Can mass education become individualized education? What do we lose with the way our current education system is structured? Excerpted from “Revolutionizing You,” June 19, 2013.

KEN ROBINSON, Advisor on Education in the Arts; Author, The Element and Finding Your Element

 

I was born in Liverpool in 1950. I now live in Los Angeles. We moved there about 12 years ago. This book I published a couple of years ago was called The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. One of the people I interviewed for it was Paul McCartney, the bass guitarist of the popular music group the Beatles. I tell you that because I wouldn’t like you to leave this evening without being aware of the fact that I hang out with Paul McCartney. [Laughter]

I asked him if he’d enjoyed music at school, and he said he didn’t enjoy it at all. I said, “Did anybody think you had any talent at school?” He said, “No. Nobody thought I had any particular talent at school in music.”

One of the other people in the same music program was George Harrison, the lead guitarist of the popular music group the Beatles. Nobody thought he had any talent either in music. So I said to Paul McCartney, “Would this be a fair summary: There was this one music teacher in Liverpool in the 1950s that had half the Beatles in his class and he missed it?” He said, “That’s right.” That’s a bit of an oversight, isn’t it?

My wife is a major fan of Elvis Presley. Terry and I have been together now for 37 years. There are in fact three of us in this marriage. Fortunately I’m alive, but it’s a marginal advantage to be honest. Thirty-seven years and the same look of disappointment at breakfast; it wears you down.

Elvis Presley wasn’t allowed in the glee club in school in Tupelo, Mississippi. They said he would ruin their sound. Elvis. Well, we all know what great heights the glee club went on to once they had managed to keep Elvis out of the picture.

See, this is partly my point, that human talent is highly diverse, very rich and often hidden. It’s often buried beneath the surface. One of the consequences of this is that very many people go through their entire lives without ever discovering what they’re good at, what their real talents are. The consequence of that is that very many people think that they don’t have any talents at all, no special talents to speak of.

The consequence of that is that many people go through their whole lives just trying to get to the weekend. They don’t enjoy their lives; they endure them, they put up with them. I feel that it’s a tragedy that this should happen.

I had an event recently in Vancouver. Actually it was two years ago now, or two and a half. I did this event in Vancouver. It was called the Vancouver Peace Summit, as it turns out. The Canadians are very good with titles, I find.

I was moderating the opening session of this thing and the guest of honor on the platform – there were over 2,000 people in the room, there were eight of us on the panel – was the Dalai Lama. He was a remarkable and wonderful man.

He said lots of very interesting things, as you’d imagine. He was asked a question at one point, and there was a long silence in the room as he pondered on it. It was a minute long probably, which is a long time when you’re waiting for a thought to be formed with 2,000 people. We all kind of metaphorically leaned forward as he framed this response. Then he took a breath and we thought, here it is. He said, “I don’t know.” We thought, What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the Dalai Lama. We don’t know, but you’re the Dalai Lama. He said, “You know, I’ve never thought of that. I don’t know, I’ve never thought about that. What do you think?” I thought that was a great response from one of the world’s great teachers. I have no idea. Teach me. Tell me what you think.

By the way, I had to introduce the Dalai Lama. I was a bit concerned about how to do it, frankly. He’s an amazing man in himself, and he’s also the 14th. There are another 13 you’ve got to take into account when you’re introducing him. Then I thought, I really don’t need to introduce him at all really, because if your name starts with “The,” I think you’ve arrived socially. If you’ve managed to collect the definite article somewhere along the way, I think you can relax in most settings at this point. Which Dalai Lama are you? That would be The.

One of the other things he said is this. He said, “To be born at all is a miracle. So, what are you going to do with your life?” I really thought that was an important and simple statement because it is the case: To be born at all is a miracle.

It was calculated recently – I won’t take you through the process of asking the whole question but it’s a question worth asking yourself: About how many human beings have ever lived on Earth? How many of us? Modern human beings are thought to have evolved behaviorally about 150,000 years ago. I know there are some people who think it all happened in the last two weeks, but I’m discarding this alternative view. I think we’ve been around longer. I’m not talking about prehistoric creatures that went about on their knuckles. I’m talking about groovy people like us, with attractive profiles and a sense of irony. If you Google the question, the best calculation that people have come up with is maybe 100 billion people have lived on Earth.

I have a couple of interesting things to say about this. The first is, of that total number almost 10 percent are on the planet now. It’s actually just over 7 percent. There are 7.2 billion people on the Earth, and we’re heading toward 9 billion in the middle of the century, maybe 11 billion by the end of it. That’s more people than have ever been on the planet at the same time in the history of humanity. We don’t know, honestly, if we can cope with it.

There was a very interesting program on the BBC about how many people can live on Earth. It was called “How Many People Can Live on Earth?” They made this calculation that if everybody on this Earth consumed food, fuel, water in the way we do now at the same rate and by the same means of production – if everybody on Earth consumed at the same rate as the average person in Rwanda or India, the Earth could sustain a maximum population of about 15 billion people. We’re halfway there for the first time in history.

The trouble of course is that we don’t all consume as they do in Rwanda or India. They said if everybody on Earth consumed at the same rate as the average person in North America – that’s us – the Earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.5 billion. We’re four times past that already. If the whole planet wanted to live as we do here – and they do, incidentally; all the evidence from the emerging economies  [suggests] they rather like what we’ve been up to. They’re not suggesting they’ll hold back in the common interest and say, “You had a great time. We’ll forgo it for the time being, but could you send us the photographs because it looks terrific.” They want the same thing. Well, if they were to want that, if we were to carry on as we do now, we would need four more planets by the middle of the century to make it feasible. We don’t have them.

I want to come back to that. The real point I want to get to here is: Of those hundred billion people who have ever lived here on Earth, nobody has ever lived your life. Each of you – your children, your grandchildren, everyone you know – is a unique moment in the whole of history. Nobody has ever been like you.

I don’t mean nobody ever resembled you. I’m like my father. It’s one of the curious things, isn’t it; you start to resemble your parents. I don’t just mean physically, but you start saying things they used to say to you with deep disapproval. You start repeating them in favorable terms to your own children. I’m a lot like my dad. I’m also a lot like my mother. I’m not a clone. I’m similar to them.

But here’s the thing. I’m one of seven kids; my brother John is currently doing our family tree. It’s not much of a tree as it turns out. It’s like a small shrub with a kind of odd fungus infection in the roots, from what we can make out, which we’re trying to eradicate at the moment. John discovered something, which I thought was very interesting, that our eight great-grandparents were all born in Liverpool in the 19th century within two miles of each other. That’s how they met. They bumped into each other in the street or in a pub or wherever it was, in somebody’s house.

By the way, that’s how people did meet. For most of human history people didn’t go anywhere. They might have gone in times of conflict or if they became sailors or traders, but it was unusual for people to travel much further than where they lived. They lived near where they worked. It’s why communities were so intensely vernacular in a way that they’re not just now.

Anyway, that’s how they met. You can say that’s not how it worked, that this was a cosmic plan to which I am oblivious, that the cosmos have arranged things, that these eight soul mates convened at the same point at the same time in the space-time continuum, that they should procreate and continue the process that has led to the miracle that is me. It’s a way of thinking about it.

I don’t think so. I just think they had lower standards then. I think people ran into each other in the street and thought, “You’ll do. I can spend my life with you without being constantly embarrassed. This will be fine.”

They didn’t have TMZ, did they? Or People magazine or Facebook. They didn’t know Charlize Theron was out there. They settled for what was available. Then, eventually my grandparents were born and years later my parents were born in these separate families and they ran into each other, and then there was that night in the pub and here I am. It’s a miracle.

The same is true of you, too, according to what view you take of these things; your personal ancestry weaves its way through the whole tapestry of humanity and many of our lives have intersected at various points through the past, and that’s true of your children, too. The odds of you being here are remarkably slim. Far more people didn’t get here than did.

Somebody once said – it’s an old proverb – that you should never regret growing old; it’s a privilege denied to many. I think that’s right. What amazes me is how little people settle for. They kind of just get on and wait for the weekend.

I think of this as the other climate crisis. There is a crisis in the world’s natural resources. It has to be a backdrop to any conversation about education, by the way. But there’s a crisis in the world’s human resources, too. I’ll give you some examples of it.

I live [in America], just to make this clear. I didn’t just pop over to take a quick shot at you; I live here now and have for 12 years. But in America, for example, something approaching a third of all kids who start the ninth grade in high school do not graduate from the twelfth grade. It wouldn’t be accurate to use the single term drop out for all of that. Some people walk away from it. Some people are bored of it. Some people decide it’s not for them. There are family circumstances that may get in the way. They may have to go. There are all kinds of reasons. Every child, every student has a biography. Like you, they wake up and they have feelings and motivations and aspirations and every single one of them is living a story. They have their reasons if they leave school, just in the way that kids who stay on also have reasons. Either way, about 30 percent don’t complete high school. That’s a catastrophe, isn’t it?

If you were running a business and you lost 30 percent of your customers a year, you’d start to wonder whether it was you, wouldn’t you? Is it me? Is it something I’m doing? It would be wrong to say these kids are failing school. It would be much more accurate to say school is failing them.

I’m very keen to emphasize this: I don’t say this in criticism of teachers, school principals or superintendents. I know wonderful people who work in schools against tremendous odds, out of a passionate conviction that this is how they should spend their lives. They work intently with the best intentions with a passion. I’m talking about the dominant culture, which affects the teachers as much as the students. Often those people who run the school districts as well. [We are all locked inside] this culture of standardization.

Everybody’s biography is different; a unique mix of talents, aspirations, motivations, feelings, dispositions – a unique mixture – every single human life. The reason a lot of kids drop out is that the system isn’t designed to cater to diversity but to a certain idea of standardization, and it doesn’t speak to them in that way.

Years ago when I was a student in my 20s, I went around the slaughterhouse. I can’t remember why now. Half my family is vegetarian, the other half, well, two of them are vegan and I teach on the edge of this all the time. I don’t know why at the time I went around the slaughterhouse. I think I was taking a girl out. I know how to treat a woman. “Come with me to the abattoir. It will amaze you.” Anyway, this is a facility designed to systematically slaughter animals, and it does. It doesn’t fail. Very few of them get away. It’s not like some escape committee where they’re all writing folk songs about the near miss they had.

As I was coming out of it, there was a door at the end of the facility and there was a sign on it that said “veterinarian.” I thought, it’s a bit late, isn’t it? He must be one of the most depressed people in the area. Another day of abject failure at the slaughterhouse; not a single one has recovered despite administering CPR. I said to the person showing me around, “Why do you have a veterinarian at the slaughterhouse?” He said, “He comes in periodically to conduct occasional autopsies.” I thought he must have seen the [pattern] by now. “Another 2,000 dead animals; there’s something happening in here. I insist on seeing what’s going on in there. This isn’t right.” What I’m saying is – and by the way they’re also appalling places, but the reason I’m telling you is, if you set up a facility to do something, don’t be surprised if it does.

If you set up a system of education predicated on standardization and conformity and compliance and a narrow curriculum that excludes people’s talents and takes no account of their personal interests, don’t be surprised if they get the message and leave it not feeling fulfilled.

I think it’s not just a personal issue. It is a big personal issue. It’s [also] a big economic issue. We can’t afford to squander talent like this. It’s a major cultural issue. H.G. Wells once said, quite rightly, that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. I think that’s right. We have an education system that is literally pointing in the wrong direction.

The Element and Finding Your Element are about trying to recover this talent and diversity. When I say there is another climate crisis, one of the examples is the way the school system works. The second is that more and more people are suffering from depression. The World Health Organization recently anticipated that by 2020 depression will be the second largest cause of mortality in human populations. It’s a shocking figure, isn’t it? Depression can range from anything, from being mildly down to being bereaved – which is a proper response – to being clinically depressed. These distinctions tend to be lost in the way drugs are being administered. For example, last year the sales of antipsychotic drugs were totaled; for the first time in America [they] exceeded sales of drugs for acid reflux. That’s an achievement in America, to exceed sales of drugs for acid reflux.

People aren’t born depressed. They become so for various reasons. One of them is a lack of personal fulfillment in the lives that people lead. Gallup has just published a study that says, based on a national survey, that 70 percent of adult Americans are disengaged at work; just not interested. They’re paying attention while you’re there but then they’re back on Facebook.

I’m not saying that finding your element will solve all these social problems, but it will help. Being in your element is this to me; there’s a difference between getting through the week and waking up wanting to get to it. I also meet people who love what they do and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. If you said, “Why don’t you change track for a bit and try something else,” they’d look at you as if you’ve gone mad and say, “But you don’t understand. This isn’t what I do; this is who I am. I love this.” I find this in every form of occupation and activity. If you can think of a human activity, somebody will love it, and somebody else couldn’t stand to do it for five minutes.

I tweeted recently – I’m replete with tweets. I asked people to say if they could name a job that they would hate that other people love. I got the normal run of things that you would expect like proctologist, but people love that. They do. I spoke recently at a conference of pathologists. They love what they do. They’re highly talented, gifted, committed people. Somebody tweeted back, “Teacher. I couldn’t bear to teach.” Yet teachers love what they do for the most part. If they don’t, by the way, I suggest they do something else, because I don’t think you should waste your own time, let alone anyone else’s.

Being in your element is two things: It’s finding things you’re naturally good at, discovering your talents. For reasons I said at the beginning, they’re often obscured. They’re hard to find. Often you have to go looking for them and create the circumstances for them to show themselves. If you’ve never picked up an instrument, how do you know if you could play it? If you’ve never worked in the outdoors, how do you know you wouldn’t get on with that? If you’ve never sailed a boat, how would you know [if you could]? If you’ve never worked in social care, how would you know if you had a gift for it or not? If you don’t do things, you never really find out. We’re all born with extraordinary latent talents, but they have to manifest themselves somehow. That’s one of the problems with education. The curriculum becomes very narrow, so people don’t discover what they can do because they lack opportunity.

Being in your element is more than just being good at something. I know all kinds of people who are good at things that they don’t really care for. They do it because they’re good at it. To be in your element you have to love it. If you love something you’re good at, well as I say, you’ll never work again.

I published a book with others in 1982 on the arts in schools. Being in your element is not just about the arts, but by the way the effect of standardization in testing has been to cut arts programs from schools across the country. It’s a catastrophe that we’re doing that. We’re depriving people of access to some of their most important talents and forms of understanding.

I was talking to this woman who was editing this book I did called The Arts in Schools in the early ’80s. I was having lunch with her and said, “When did you get to be an editor?” She said, “About five years ago.” I was curious because she was a brilliant editor who had the temerity to correct some of the things I’ve written. I was suppressing this kind of fervent rage against this woman. How dare you? I was trying to establish whether she was qualified to question me in this way. Actually she was brilliant. I said, “Really? What were you doing before this?” She said, “I was a musician, a concert musician.” I said, “Well, why did you change?”

She’d been a concert pianist. She was giving a concert in London in the Southbank Centre and at the end of it she went out for dinner with the conductor to celebrate the week. She said, “We got along really well and the conductor said, ‘You were brilliant this evening.’” She said, “Well, thank you very much.” There was this pause. Then he said, “But you didn’t enjoy it, did you?” She said, “Well, how do you mean?” He said, “Playing. You were brilliant, but you didn’t seem to be enjoying the performance.” She said, “No, not really.” He said, “Do you enjoy playing?” She said, “No. Not really, no.” He said, “Why do you do it?” She said, “I suppose because I’m good at it.” He then said, “Being good at something isn’t a good enough reason to spend your life doing it.”

She thought about this and realized that what had happened was that she’d been born into a musical family – her parents both played in an accomplished way – so she was introduced to music lessons. She learned the piano, she passed all the guild hall exams, she went to a music high school, then a college of music, where she studied piano. Then she took a doctorate of music degree, and she said, “As the night follows the day I progressed onto the concert platform and nobody, least of all me, stopped to ask if I really wanted to do that. I realized when I was speaking to him that I’d never really enjoyed it. I was just responding to other people’s expectations of me. I knew that what I loved was books. In every interval in every performance I was sitting reading books, I was making notes on books. I sought out the company of writers and poets. I loved the literary world. I spent every spare minute I had in it, but I kept on denying it to myself because I thought, this is just a hobby. What I was meant to do is play the piano. At the end of that season I closed the piano lid.” She never opened it again and she has been immersed in books ever since. She said, “And I have never been happier. Never poorer, but never happier.”

This is the point I want to make. We are born with these tremendous talents. We have to discover them, but our lives move in a different direction when we do. Life is not linear.