas Beecham, Sir Thomas Beecham, and he's very celebrated, and he was asked at one point about the popularity of these Prom Concerts that are held in London every year at the Albert Hall and at Jonah, because of his comments, he said, “You have to understand is that the English don't understand music, but they love the noise it makes.”
Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, I rest my case. You just pulled that quote out of the air!
Sir Ken Robinson:
But that's such a beautiful observation, isn't it?
Guy Kawasaki:
True.
Sir Ken Robinson:
“They love the noise it makes.” I think that's great. I tend to absorb vivid comments of that sort, and I do bump to credit the people who do come up with them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
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, than I'm very happy to enlist them.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 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’ve got to get into Dartmouth. You’ve got to get into kindergarten right now.” So are you struck by that irony or-
Sir Ken Robinson:
Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean that, they're not the only people I talk to, but you're right. There's a significant proportion of people in any group that not away-
Guy Kawasaki:
Left with the book.
Sir Ken Robinson:
That's absolutely right. Yeah. It's like and I think it's an exact analogy. It's like with the Environmental Movement, the Climate Movement, that people pay all kinds of lip service to it and I 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
And catch a private jet home?
Sir Ken Robinson:
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 in particular 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 grew 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.
I remember years ago we were in an event in New Zealand and anyone who's been then you would know that, that the ceremonies always began, don't they, with the Maori Dance.
Guy Kawasaki:
The Hakka
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, and in this particular case, in this theater, it was a beautifully done thing, but you can sit there and comprehending of it and thinking-- If you just look at it at face value, you think, “What is this?” The guy puts a leaf stand on the stage and screams at it and then screams at us as not to go near it. And we're not going to, that's the point. We have no intention of going anywhere near it. 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'd helped to set up an Academy in Hong Kong, the Performing Arts, and the first time I went to Hong Kong, we're taken to a Chinese Opera. That's very hard work if you're not from that culture.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
It just is.
Guy Kawasaki:
I’ll throw in any culture is hard.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, that can also certainly be true, but with Chinese Opera, if your unused to it... Well, first 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 who have stock characters and they specialize them throughout their career. There are standard stories they tell. It's bit like the fairy tales of myths, and often the companies will be brought together and we'll 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 Westerner, and I worked out quite early on, that this performance, which is quite long, that if I could find some way of getting hold of the percussionist and sounding singing, it would have made the whole evening much more enjoyable because they sat kind of “boing, boing, boing,” but anybody would.
But the crowd is actually 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 extraordinary and comprehensible series of noises and you think, “How can this possibly mean anything?” But it does.
But when you face audiences with ideas which challenge what they've grown up with, what they'd considered to be common sense, what they'd believed to be the only way to do things, you can sense it they're taking it in at one level, but you asked them to change the whole world view.
So they can entertain the idea, but whether 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 that 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 they odd to think really fundamentally differently.
Guy Kawasaki:
Was there some formative experience that caused 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.”
Sir Ken Robinson:
No. Not one single thing. It's an accumulation and I feel it's generally it-- 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: How Finding your Passion Changes Everything. 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 and I mentioned the book and it was at the 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 person I was referring to because we changed the title of it.
I'd talk in that book about how do people find their calling in their lives and sometimes it is like falling in love at first sight. Some people are saying that, and I mentioned it 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've fallen in love with somebody who was an old friend and you hear that title, “They've known each other, they grew up and went to school together.” Or, “Something happened to a previous partner and this is somebody that they've 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.
I 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 that's certainly happened in my life. I mean, there were some things looking back I can psychologize about it and one of them is without question has a bearing on it.
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 is because I have polio as a kid and my parents, wisely, recognized that I'd 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. Beatlemania 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. 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 you. Absolutely not. They had a massive inference as did my family.
So, and I find myself in the company as a kid, I went to the Special Ed and so I spent five years in Special Ed, surrounded by people with all kinds of physical disabilities, particularly.
Guy Kawasaki:
This was before ADHD and stuff like that, though.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
This is Physical Special Ed?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was interesting in Liverpool at the time that they distinguished between the physically handicapped and that's they called them the mentally handicapped at the time. We weren't very good at euphemisms in the 1960s. So I haven'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 were, if you had a physical handicap, you entered a different direction.
Although, people always mingled them up. I mean, I find that it's good. I still do sometimes. These days, I tend to get into wheelchairs in airports because my family had an intervention with me and I never wanted it because I spent a lot of time as a child in the wheelchair and it was a triumph to get out of it so I didn't want to get back in it anytime soon.
Well a few years back they were just so fed up with me, taking the time, getting through it at airports. I said, “For God's sake, get in the wheelchair,” so, and now of course I get off the plane and, “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.
Sir Ken Robinson:
They'll say things like, "Does he have his boarding pass?"
Guy Kawasaki:
That's interesting.
Sir Ken Robinson:
They do still.
Guy Kawasaki:
Because you have a physical issue, they think you have a mental issue?
Sir Ken Robinson:
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 mix the two things up but something that struck me at school…I wasn't planning it. 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 fashionable at the time, and the people with cerebral palsy, all sorts of disabilities but they and I didn't identify themselves by it, it was just something that you had. What you were drawn to with people was: were they interesting? Were they funny? Were they good to hang out with?
And 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 pallet of emotional and social complexities that everybody has, and people who also don't appear to have a physical disability may have a considerable one but 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're having 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 Lynne, the dancer. She was judged to be a problem, and as that doctor famously said, "She's not sick, she's a dancer."
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, yeah, it has roots in my own experience but 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, generally. 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.
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.
Guy Kawasaki:
That would be a whole other conversation. Yes, yes.
Sir Ken Robinson:
But I became a citizen here eighteen 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God!
Sir Ken Robinson:
Because we've actually read it and we know just how appalling it's being abused now.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'll tell you a funny story. A few days ago, for this podcast, I interviewed Leon Panetta, and Leon Panetta is the man.
Sir Ken Robinson:
That's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
And 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. 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 out. Then I said, "Or does the majority and the minority bathroom, is it different? Does one have mirrors?"
Sir Ken Robinson:
And the other not?
Guy Kawasaki:
So, I don't know what Mitch McConnell sees, but okay.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, we know the White House has wall-to-wall mirrors.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
And they don't seem to make any difference.
Guy Kawasaki:
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 hardest 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 Keeble's telling me to put a comma there and don't use the passive voice and at the same time you're saying, “Everybody's beautiful. Everybody has a talent.” Doesn't the Harold Keebles approach stifle the person who doesn't want to write in complete sentences?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, I don't know Harold.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Sir Ken Robinson:
But some of the best teachers I had in school were sticklers. English teachers, Latin teachers, some of the mathematics teachers. I didn't, frankly, enjoy maths very much matters at school. No, there's no conflict between rigor, discipline and creativity.
Guy Kawasaki:
There isn’t?
Sir Ken Robinson:
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. I mean, we had a Latin teacher who was an absolute authoritarian. He used to walk around the classroom. He looked a bit like Mr. Bean.
Guy Kawasaki:
Don't all Latin teachers look like Mr. Bean?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, actually, no, no. No, some don't. Some look like Batman.
But he 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 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 and eventually because he had a belief that you would get it right, but he used to feign this authoritarian attitude and we all went along with it, but we knew his bark was 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 I should say disciplines, it's profound and necessary and there are lots of misconceptions around creativity.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's profound and necessary?
Sir Ken Robinson:
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's creativity. Now, 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 and people give themselves low scores for that.
One of the reasons is they think what they've just been asked is “How artistic are you?” And 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 is the process for having original ideas and have value. It's why people struggle when you give them a new idea because it bends their head into an odd shape.
Now, I often talk to businesses about this. Some businesses are very good at generating new product. Apple is 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.
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. It's 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.
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 Beecham, 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 or the piano before you can do anything creative.
I mean, I grew up in Liverpool. 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. It didn't stop them getting on.
If you look at the arc of their musical development over the course of ten years, it went from musically, fairly rudimentary songs. They were 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 achieved enormously, distinctive reputations in sport. So they had Pelé, Wayne Gretzky, Jerry Rice, Serena Williams and me, Guy.
Guy Kawasaki:
The kid with polio.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, who are you going to call, right? But I was talking about some of these issues, but to listen to him, 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, "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 Mohammed Ali if you're not in shape. If you can't…
Guy Kawasaki:
There's a baseline. Yes.
Sir Ken Robinson:
There’s a baseline, but you get better at doing it, and often what brings the best in people, we talked about the elements about it, it's when they discover their medium. Wayne Gretzky is a fantastic hockey player but nobody's saying, "Well, that's all very well, but how are you on the trombone?" We have to modify our opinion of you because, frankly, when it comes to the tuber 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 musical night and he picked a trumpet up off the table and he said, "My life changed in that moment." He said, "I blew into this thing and I realized," he said, "I could speak through the trumpet better than I could speak in language,” but he is now a virtuoso. He 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 there are different levels of originality.
So, to go back to your teacher, there are conventions of grammar according to what parts of the world you live in. 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 that 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 try to make it that way through the academy Francaise. They try to pin it down and not let it evolve but they still let words in like the “le weekend” and “le laptop” and all of that, but it is evolving.
There was a wonderful interview years back on the BBC, they were interviewing 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, with some irritation, about why in America people insist on turning nouns into verbs. He said, "How do you mean?" "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've traveled around the UK, and then 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 we're talking about, because it's so mangled. It's like people from England would have a hard time in Brooklyn. They, "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 semi-colon. You'd be marked down in England for doing that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Is that right?
Sir Ken Robinson:
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, can you see any end to it?" I loved it. He said, "Nope." He said, “I can't think of a noun that couldn't be verbed."
Guy Kawasaki:
And he meant it.
Sir Ken Robinson:
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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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."
Sir Ken Robinson:
Oh, I didn't say that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh.
Sir Ken Robinson:
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.
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.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm hearing!
Sir Ken Robinson:
I'm just saying. No. As part of it, they took me back to my old school, the one I mentioned, the special needs school. That's now empty, but 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 in the world." She said, "I mean, how many people will leave school and going to be dancers?" I said, "Well, 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 will produce some who are happy and interested and engaged with it.
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 culture's 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 of open violence.
I mean, I quoted in this talk, I gave a whole lecture on it in the London School of Contemporary Dance. There are programs of ballroom dancing, which have been used in schools in New York and 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 the kids have, and also making them feel more holistically engaged in their own growth and development, is remarkable and the consequences of seeing a broad view of education isn't theoretical, it's actual.
I can take you to schools and show, “This is how it works,” and it's not saying it's more important than math. It's just as important, but incidentally, there are lots of studies to show that if you have a good arts program at schools, particularly, and including a good dance program, kids do better at maths, as it turns out.
Guy Kawasaki:
But education is underfunded and dance and arts are underfunded in the underfunded.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, that's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
I mean, yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, that's right.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can it get any worse?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, not really. So it has to get better, but that's the thing. People often assume that, "Well, we can't afford these things." But we can.
I 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 anyone’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 were 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 the standardization route in education.
But in America, No Child Left Behind required that schools administered standardized tests at key points throughout the child's career in those disciplines. It was science and maths and numeracy. Partly because they keyed in with these international league tables and politicians want to know how America was doing. But they didn't provide the test. They threw that out into the commercial world. This has been a bonanza for the publishing companies, they love it.
In 2013, it's about the best we could make out, we did the figures; the national football league was a nine-billion-dollar enterprise. The US cinema domestic box office was about eleven point two I think, the education testing and support industry in America was a sixteen-billion-dollar business.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Sixteen-billion-dollars 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. 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. 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. America is still pretty much where it was on the international league tables twenty years ago. It's just lined the pockets of the testing companies.
Guy Kawasaki:
What would you do differently?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, can you imagine what you could do differently? These are public tax dollars by the way. I'd said this recent to a national meet at the school boards, "Can you imagine what you could do to improve education in this country with an extra sixteen-billion-dollars a year to spend on it?" If you were to invest that in the section of teachers, the professional development of teachers, in facilities, in infrastructure, on cultural programs, on links with the community, on parental engagement programs, sixteen-billion-dollars 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, it's Finland, that this whole standardization, mainly it began in America forty years ago under the Reagan administration with 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.
Anyway, forty years ago, this is when it began. Forty 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. They outperform America on every index. America could be doing that if they'd gone in the same direction, but instead it made this fatal mistake to standardize everything.
Guy Kawasaki:
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?
Sir Ken Robinson:
It's all of the above. The decisions to move in this direction we're taking, 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. Sadly, the Obama administration didn't get their arms around it in the way they could have done. 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. 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 is changing rapidly. 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.
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? It's a very high proportion of people in the correctional system didn't complete high school. There is a correlation and it's mainly young men of color who end up there.
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 commercial enterprise as well. It costs a lot more to have somebody in prison for a year than it does to get them in high school and educate them properly.
It's an example, I think, of a culture that's beginning to turn in on itself. 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 closer on the edge of an abyss here. I don't know why people are resisting the idea of not wanting to grapple with it, but also, we have a crisis in the human world and the crisis of culture. 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. The education is not the cause of them all, but it contributes to them.
It's the old thing. If you're not past the solution, you're past the problem. 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. Now, if you look at social media, when I gave that talk in 2006, the smart phone wasn't available. It didn't come out until 2007. The tablet didn't come out until 2010. Now, people are behaving as if civilization is impossible without them, both look ten years out from here when AI and machine learning really starts to kick in.
Now, these are transformative revolutionary devices, but nobody along the way anticipated social media in the way it's grown. Twitter, really? Nobody was talking about that in 2006. Facebook was a glint in Mark Zuckerberg's eye, and now it's fermented the average spring.
All these things ricochet and have a cumulative and largely unpredictable effect. Educations are only buttress against that to help people not just navigate their own lives, but to anticipate, to collaborate. As a species, we have to think very differently. I think we're planning for big stakes there with education.
Guy Kawasaki:
Let me offer a theory. 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.” 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.” Until companies realize that innovation and creativity happens from people without these strict disciplines, parents are always going to force their kids into those curriculums.
Sir Ken Robinson:
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 two-thirds of them had degrees in the humanities. It's not a straight line.
I'm not arguing as people need college degrees or getting deep into discipline, becoming expert at it at all, but it's not the only route to success. For most people, it's not a straight line anyhow.
Look at the numbers of lawyers you got churned out to 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 lower at all. They end up in all kinds of odd directions.
I know people who did dance at school who’ve gone in all-- they're in senior management positions. 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. 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 Warhorse, I don't think you've ever saw it. It was a stage play as well, but it's about the cavalry and the first world war. A very good friend of mine, David Putnam, Lord Putnam as he now is, was a film director. He did Chariots of Fire, The Mission, really very strong record in 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 Warhorse, he shows a clip of it where the cavalry are charging towards the enemy positions and the headman is in some bushes.
The enemy pull back the disguises they'd been wearing and that they're with machine guns and they just slaughter the horses. 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 made this thing. There's a sense in which that is happening in the culture, which is this point that we're still educating people for a world that's disappearing. These new technologies are going to size down a lot of these ideas.
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 would be committed to in the past may not exist in the current form in future is just pragmatic, common sense. I say this a lot.
I did a book for parents called You, Your Child and School. I was saying to them that you have to look at your child. 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.
Paradigm, and it's a word that's overused, but you see, it's about history. When you see a big shift in the way things were, like from the farming communities, the industrial revolution, from the industrials, the information economy, people cling on to the old model. In fact, they double down on it because it's what they know.
They think, “Well, it worked for my parents,” and they think they're doing the right thing. 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?
Guy Kawasaki:
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 dumb-ass job and education requirements. 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."
More about the person. "You know how to tell stories on any platform that drives engagement and you have a pulse on new and creative trends in digital marketing, and creative sensibility that extends across content genres. You excel at building cross-functional relationships in fast-paced organizations."
This is going to be just great, because when I come down through the education requirements, it's going to say Masters of Fine Arts or whatever, computer science. 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 typical bachelor of Art, fine, whatever, some ... it's so flexible. Maybe that's why Apple is so creative because, it's permeated even the job listing. You don't even need a bachelor or equivalent work experience. It's just preferred, not required. Is that an enlightened-- your dance instructor, your dance student would qualify.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which is a beautiful thing.
Sir Ken Robinson:
I think Google has done that and a number of other firms that have said that “We don't stick originally anymore to the idea that you have to have a college degree.” None of this is not going to make us having a college degree, but it's an 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 like a holding camp, to keep you away from the job market for a bit longer. They're leaving with huge amounts of debt and the system's not working. It's true in other Asian countries as well. It's not just in America, but now I think that's good.
As you read it, 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
What a concept!
Sir Ken Robinson:
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. She was looking at a job as a librarian, I forget which state this was in now. I was on the road. She's in her forties, but she wasn't allowed to apply for it because she didn't--
Guy Kawasaki:
Have a degree in library sciences?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, she didn't graduate high school maths. I said, "But it's got nothing to do with…” She's lived her life in books. It's that fixed mindset, where but you don't have that so you can't do that. 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.
I'm not saying they're recommending 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 we in the climate, in the environment, we know that intensive industrial farming, which essentially sterilizes the environment so that eventually it decays and erodes, it's a suicide note. The way you start to get around it is to recognize that nature is a living entity.
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. 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Could you just, in broad terms, describe the education system that we should be aspiring to?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Okay. How long have we got? Well, it starts for me with the individual.
In fact, I'm currently writing a manifesto for all of this at the urging of my literary agent. I may never forgive him. I can't remember if somebody who listened 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.
It began by saying, "I'm writing you a long letter because I don't have time to write a short one."
Guy Kawasaki:
They attribute that to Benjamin Franklin.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, it's Franklin. It was him.
Sir Ken Robinson:
I can never tell if it's Franklin or Churchill. It's always one of them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Those are the only two smart man ever, but yeah.
Sir Ken Robinson:
But you know that. It's producing something condensed is trickier. That's partly what I'm trying to do just now, but it has to begin with a child.
It's like, if you're reinventing agriculture, you have to start looking at the conditions and how organisms behave and how they behave in different conditions. We have a grandchild now, my wife and I, and by a remarkable coincidence, it turns out she's the most beautiful gifted child who was ever born.
Guy Kawasaki:
What are the odds of that?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, what are the odds, Guy? We're feeling pretty, pretty pleased about that.
Guy Kawasaki:
That it should making her study math, right?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Who have been graced with this golden child, but she is great, but the good thing about having grandchildren, we realize-- we've told her for years-- as distinct from having your own kids, is you have more time to enjoy them-
Guy Kawasaki:
And give them back?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Give them back, yeah. Well, you're not being harassed with anxiety and sleep deprivation. You get to enjoy them differently, but it it's a function of getting older too, but a couple of things strike you about babies like this.
She's twenty-one months now, and it's the right place to start. Children are born with endless possibilities. Again, that's not a slogan. I don't mean it that way, but they are. Language is always a very good example of that.
Most kids learn the language they're exposed to, but I meet kids, that maybe true of you, I don't know ... who speak three or four languages effortlessly, not because they're gifted, linguistic. They might be, but it's not because of that, it's because they grew up in cultures where they just took it in through their skin.
The fact is we could all be multilingual if we were exposed to it, in that way. It's effortless. Kids learn to speak not because we teach them how to do it. You can't, they learned to speak because they want to, and they can. If they are exposed, they'll learn all of them.
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.
If you look at people who excelled in different areas, there's normally some point of exposure in their life or some influence. Then there's that little spark that goes when-- Paul McCartney. I may have mentioned The Beatles, I don't know, but Paul McCartney was on Stephen Colbert in The Late Show a while ago. It was just great. It's little things.
Stephen Colbert said, "How'd you write all those songs? How'd you get how'd you get to write Beatles songs?" He did a whole thing about when he grew up in Liverpool, that he was surrounded by music. His dad played the piano, the family parties, singalongs. He was just exposed to it, all the old show songs of the great Oscar Hammerstein and all the great musical song period. People would sing them as a big community things and, "My dad played the piano. Then when he couldn't play the piano, I started playing the piano," he said, "So I had a lot to draw from, it's all this stuff coming. I had lot of things to draw from musically." He said, "Plus, I'm a genius." Stephen Colbert says, "Yeah, yeah. Plus, you're a genius."
Guy Kawasaki:
But you are the man of quotes, man. You should just edit a book of quotes, and why bother writing?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah! Why bother?
Guy Kawasaki:
You got to know what to steal. That's a skill.
Guy Kawasaki:
Why make it up?
Sir Ken Robinson:
But what I mean is, is that there's that balance between nature and nurture. We're all born, and there was a whole debate for years about were children born as blank slates and was it all environment. I think whoever thought this up didn't have kids. This is just such blatant BS because anyone whose got children or lived anywhere near a child, knows that they come fully loaded. When you're a parent, you just have to wait and see who this is, that's landed in your mists. Who are you? They'll tell you who they are.
We're all part of the genetic inheritance from our families, our ancestors, and we're all co-mingled 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. You have to start with that.
The children have fantastic capacities and they grow and flourish in same condition as what. This isn't new.
Froebel, 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. Need to learn from each other, because learning is a social process. It's why we all speak similar language. There aren't seven and half billion languages on earth with nobody understand what the hell we're all talking about. I mean, we speak the same language and still don't know what we're talking about but at least we end up with accents, not because we're peculiar, but because we were exposed to it.
And then as the 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 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, 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 Thrive Education, my ideal assessment, 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. We have a rough timetable, we've got one now, but outside schools, we wouldn't begin to think, “We'll do this for forty minutes, then we'll just do something else for another forty minutes, we'll go to another room and do that.” If you did that in business, you'd be broke 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 in another one. So, having cross-generational education is very important, and I'd have an agreed broad base of disciplines in the early years, but then I'd allow 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 Mentzer, 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 order and rules of safety, and there would be multiple pathways after 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 of 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 the 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 far 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 and operated. 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 sixteen-billion-dollars of wasted public money should go into respecting, remunerating, and training and developing a much better teaching for us.
Guy Kawasaki:
We should take investment banking and teaching in reverse compensation.
Sir Ken Robinson:
That would help, wouldn't it? 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. 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.
I always make a distinction, I don't always, I mean, haven't made it for a while, as it turns out, I occasionally make a distinction. I think I did on one of the Ted Talks between fast food and Michelin starred restaurants. 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 not going to be horrible, but it's guaranteed and it's got a need to satisfaction. But you go to the restaurant with a well-qualified chef, and well-trained staff, they're all great, and they're all different, 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 they are, in doing it.
And again, this isn't theoretical, there are a lot of examples of these schools around the world. In fact, we're about to launch a new platform called Boundless. Myself, Ted Smith, Andrew Mangino and the CEO we've just appointed called Emily Tabin. This 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
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.”
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, it's not. It's generally not, but the job market is constantly changing, and evolving, and it seems pretty likely, nothing's 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, that 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 that, 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?
Guy Kawasaki:
It's true. What's the odds of two of us being in the same room at the same time?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Honestly, and if lightning were to strike here now, God knows what life form would evolve, but it's true, isn't it? They're not intelligent in that sense, they are very smart algorithms, but they're not intelligent in the sense that human beings are, with all of our faculties, senses, embodiments, and sensitivity.
Guy Kawasaki:
And creativity.
Sir Ken Robinson:
And creativity, that's right.
So 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. I mean, it's interesting, like Uber, for all its problems and troubles, wasn't conceivable ten 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're all queued up to get involved in it and people commonly make mistakes like this. When the telephone networks started to evolve in the 19th century, famously, people were saying, I mean, "The way things go, there's going to be a telephone in every town."
I remember when the mobile phone came out, I was taken aback by it. 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? What do you mean, you can have your own phone? What for?”
So, all the things that we just take for granted now, I'm not just saying it to comfort each other, but these things where inconceivable. My dad was born in 1914, he died in 1977. If he came back now, and wandered about, or the Wright brothers would come back now, they would sit there complaining because the planes ten minutes late. What? So, it's not a stretch to think that ten years from now, fifteen 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
I would make the case that if 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.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah. I think he'd be appalled, as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
Well, yes. Yes. Two more questions. Okay. First, how does one become a Knight?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Corruption. Hidden cameras.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did the Queen call you up and say, "Hey Ken, what are you doing today? I'd like you to take a knee before me?" Is that like getting the MacArthur Award? What, do they just call you up, the Nobel Prize, "Hi, this is the Queen, you've been chosen."
Sir Ken Robinson:
Well, it's not unlike that, truthfully, but seriously, there's a whole process of nominations. You can't nominate yourself. That rules it out.
But in the UK, knighthood's a part of the broader honors system where, it's the same in America.
Guy Kawasaki:
What's same in America?
Sir Ken Robinson:
We don't have the Presidential Medal of Honor here.
Guy Kawasaki:
You mean for Rush Limbaugh?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah. Just for Rush Limbaugh.
Guy Kawasaki:
Rush Limbaugh and Rosa Parks, those are two names.
Sir Ken Robinson:
They're the two people, yeah. The people who've really brought value to the American way and have offered a vision of the future that we all buy into. Yeah.
But there are civil and military metals, and awards and honors, that are given here in America. In Britain, it's called the honor system and there are a whole network of civil and military awards that are given, which includes knighthoods. There's a particular category of knighthood called Knight Bachelor, which is a personal award by the Queen.
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 and they would get the title, Sir. And often lands that go with it, we've seemed to have dropped the lands bit at the moment, which is a bit of irritating.
So there's a process of nomination for honors. They go to a government group organization, it's housed in something called the Central Chancery for Knighthoods, and they sift through these awards. It's 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 could be submitted by anybody on your behalf and the more people who think so the better. And they say, "We think this person has 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
Did you know it was coming?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No. No, that's not true. I was asked by the person who put it together if I would mind being nominated, but that was several years before anything happened. Because I was doing quite a lot of stuff at the time at a national level in the UK, and I'd been involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland, and stuff like that, and I said, "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."
And then, so that goes together, and then there's a process where it's evaluated. People take references, see if it's true, and I don't think they tell you, but they figure out, make sure that you're not doing anything appalling, and then if all that checks out, apparently, there's 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, "Ma'am, your majesty, the collective view is this person merits this, and..."
Guy Kawasaki:
Does she ever say no?
Sir Ken Robinson:
We don't know that.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, okay.
Sir Ken Robinson:
We don't know that. But sometimes people refuse them, when they're offered them.
Guy Kawasaki:
Really?
Sir Ken Robinson:
It's pretty unusual. And so, what happens, to answer your question. When all that has happened, you're contacted, either 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 Consulate-General, who was a friend of mine at the time, who said he had some exciting news. I thought he was being posted to Barcelona, or somewhere. And he said, "I've got 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 would accept." I said, "What are you talking about, Peter? Are you all right?" But the language is important. Basically, he was saying, decoded, 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 ask you, 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, just decline it, and some people have in the past. So they want to avoid that kind of difficulty. But I was actually 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.
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, or my dad did. I mean, he lived through it, he didn't fight in them. He didn't fight in the first one.
For that generation, especially, and also, we'd gone through some hard times as a family. 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 and broke his neck so he was a quadriplegic for the rest of his life and money was hard to come by, and I have an extended family.
My mom was one of seven. They had lots of kids. So, when we gathered it was like a meeting of the clans and my family was very close knit, I mean the central core of it was very close knit and they're all very, very funny and we're very close.
And so, to me, it was an honor for the family, as well as me because whatever I've done came out of the spot my family gave me.
Guy Kawasaki:
And does life suddenly change? I mean, you can just walk into Nobu and not need a reservation?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Pretty much. You enter a room, people drop to their knees almost instantly, stuff like that. I mean the crown gets to be a bit of a nuisance after a while.
Guy Kawasaki:
Selfridge's has a separate corner for you?
Sir Ken Robinson:
It's all very intangible, honestly. I mean, I think it's a title that people respect and take seriously, which is great.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you ever get together with all the other knights?
Sir Ken Robinson:
There is actually something called the...
Guy Kawasaki:
The World Knight Forum?
Sir Ken Robinson:
No, it's the... Oh God, the actual formal title's gone out of my head. But it's an organization of people who've got this form of knighthood, the Knighthood's Bachelor, and it's a society.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's a bachelor party.
Sir Ken Robinson:
It's a bachelor pad, yeah, and so, it's the same form of knighthood that Paul McCartney-
Guy Kawasaki:
John Ive?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Johnny Ive has a different form of knighthood. There are three or four different versions of it. According to, people like, well, there are lots, Elton John, all the people you'd recognize.
So yeah, truthfully, I'm not being quirky in saying it, 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 answer to Ken, 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 into hotels in all kind of where. I've been checked in as Mr. Sirken Robinson and I think, in some places, people think Sirken is, that I'm an Indian person of some sort. I've had that, “Mr. Sirken Robinson?” Yeah.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you're Muslim?
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah. I'll take it. Whatever you got, but it was a recognition of the importance of the field of work as 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 forty-two 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.
Guy Kawasaki:
It's like when you get the United Global Services, and your spouse gets Global Service status too.
Sir Ken Robinson:
Yeah, well, there you go. It's very similar.
Guy Kawasaki:
And my very last question, I promise you, is, do you know whatever happened to Sarah?
Sir Ken Robinson:
“We moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. And I just wanted to say about the transition. Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids. He's twenty-one now and my daughter's sixteen. 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 sixteen. 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 the main reason we were leaving the country.”
Guy Kawasaki:
That is one of the best lines I have ever heard in a video. Poor Sarah. Did you scar her? What happened?
Sir Ken Robinson:
You know, I don't know. When I gave that talk, I didn't know that it was going to go on the internet. I was just talking to a room full of people.
Guy Kawasaki:
And Sarah is scarred?
Sir Ken Robinson:
We don't know. We didn't know her all that well but 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 that's the law of unintended consequences, isn't it?
Guy Kawasaki:
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 Seih and Peg Fitzpatrick. I'd knight them both if I could. Special thanks to Esther Ward-Siki for introducing me to Ken Robinson.

This is Remarkable People.