Although I do share a similar lack of hair to Ken.

We do have Ken's daughter in the house as well, which is great,

but I'm not going to humiliate her by bringing her up on stage,

because that wouldn't be fair.

What I'm going to do instead is basically talk to you about Ken.

Sadly, Ken wasn't able to join us today.

He lives in L.A. You may or may not know.

But we thought it was appropriate, as he's the officially...

the most watched TED speaker ever, with his 2006 and 2010 talks

being watched 200 million times in 150 countries,

we thought it was appropriate that he did the intro to the event.

Sir Ken has also been working with us curating this event,

so he's really integral to it.

So, I'd like to introduce to you Ken Robinson.

[Applause]

Good morning and welcome to TEDxLondon and the Education Revolution.

I'm Ken Robinson and firstly let me say

I'm sorry not to be with you today at the Roundhouse.

I would love to have been there.

I have a great affection for the Roundhouse and for London.

Unfortunately, I have to be in Los Angeles,

which of course has its own benefits.

This event has been organised by TEDxLondon,

and I wanted to thank all the people who've put it together

and have worked so hard over the past few months

to make it work as an event in its own right.

But I also wanted to say a couple of word of thanks,

because the event, to some extent, has been triggered

by the second talk that I gave at TED in Long Beach.

I spoke at TED originally in 2006 and talked about creativity,

and Chris Anderson asked me to go back and talk again four years later

and I thought of that really as the sequel

and I called then for our efforts to be redoubled

to revolutionise education.

So, today is an opportunity to develop some of those ideas

through all the speakers that you'll be hearing

and in the conversations you'll be having between the sessions.

So I wanted just to give a few thoughts about the direction

in which these conversations might go and why I thought it was important

to talk about the need for revolution in education in the first place.

It's actually very appropriate that you should be meeting at the Roundhouse.

The Roundhouse, if you've not been there before,

has a long history in cultural policy and agitation.

It was a centre for Arnold Wesker, Centre 42,

which was named after a proposition that the trades unions put together

to promote cultural access and cultural equity.

I also saw a lot of productions at the Roundhouse in the '60s and '70s.

That would be the 1960s, by the way, and 1970s.

And one of them was by Peter Brook, and I'm going to come back to that,

just before I wrap these comments up.

But I wanted to, firstly, congratulate and welcome the other speakers.

I know of their work.

I particularly wanted to mention Jude Kelly, who'll be speaking shortly.

Jude and I have worked together for a very long time,

Jude does wonderful work at the Southbank Centre,

but we also worked together 10 years ago on a report for the British Government

called "All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture, and Education"

and Jude's work, like mine, crosses over

from the professional arts into education and beyond.

So, I wanted to say that you're in good company today for this conversation

and there's great expertise in the audience.

The reason I think we need a revolution is really captured

in a phrase you hear politicians often misuse.

They talk about the need to "get back to basics" in education,

and I think we should.

The problem, I think, is that many politicians,

when they say "get back to basics,"

seem to believe the basics are a group of subjects

that they did when they were at school,

and in particular, they tend to emphasise

literacy and numeracy and science.

Well, of course, they're fantastically important,

but the basics of education are not a group of subjects.

The basics in education are fundamental purposes

and I'd hope that you'd bear these purposes in mind

during the day's conversations and the debates and issues,

which I hope will flow from today.

There are three basics, as I see it.

Not in particular order of priority,

though I have a reason for putting them in this sequence.

The first of them is economic.

Education has powerful roles in economic growth,

development, and sustainability

and any conversation about education that doesn't take account of the economy

is really in some respects detached and naive from the world that we live in.

The problem is that the economies that we are now generating around the world

are quite unlike the economies in which people,

certainly of my generation, grew up in,

and completely unlike the ones in which public education was conceived.

The economies of the 21st century demand that we develop our skills

of creativity and innovation and a great multiplicity of human talents.

Our education systems don't do that.

So, one of the reasons for a revolution is to meet economic purposes.

But the second is cultural.

Education has fundamental roles in enabling our students,

at whatever age they happen to be,

to understand their own cultural backgrounds,

their own histories and traditions,

their own identity and what shaped and formed it,

but it has equal responsibilities to encourage them

to understand other people's cultures.

The great challenges that we face on the planet just now

are partly environmental, but they're also partly cultural.

The great conflicts around the world

are born out of cultural mistrust and misunderstanding.

So, the cultural roles of education are fundamental

and that has real implications for the curriculum.

But the third – and I come to it last because it's, to me,

the bridge into everything that matters to me

in education, as we start to build for the future –

the third of them is personal.

Education in the end is about people.

It's about individuals.

It's about their hopes and their aspirations.

It's about their talents and their abilities and their passions.

A lot of people are dropping out of education,

a lot of people are staying in, but detaching from it,

and they all have personal reasons for doing that.

Education is not a mechanistic process,

it's a process that depends upon the imaginations

and interests of students being properly engaged.

So, at the root of my call for a revolution

is the need to personalise education,

and I say it because, particularly over the last 10 or 15 years,

education has in a way become more and more impersonal.

The more the governments have driven to standardise education,

the more they've driven education towards a narrow view of conformity,

the less personal it's become.

So, the root of the revolution, to me, is the need to reverse our priorities

and focus on the students and the teachers.

I mentioned Peter Brook. I used to go to the Roundhouse in the '70s

and I saw a number of productions by Peter Brook.

Peter Brook, if you don't know, was a theater director, still is.

He was involved with the National Theatre,

the Royal Shakespeare Theatre,

and then he moved to Paris to set up a centre for theatre research.

I remember seeing his production of "The Ik" at the Roundhouse,

when the Roundhouse was a centre for innovative theatre in the '70s.

Peter Brook wrote a book a number of years ago, called "The Empty Space"

and in it, he talks about his interest in making theatre

the most powerful experience it can be

and his argument really is that a lot of theatre experience

is not terribly powerful;

it passes the evening, but it would have passed anyway,

and that theatre has transformative potential.

So his interest is in plumbing that potential.

And he says, to do that, to make theatre the most powerful thing it can be,

we have to focus on what it really is,

and he suggests a kind of thought experiment.

He said, "if you were to take an average theatre performance,

what could you take away from it and still have theatre?"

This is a way of getting to the irreducible minimum of theatre.

"Well," he said, "you can take away the curtains,

you can take away the scripts –a lot of theatre doesn't have scripts–

you can certainly get rid of the director –a lot of theatre didn't have directors–

you could get away with the lighting, as long as you can see it,

actually, even if you can't,

you could get away with the stage crew,

you could... in fact, you could get rid of the building."

He said, "You don't need any of this, really, for theatre.

What you do need, all you need for theatre,

is an actor in a space and somebody watching.

It could just be one other person, but an actor with an audience, that's it.

The actor performs a drama,

the fact of it being witnessed by an audience,

that relationship is theatre."

And he said, "If we're interested in making theatre powerful,

we should focus our efforts on that relationship

and on making it the best it can be."

And he said, "We should never add anything to it, unless it improves it.

If it's a distraction, get rid of it."

Well, you see, the parallel with education to me is absolutely exact.

In education, in the end, what we're talking about

is the relationship between teachers and students,

between somebody learning and somebody helping.

Sometimes it's self-help, of course.

But it's that relationship that matters and over time what's happened

is that relationship has become obscured

and encrusted and obliterated in some respects

by every type of distraction, national policy sometimes,

by testing regimes where they don't contribute to the process,

by bargaining rights, by subject loyalties, by building codes.

It's like an old painting that's disappeared

under layers and layers of varnish.

And I find it interesting, people can talk all day

about education, but never mention learning.

And therefore, what I'm arguing is that the education revolution

has to be based on a radical commitment

to improving learning, however that happens.

It's not about curricula in themselves, it's about the quality of that.

And you can have all kinds of things going on in education, around it,

but unless learning is deepened and improved,

and that means making it personal,

then nothing really else matters very much.

So, it leads me to suggest some core principles

for taking the revolution forward.

The first is that education has to be personalised.

Every student has their own story,

every student has their own menu of interests and of talents.

It has to be about them.

It has to be about improving the motivation and opportunity

for creativity of teachers.

Teaching is an art form. It's not just a delivery system.

Great teachers are people who know how to mediate their material,

in a way that really does inspire the imaginations

and ignite the creativity of their students.

Secondly, education has to be customised.

Wherever students learn, that is the education system for them.

It's not the committee rooms of our parliament buildings,

it's not the board rooms of our examinations boards.

Education happens in the schools or learning communities that students attend

and that for them is the system.

So, customising education to those students, to this place,

these needs, this community, is absolutely critical.

And the other key principle to me is diversity.

Our current drive towards standardisation offends the principle of diversity

on which human life depends and flourishes.

If you're a parent or a sibling

and you have a couple of children or a couple of siblings,

I'll make you a bet.

If you have two or more children or siblings, I bet you

that they are completely different from each other, aren't they?

I mean, you would never confuse them, would you?

"Which one are you? I'm constantly mudding you up."

And the reason is that human life is inherently diverse,

and we need to celebrate that in our school systems.

Instead, too often, we subscribe to a rather bland menu of conformity.

And the final principle here is about partnership.

Education isn't just what happens in formal school buildings,

it should involve great institutions, like the Southbank Centre,

like the Roundhouse, like our great museums,

our great science institutions.

It should be a genuine partnership with the community more generally.

So, to me these principles open up a whole menu of issues for debate,

about the curriculum, about the balance of it.

I think it's appalling that we ever contemplate

a national system of education, for example,

which doesn't get equal weight to the arts along with the sciences,

the humanities, and physical education, as well as literacy and numeracy.