Кен Робинсон: The Element

Most students never get to explore the full range of their abilities and interests. Those students whose minds work differently— and we’re talking about many students here; perhaps even the majority of them—can feel alienated from the whole culture of education. This is exactly why some of the most successful people you’ll ever meet didn’t do well at school. Education is the system that’s supposed to develop our natural abilities and enable us to make our way in the world. Instead, it is stifling the individual talents and abilities of too many students and killing their motivation to learn. There’s a huge irony in the middle of all of this.

The reason many school systems are going in this direction is that politicians seem to think that it’s essential for economic growth and competitiveness and to help students get jobs. But the fact is that in the twenty‐first century, jobs and competitiveness depend absolutely on the very qualities that school systems are being forced to tamp down and that this book is celebrating. Businesses everywhere say they need people who are creative and can think independently. But the argument is not just about business. It’s about having lives with purpose and meaning in and beyond whatever work we do.

The idea of going back to basics isn’t wrong in and of itself. I also believe we need to get our kids back to basics. However, if we’re really going to go back to basics, we need to go all the way back. We need to rethink the basic nature of human ability and the basic purposes of education now.

There was a time in our history when the steam engine reigned supreme. It was powerful, it was effective, and it was significantly more efficient than the propulsion system that came before it. Eventually, though, it no longer served the needs of the people, and the internal combustion engine ushered in a new paradigm. In many ways, our current education system is like the steam engine—and it’s running out of steam rather quickly.

This problem of old thinking hardly ends when we leave school. These features of education are replicated in public institutions and corporate organizations, and the cycle goes around and around. As anyone in the corporate world knows, it’s very easy to be “typed” early in your career. When this happens, it becomes exceedingly difficult to make the most of your other—and perhaps truer—talents. If the corporate world sees you as a financial type, you’ll have a difficult time finding employment on the “creative” side of the business. We can fix this by thinking and acting differently ourselves and in our organizations. In fact, it is essential that we do.

The Pace of Change

Children starting school this year will be retiring in 2070. No one has any idea of what the world will look like in ten years’ time, let alone in 2070. There are two major drivers of change— technology and demography.

Technology—especially digital technology—is developing at a rate that most people cannot properly grasp. It is also contributing to what some pundits are calling the biggest generation gap since rock and roll. People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology—laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet—as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e‐mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.

When my son, James, was doing homework for school, he would have five or six windows open on his computer, Instant Messenger was flashing continuously, his cell phone was constantly ringing, and he was downloading music and watching the TV over his shoulder. I don’t know if he was doing any homework, but he was running an empire as far as I could see, so I didn’t really care.

But younger children who are growing up with even more sophisticated technologies are already outperforming teenagers of his generation. And this revolution is not over. In fact, it’s barely begun.

Some suggest that, in the near future, the power of laptop computers will match the computing power of the human brain. How is it going to feel when you give your computer an instruction, and it asks you if you know what you’re doing? Before too long we may see the merging of information systems with human consciousness. If you think about the impact in the last twenty years of relatively simple digital technologies on the work we do and how we do it—and the impact these technologies have had on national economies—think of the changes that lie ahead. Don’t worry if you can’t predict them: nobody can.

Add to this the impact of population growth. The world population has doubled in the past thirty years, from three to six billion. It may be heading for nine billion by the middle of the century. This great new mass of humanity will be using technologies that have yet to be invented in ways we cannot imagine and in jobs that don’t yet exist.

These driving cultural and technological forces are producing profound shifts in the world economies and increasing diversity and complexity in our daily lives, and especially in those of young people. The simple fact is that these are times of unprecedented global change. We can identify trends for the future, but accurate predictions are almost impossible.

For me, one of the formative books of the 1970s was Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock . In that book, Toffler discussed the seismic impacts of social and technological change. One of the unexpected pleasures and privileges of living on Los Angeles is that my wife, Terry, and I have become friends with Alvin and his wife, Heidi. At dinner with them, we asked if they shared our view that the changes now sweeping the world have no historical precedents. They agreed that no other period in human history could match the present one in the sheer scale, speed, and global complexity of the changes and challenges we face.

In the late 1990s, who would have accurately guessed what the political climate of the world would be ten years later, what over‐arching impact the Internet would have, the degree to which commerce would become globalized, and the dramatically different ways in which our children would communicate with one another? Some of us might have guessed one of these or maybe even two. But all? Very few have that kind of vision. Yet these changes have altered the way we conduct our lives.

And the changes are accelerating.

And we can’t say how. What we do know is that certain trends indicate that the world will change in fascinating ways. China, Russia, India, Brazil, and others will play an ever more dominant role in the world economy. We know that the population will continue to grow at unprecedented levels. We know that technology will open new frontiers, and that these technologies will manifest in our homes and our offices with stunning velocity.

This combination of things that we do know—that more countries and more people are in the game than ever before, and that technology is in the process of changing the game itself as we speak—leads us to one inescapable conclusion: we can’t know what the future will be like.

The only way to prepare for the future is to make the most out of ourselves on the assumption that doing so will make us as flexible and productive as possible.

Many of the people you’ll meet in this book didn’t pursue their passions simply because of the promise of a paycheck. They pursued them because they couldn’t imagine doing anything else with their lives. They found the things they were made to do, and they have invested considerably in mastering the permutations of these professions. If the world were to turn upside down tomorrow, they’d figure out a way to evolve their talents to accommodate these changes. They would find a way to continue to do the things that put them in their Element, because they would have an organic understanding of how their talents fit a new environment.