“Do schools kill creativity? I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Because it’s one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. 1/31 #March4Justice #EnoughIsEnough

We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. 2/31

Nobody has a clue — despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days — what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. 3/31

And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, 4/31

and we should treat it with the same status. I heard a great story — 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 this lesson she did. 5/31

The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.” 6/31

Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original — if you’re not prepared to be wrong. 7/31

And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. We run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. We’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. 8/31

And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this — all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. 9/31

Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why’s this? Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, where Shakespeare’s father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? 10/31

Because you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be? 11/31

Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now,” to William Shakespeare, “and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing everybody.” 12/31

Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn’t matter where you go. 13/31

You’d think it would be otherwise, but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy. Why? I think math is very important, but so is dance. 14/31

Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting? Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. 15/31

If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say “What’s it for, public education?” I think you’d have to conclude — if you look at the output, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you’d have to conclude 16/31

the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. 17/31

They’re just a form of life, another form of life. But they’re rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There’s something curious about professors in my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. 18/31

Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented — around the world, there were no public systems of education, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. 19/31

So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. 20/31

Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you won’t be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. 21/31

And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, cos the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. 22/31

And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way. 23/31

In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. Suddenly, degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. Today that is not a guarantee. 24/31

And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it’s diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. 25/31