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  • I was here four years ago,

  • and I remember, at the time,

  • that the talks weren't put online.

  • I think they were given to TEDsters in a box,

  • a box set of DVDs,

  • which they put on their shelves, where they are now.

  • (Laughter)

  • And actually, Chris called me a week after I'd given my talk, and said,

  • "We're going to start putting them online. Can we put yours online?"

  • And I said, "Sure."

  • And four years later,

  • it's been downloaded four million times.

  • So I suppose you could multiply that by 20 or something

  • to get the number of people who've seen it.

  • And, as Chris says, there is a hunger for videos of me.

  • (Laughter)

  • (Applause)

  • Don't you feel?

  • (Laughter)

  • So, this whole event has been an elaborate build-up

  • to me doing another one for you, so here it is.

  • (Laughter)

  • Al Gore spoke at the TED conference I spoke at four years ago

  • and talked about the climate crisis.

  • And I referenced that at the end of my last talk.

  • So I want to pick up from there

  • because I only had 18 minutes, frankly.

  • (Laughter)

  • So, as I was saying --

  • (Laughter)

  • You see, he's right.

  • I mean, there is a major climate crisis, obviously,

  • and I think if people don't believe it, they should get out more.

  • (Laughter)

  • But I believe there is a second climate crisis,

  • which is as severe,

  • which has the same origins,

  • and that we have to deal with with the same urgency.

  • And you may say, by the way,

  • "Look, I'm good.

  • I have one climate crisis, I don't really need the second one."

  • (Laughter)

  • But this is a crisis of, not natural resources --

  • though I believe that's true --

  • but a crisis of human resources.

  • I believe fundamentally,

  • as many speakers have said during the past few days,

  • that we make very poor use of our talents.

  • Very many people go through their whole lives

  • having no real sense of what their talents may be,

  • or if they have any to speak of.

  • I meet all kinds of people

  • who don't think they're really good at anything.

  • Actually, I kind of divide the world into two groups now.

  • Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher,

  • once spiked this argument.

  • He said, "There are two types of people in this world:

  • those who divide the world into two types

  • and those who do not."

  • (Laughter)

  • Well, I do.

  • (Laughter)

  • I meet all kinds of people who don't enjoy what they do.

  • They simply go through their lives getting on with it.

  • They get no great pleasure from what they do.

  • They endure it rather than enjoy it,

  • and wait for the weekend.

  • But I also meet people

  • who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else.

  • If you said, "Don't do this anymore,"

  • they'd wonder what you're talking about.

  • It isn't what they do, it's who they are.

  • They say, "But this is me, you know.

  • It would be foolish to abandon this,

  • because it speaks to my most authentic self."

  • And it's not true of enough people.

  • In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people.

  • And I think there are many possible explanations for it.

  • And high among them is education,

  • because education, in a way,

  • dislocates very many people from their natural talents.

  • And human resources are like natural resources;

  • they're often buried deep.

  • You have to go looking for them,

  • they're not just lying around on the surface.

  • You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

  • And you might imagine education would be the way that happens,

  • but too often, it's not.

  • Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment

  • and it's not enough.

  • Reform is no use anymore,

  • because that's simply improving a broken model.

  • What we need --

  • and the word's been used many times in the past few days --

  • is not evolution,

  • but a revolution in education.

  • This has to be transformed into something else.

  • (Applause)

  • One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education.

  • Innovation is hard,

  • because it means doing something that people don't find very easy,

  • for the most part.

  • It means challenging what we take for granted,

  • things that we think are obvious.

  • The great problem for reform or transformation

  • is the tyranny of common sense.

  • Things that people think,

  • "It can't be done differently, that's how it's done."

  • I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln,

  • who I thought you'd be pleased to have quoted at this point.

  • (Laughter)

  • He said this in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress.

  • I ought to explain that I have no idea what was happening at the time.

  • We don't teach American history in Britain.

  • (Laughter)

  • We suppress it. You know, this is our policy.

  • (Laughter)

  • No doubt, something fascinating was happening then,

  • which the Americans among us will be aware of.

  • But he said this:

  • "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.

  • The occasion is piled high with difficulty,

  • and we must rise with the occasion."

  • I love that.

  • Not rise to it, rise with it.

  • "As our case is new,

  • so we must think anew and act anew.

  • We must disenthrall ourselves,

  • and then we shall save our country."

  • I love that word, "disenthrall."

  • You know what it means?

  • That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to,

  • which we simply take for granted as the natural order of things,

  • the way things are.

  • And many of our ideas have been formed,

  • not to meet the circumstances of this century,

  • but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries.

  • But our minds are still hypnotized by them,

  • and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them.

  • Now, doing this is easier said than done.

  • It's very hard to know, by the way, what it is you take for granted.

  • And the reason is that you take it for granted.

  • (Laughter)

  • Let me ask you something you may take for granted.

  • How many of you here are over the age of 25?

  • That's not what you take for granted, I'm sure you're familiar with that.

  • Are there any people here under the age of 25?

  • Great. Now, those over 25,

  • could you put your hands up if you're wearing your wristwatch?

  • Now that's a great deal of us, isn't it?

  • Ask a room full of teenagers the same thing.

  • Teenagers do not wear wristwatches.

  • I don't mean they can't,

  • they just often choose not to.

  • And the reason is we were brought up in a pre-digital culture,

  • those of us over 25.

  • And so for us, if you want to know the time,

  • you have to wear something to tell it.

  • Kids now live in a world which is digitized,

  • and the time, for them, is everywhere.

  • They see no reason to do this.

  • And by the way, you don't need either;

  • it's just that you've always done it and you carry on doing it.

  • My daughter never wears a watch, my daughter Kate, who's 20.

  • She doesn't see the point.

  • As she says,

  • "It's a single-function device."

  • (Laughter)

  • "Like, how lame is that?"

  • And I say, "No, no, it tells the date as well."

  • (Laughter)

  • "It has multiple functions."

  • (Laughter)

  • But, you see, there are things we're enthralled to in education.

  • A couple of examples.

  • One of them is the idea of linearity:

  • that it starts here and you go through a track