do. That's true, isn't it? Broadly speaking? In fact, I want to give you a quick test,

if I could. Well, I'm going to, so.... How creative do you think you are personally?

I mean, if you would, think of that on a ten-point scale, with ten at the top. Okay? It's important

to know that ten is the top. And where would you put yourself on a scale of one to ten?

While you're thinking about that, have a think about this. How intelligent are you on a scale

of one to ten, with ten at the top? Now I'm going to ask you to put your hands

up. You don't have to. You can say, "I'm sorry. I did not come to Zeitgeist for this type

of thing. I'm a grownup. You may put your hand up."

But assuming you're willing to, let me just give you an assurance that if you do put your

hands up, there are no social consequences. [ Laughter ]

>>Ken Robinson: For me. [ Laughter ]

>>Ken Robinson: Can be social death for you, for all I know. What I'm going to do, I'm

not going to drag anybody you up here and ask you to demonstrate anything. It's purely

a straw poll for the purpose of conversation. So with that caveat in mind, would you put

your hands up if you gave yourselves ten for creativity?

Was that a vote or a scratch? All right. One. Nine?

Eight? Seven?

Six? Five?

Four? Three?

Two? Okay.

Where was the average, do you think, of that? Yeah, I'd say.

How about intelligence? Now, I know a certain social modesty comes into play here, but this

is Zeitgeist, so get over it, you know. [ Laughter ]

>>Ken Robinson: How about ten? Any tens for intelligence?

No? Nine? Thank you. Thank you. Actually, you

can -- we're just wasting your time, honestly. You can go now.

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Eight?

Seven? Six?

Five? Four?

Three? -- it's getting tense, isn't it?

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Two?

Any twos? Okay. I never do one, by the way. If you got

one, you're not following this anyway, are you?

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Where was the top of that

curve, would you think? In intelligence? About seven again? Okay. Eight. Okay.

All right. One last question. Last time you have to put your hands up.

Put your hands up if you gave yourself different marks for intelligence or creativity.

Okay. The reason I ask you this is, I think you're all wrong, by the way. Obviously, apart

from the two nines, obviously. Never argue with a nine is my view.

But the reason I say it is that I think most people operate on a very limited conception

of creativity and of intelligence. So my question is, what were you thinking

of when you gave yourself the mark? When you decided you could give a number for creativity,

what was in your mind? When you give yourself a number for intelligence, what was it you

were thinking of? You see, my experience of it is that people

operate on all kinds of misconceptions about creativity. And I think it's why that last

conversation was so important. They think it's all about the arts. And while the arts

are terribly important, it's not just about the arts. They think it's about special people.

It's really not. I mean, if you're a human being, it comes with a kit. You are born with

tremendous creative capacities. The trouble is that creativity's a bit like

literacy. You may have an aptitude for it but never developed the abilities that are

required to exercise it. That, to me, is a big fault of our education system.

And the third misconception is, there's nothing you can do about it. You're creative or not,

and that's the end of it. And I believe there's a great deal you can do to make yourselves

more creative. The whole theme of this conference is about

linking these two worlds, or this session, the inner world and the outer world. And I

believe that our education systems currently are failing to keep pace with the developments

in the external world, which are moving with a tremendous speed and depth of change. And

they have never been good at connecting with our inner world.

Very many people go through their education having no real sense of what lies deep within

them. I'm convinced of this, that we're all born

with tremendous natural talents. But very few of us actually get to tap into them, to

tap into the -- the depth of them. Just on this external world, by the way. I

mean, I published a book ten years ago called "Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative."

And I was asked if I would like to make any changes to it last year. We were bringing

out a new edition. The publisher was going to do a tenth-anniversary edition. "Would

you like to make any changes?" Well, it seemed to me, improbable, frankly,

that it could be improved in any way. [ Laughter ]

>>Ken Robinson: It was, after all, a masterwork that I had written myself.

But I decided under some pressure I'd make a few changes. I had in mind a weekend with

a spell check and a bottle of burgundy. That was the plan.

I actually rewrote the entire book from start to finish. I don't think there's a single

word unchanged in the entire book. And the reason is that so much has happened

in ten years, just in ten years. I mean, Google is responsible for quite a bit of this, I

think. But ten years ago, there were no smartphones,

were there? There were no iPads? No iPods? I know that's not a Google idea. There were

no social media. I mean, Alison talked about interviewing Zuckerberg here when it was just

a faint idea in his head. There was no Twitter ten years ago, was there?

I mean, ten years ago, people didn't tweet, did they? I mean, if they did, they were discouraged,

weren't they? [ Laughter ]

>>Ken Robinson: People -- people would say, "What was that? And do you mind not doing

that again? We're trying to eat in here. If you have to tweet, go outside and do it."

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: But now, you know, if you're

not tweeting on a regular basis, if you haven't tweeted this morning, you feel socially inadequate.

This is just in the space of ten years. So we know the external world is changing

with a fantastic rate and profundity. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to rewrite the

book. By the way, I rewrote the book on Microsoft

Word. Do you use Microsoft Word? Yes. Well, I like it. But you may have noticed

Microsoft Word has opinions. Doesn't it? It tends to give you little squiggles if it -- there

are two sorts of squiggles, those that point out you have made a mistake. I'm fine with

that. The squiggles I don't like are where they disapprove of what you've just said.

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: Like the passive voice. They

don't like it. And why? What has this got to do with Bill Gates? We don't know.

If you use the passive voice, they give you squiggles and suggest helpful alternatives.

I wrote this sentence, "The foundations of the modern intelligence test were laid in

the late 19th century by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin."

That's true, by the way. It's a beautiful sentence, isn't it?

I'll read it again for you. It's that good, I'm feeling.

[ Laughter. ] >>Ken Robinson: "The foundations of the modern

intelligence test were laid in the late 19th century by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of

Charles Darwin." Microsoft Word didn't like that. It has the

passive voice in it, "were laid." So it helpfully suggested this alternative in the active voice.

"In the late 19th century, Sir Francis Galton laid a cousin of Charles Darwin" --

[ Laughter ] >>Ken Robinson: -- "the foundation of the

modern intelligence test." I had no idea.

But I rewrote the book using Microsoft Word for lack of an alternative, because so much

has changed in the world around us. The rate of technological change has transformed everything.

And it will continue to. People here are much more expert at this than I am, but you will

know, I'm sure, that ten years from now, the book will have to be rewritten again. Many

of the things that we think are so smart and groovy just now will be discarded within ten

years. I mean, I think if you show your grandchildren your iPad, they will smile at you with a kind

of patronizing look of how quaint it was that you thought this was so exciting. You know,

that you actually have to hold something in your hand, like an actual object. Because,

I mean, the work we've been seeing on robotics, you can multiply that with what's happening

in cloud computing and everything else, ten years from now, these things we think are

so advanced will be primitive, in all likelihood. The other fact is population growth, that's,

I think, about to present us with challenges people haven't faced up to. There was a very

good program on the BBC -- there are many good programs on the BBC. This happens to

be one of them -- last year. It was about how many people can live on Earth. And it

was called. "How Many People Can Live on Earth." The BBC have a great gift for titles, I find.

And they came to this view. You know, there are now seven and a half billion people on

the planet, seven and a half -- heading for seven and a half billion, which is more people

than the whole history of humanity, by a long way.

And we don't know if the Earth can handle it. So they said if everybody on Earth were

to consume at the same rate as the average person in Rwanda -- you know, consume food,

fuel, water, air, space. They said if everybody on Earth were to consume at the same rate

as the average person in Rwanda, that the Earth could sustain a maximum population of

15 billion people. So we're halfway to that. The trouble, of course, is, we don't all consume

at the same rate as they do in Rwanda. They said if everybody on Earth were to consume

at the same rate as the average person in North America -- that's us -- the Earth could

sustain a maximum population of 1.2 billion. So we're five times past that currently.

So if everybody on Earth wants to live as we do in North America -- and, by the way,

they do -- we would need four more planets to make this feasible, which we don't have.

And there's a paradox here. All of these challenges are created by human ingenuity and human innovation

and creativity. It's not the lemurs that are causing the problem. It's us. And at the very

point where we need to get even more innovative, more inventive, more ingenious to deal with

the challenges that we have created, our education systems are stifling the very capacities on

which we're about to depend. And this is -- I just want to get to this. There are -- We

really live in two worlds, don't we? There's a world, as a guy called (saying name) once,

I thought, very nicely put it. There's a world that exists only -- exists whether or not

you exist, a world that came into being before you did. It was here before you got here.

It will be here well long after you are gone. It's the world of other people, events, other

circumstances. Our education systems are pretty obsessed with that world.

But there's another world that exists only because you exist. It's the world of your

own private consciousness, the world that came into being when you did, the world, as

somebody once said, where there's only one set of footprints, a world of your private

passions, your motivations, your aspirations, your hopes, and your talents.

And I believe the future of the world around us, so far as we're concerned, depends on

understanding much more about the world within us.

And the more standardized our education systems become, the less amenable they are to allowing

us to make those explorations. You have no idea what your talents are, I'm

sure. How many of you have got children? Can I ask

you? How about two children? Okay. And the rest of you have seen such children?

[ Laughter. ] >>Ken Robinson: Small people wandering about.

I will make you a bet. If you've got two or more children or you have two or more siblings

or friends -- I hope that's now included everybody. But if you've got two or more children, I'll

make you a bet. My bet is that they are completely different from each other. Aren't they? Completely

different from each other. No matter how alike they may be in some respects, you would never

confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me."

[ Laughter. ] >>Ken Robinson: I am constantly being mixed

up here. And the reason I point out is this, that our

education systems are based on three principles which are the opposite of how human life flourishes.

Apart from that, they're great. The first one is conformity. Our systems are

becoming more and more standardized; whereas the great pulse of human life is diversity.

We are here in all of our varied differences, we are centers of unique talents and possibilities,

each of us in every child. The second is our education systems are based on compliance,

more and more. Whereas the energy of human life is creativity and innovation. It's why

in the United States -- kids come from college and they cannot innovate anymore. It's kind

of been educated out of them. But the third is this: Human life is organic. We create

our alliance, our education systems are based on a principal of linearity. I would bet very

few of are you of living the life now that you anticipated you would be living when you

left school; is that correct? I mean, we submit to a fiction here that there comes a point

in your life where you have to write your resume. And we set it all out in some linear

narrative, you put headings in, certain things in bold you pick them out to try to make your

life look as if it's all run along some very well-planned strategy here to take you from

your childhood to your present position of eminence. But of course it's not at all like

that. You do that because the last thing that you want to do is to convey in your resume

the actual chaos that you've been living through. [ Laughter ]

>> Ken Robinson: And the actual decisions you've made all along the way.