 We are creatures that grow from small beginnings and what we grow into depends on several factors. One is the conditions that surround us and one is the extent to which we engage with the life within us. For the past 20 years or more education has become a strategic issue around the world. When I was a student nobody was very interested in what was happening in another country as an education. I mean I was growing up in England we didn't really care what was happening in Finland. People in America weren't that bothered about what was happening in Spain. But now governments are education has become a strategic issue. And it's become a strategic issue because of the nature and pace of globalization. And education has become seen as a process to encourage competition and economic success between countries. And it's led to the most corrupt and sterile form of education you can imagine for our children. Our children are suffering now from high levels of stress than ever before. More and more kids are not graduating from high school. I hate the expression, is hate a strong word? I hate the expression drop out. In America currently something like 30% of kids who start the 9th grade don't complete the 12th grade. And every single child has a reason for that. I mean there are trends but what's interesting not the statistics it's the reasons individuals have. But you know if you're running any kind of enterprise and you lost 30% of your clients every year. You might wonder whether it was the stupid clients or your enterprise. And to call these kids dropouts makes it sound like they failed the system. And it's much more accurate to say the system has failed them. Because I don't know any kid who doesn't want to learn. You know children are born with immense possibilities. I mean infinite possibilities and they have a massive appetite to learn. I mean I think what happens in the first 18 months of life. Children learn to speak. Little babies in the first 18 months learn to speak. And nobody teaches them. You don't if you're a parent you didn't teach your child to speak. It's far too complicated. You know you wouldn't have the time and they wouldn't have the patience. It's not like you sit your child out of the age of 18 months and say look we need to talk. Or more specifically you do. And this is how it's going to work. You probably notice your mother and I have been making all these noises for the past 18 months. Some of these are names of things we call them nouns. There are other noises we make. They're not names of things. They're names of things you can do with things. We call them verbs. If you change the noise you can say what you will do and what you have done. And don't worry about the subjunctive. Nobody gets it. It doesn't work like that. Kids absorb language through their skin. You nudge them, you correct them. They mimic you but you don't teach them. By the way if they grow up in a home where there are six languages spoken they'll just learn all of those. Kids love to learn. The problem they have is with education. Which is the time when we start to decide systematically to teach them things. Many of the rhythms of education are obstructive to the natural rhythms of learning. My premise is that children are born with immense natural capacities. They have a tremendous appetite to learn. Education has become the problem. When you say what is the aim of education, I'd put it this way, and I'd love to know what Sankara has to say about this coming from a different cultural perspective, but my take on this is that all of us are born into two worlds. There's a world that existed before you came into it. It was there before you were. It's the world of historical circumstances. It's the world that exists whether or not you exist. That would be there when you've gone according to where your metaphysics take you. But there's another world that exists only because you exist. It's the world that came into being when you did. It's the world of your private consciousness. The world of yourself. The world of which there's only one set of footprints. But the world of your own anxieties, hopes and aspirations and talents is now ambitions and so on. Education is filled with the outer world. And most of the problems that children experience are to do with their inner world. So as I see it, the role of education is to help children understand the world around them. That's clearly essential. And also the world within them. So that they can become compassionate, fulfilled and engaged individuals. And for me, the great deficit in education at the moment is the extent to which we fail to engage the child's inner world. And recognise how much they could become if we invest enough of our time, effort and own conscious understanding into what their possibilities are. Sandro. So much of your work has been about helping people blossom to their fullest potential to live a full, fledged life. I remember visiting your amazing Isha school, which reflects many of the values that Sir Ken has described. And I'm wondering if you can tell us in your view what makes for a perfect school. And how does Isha or any of your schools address the natural longing in a human being to know? I'm glad that there's no perfect school anywhere. Because this aspiration for perfection is very death-oriented. It's something that most people have missed. The nature of life is never perfect. Only death is perfect. Never has death happened imperfectly. Never has life happened perfectly. If school is about life, then there is no perfect school. Having said that, as someone said, not him somebody from England. No, I'm seeing him as a representation of England. Someone said that education is a necessary evil. It is a necessary evil because there is a resident evil in the world. We have very convoluted aspirations in the sense, largely most part of the education is trying to manufacture cogs for the larger machine that we have built. Our children are the fuel, unfortunately. We have to put them into some slot where they'll function well. And when we say the world, world is no more about people. The world is about the economic engine that we are driving. It's become bigger than us. We have to keep the engine going. We're scared to stop it for a moment. We have to keep going. Now, the problem is this that we have created a world. If our economies fail, we will be depressed. If our economies succeed, we'll be damned for good. I feel it's better you're depressed. Now, talking about a school as a way of manufacturing cogs for the machine, there are many ways to do it. Every nation has its own system. If I have to shape you into a particular shape that you must fit into a particular machine, it's a cruel process. But now we can't let the machine fail. It needs spare parts. Constantly it has to absorb. And humanity is the spare parts. So our children are the fuel and the machine parts which go into this to run the larger machine. That's one aspect. So this is why I have addressed education in three different dimensions, which people around me are still trying to grasp why these three different things. There is one form of education which is called Isha Vidya, I think they might have showed something about that. This is for the rural masses in India, where the problem is they're in an economic and social pit which they cannot get out by themselves. The only ladder for them is education. Employment generating education. But there are reasonably well-to-do people where they might have gone through that in the previous generation, but this generation need not think about how to earn my living. They have to look at how to expand who they are. So we have Isha homeschool which caters to that because this kind of education costs money. So only people who can afford it can do that. Cost money means not like how it costs here. By Indian standards it costs money. And there's another form of education where people are not interested in serving this machine or that machine, they want individuals to blossom. So we have Isha samskrithi, where there is no academic education of any kind. They only learn music, dance, art, Sanskrit language, Calary which is a very... the mother of all martial arts and classical dance, classical music, yoga, English language is a passport to the world. So these children are a treat to watch. This is how children should have been, just to give you a glimpse of what it is. At the age of fifteen, for three years they go into monastic life. Compulsory they must go on. Compulsory they must come out at eighteen. They cannot continue. They'll take monastic life for three years, but after three years they cannot continue. They have to discontinue that and get back to normal life. This is for discipline and focus. But you can't make the entire world like that. This is an ideal to work towards. The idea of this kind of schooling is just to develop human body and human brain without any intention, without any intention as to what they should become. They can become whatever they want. Only thing is human body and human mind should grow to its fullest capability and attention is the main thing. An indiscriminate and unprejudiced attention is what we're trying to evolve in the children, that they learn to pay attention to everything the same way, that you don't divide the world as something as good and something as bad, something high, something low, something divine, something devil, something willy, something sacred. No, you learn to pay the same attention to everything. This is the fundamental of this form of education. What will they do? What will they do is the aspiration, so I guaranteed them one thing. Twelve years, if you enter the school, the commitment is for twelve years. You have to. Six if you come, eighteen if you can leave. So they asked me what will the children do. I said, one thing I'll assure you, we will not give you a certificate in the end. They said, said, grew what? I said, did anybody ask me what is my certification? Only in the American Embassy they asked me. So I said, no certification because doors in the world may open little slowly for you, but when they open, they stay open. Because not because of qualification, but by competence you open doors. It is just that everybody is in a mad race, your children should do better than your neighbor's children. This is a disease. I agree. I didn't know you're unqualified by the way. I'm sorry. That's the... I actually have to go. That is the only qualification I have and that is the only striving in my life how to remain uneducated. Because this is the biggest problem. Why education has become a problem in the world is people become who they are in the world because of what they have gathered. This is a very unfortunate situation. Right now, whether it is material things or knowledge, whatever information they have gathered, it makes them who they are. Now who you are and what you have gathered are two different things. This is the distinction we are trying to bring into child's life in our schools. Whatever you may gather, it doesn't matter. What you gather is just information and things. Information is a thing by itself. It should not determine who you are. Who you are is determined by a different process. What you gather by a different process. So when I keep repeating to everybody, some... lot of these people feel ashamed, my guru is uneducated. They try to say, no, he only says that he's really educated. What I'm saying is whatever I have gathered does not determine who I am. Because the biggest problem in the world is this from the day you are born, all kinds of people are trying to teach you something that's not worked in their life. I think if I can say one of the major problems, excuse me, I agree with all of that, is that we didn't have systems of mass education as we know them now pretty much until the middle of the 19th century. They were invented. Made up. Yes, it was part of the industrial revolution and it was associated with the big move from the countryside into the cities to provide a workforce for the industrial economy. It's very straightforward from that point of view. It was a massive piece of social engineering. It's why the system is shaped the way it was. We needed a majority of people to do blue collar work, which is why we had a broad base of elementary education, and a relatively small group of people to do clerical administrative work in suits, which is why we had a small university sector. The system was created that way in Britain when I was at school, at the age of 11, while we all took an exam, I'm sure Ian would remember it, it's called the 11 plus, and it determined at the age of 11 which type of school you went to, which sort of high school, a grammar school or a secondary modern school. People thought it was a blood test that told them how smart they were. It was just a capacity to do that type of test. Like a driving test, you could get better at it. A lot of people were trained to do it and they got through it. The consequence of it is that we created this kind of system where there were a small group of winners and they did very well by it, but the vast majority didn't. The system of education is burdened with certain ideological assumptions. One of them is a whole set of ideas about intelligence. The whole ideal of Western education is to get people to university. Therefore, because the university has abrogated the system to their own purposes, and therefore we have in the system this deeply mistaken assumption that intelligence is the same thing as academic ability. Academic ability is very important, but it's a very specific capacity to certain types of deductive reasoning, certain types of critical discourse. The upshot is that if you're not very good at that, you're thought not to be very smart. The truth is that if you create a very narrow conception of ability, you create a very big conception of disability and inability. I'm from Liverpool in England. I went to school across the city centre from the Liverpool Institute, which is where Paul McCartney was at school. I didn't know him then. I'm sure some of you do know him quite well. I wrote a book a few years ago called The Element, How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything. I interviewed lots of people for the book. One of whom was Paul McCartney. I tell you this because I think it's very important you don't leave here today unaware of the fact that I hang out with Paul McCartney. Anyway, Paul, as I call him, was... I asked him, I interviewed him for the book, and I said, did you enjoy music at school? And he said no. He hated it. I asked him, I interviewed him for the book, and I said, did you enjoy music at school? And he said no. He hated it. I said, did your music teacher think you had any talent? He said no. Not really. He does, doesn't he? And then one of the other people in the same music program in the same school was George Harrison, the lead guitarist of the popular music group, The Beatles. And I said, did your music teacher think you, George, had any talent? He said no. Not really. I said, well look, would this be a reasonable comment that there was this one music teacher in Liverpool in the late 1950s who had half the Beatles in his class and he missed it. He said, yes. Well, it's a bit of an oversight, isn't it? So... Anybody stand out in your class this year? Mr Wilcox, not really. Nobody leaps forward, frankly. What I mean is if you create this narrow view of ability, then you automatically suit all this other stuff. I mean, in... In the 50s there was a big polio epidemic that ran right through America and Europe and I got it. I'm one of seven kids, I was the only one in the family to get it and the only one in the street to get it. Despite my vigorous attempts to cross into our neighbourhood. I thought, you're coming down with me. Anyway, I was in hospital and I ended up going into special ed at 5-11. That's what they used to do. So I was in school which had lots of kids with polio, lots of kids with cerebral palsy, partially sighted, blind, deaf kids. I was sitting next to one kid in school who had a really bad case of cerebral palsy. It's a terrible thing to deal with because if you don't have it, you can just move your arms around, you just have to relax muscles and contract them, you don't think about it. But if you've got cerebral palsy or affected by it, you're fighting your body all the time. If you try to speak and it's affected your face, you sound as if you're talking nonsense. Of course you may be talking absolute sense, it's just you can't get the sounds out. Anyway, so the guy sitting next to me in one of my family at the school couldn't grip a pencil in his fingers but he could grip it in his toes and he had beautiful writing, better than mine actually. Was this handwriting? We don't know. We don't know. But the point is we were surrounded by people like this. My classroom at school was like the bar room seen from Star Wars. There were people in various degrees of decrepitude being brought in. But nobody was interested in what people's disabilities seemed to be. What we're interested in is what they were good at and if they were smart or interesting or what. And the fact is that many of the things that they had difficulty with weren't what really defined them. But because there's this narrow view of ability if you have trouble writing or speaking it's assumed that you have some associated mental incapacity. Which is why you get this big conception of disability surrounding it. But if you reframe the conception of ability of talents and possibilities they're inherent all the time. I mention it because it's a dramatic example of what happens all the time in general education. All kinds of kids are told they've got problems who don't have them. They're created by the system. And it's the problem of the system that we need to address. That if you reframe ability all of these devotees that people seem to be suffering from suddenly disappear. If you find the things they're good at you do as Sadgurus suggesting. If you create an environment which is holistic which is addressing your spiritual development your physical development which recognize that human life is not linear it's organic and it will take many different courses then you have a completely different setting additions under which people will flourish. And it's the fact that the conditions themselves which are industrial in character create problems for kids which they then begin to reel against. So we now have a system based on competition narrow view of ability and one in which people are being medicated to stay with the program. They're being pathologized for losing interest in what is essentially very boring stuff. We sit them down all day long and wonder why they fidget. And there are different ways of doing it better ways I mean for me it's it's plain as day really you know education is not one of those things like an incurable disease and we can't figure out what to do. We know what to do in education it's about taking this thing to scale but taking it to scale doesn't mean replicating it because as you say there's no perfect school actually there are no tools two schools alike but like there are no two individuals alike but there are principles you can apply everywhere and getting those principles in place to me is the big challenge now. As we are looking for an evolution of a human being through the education system the education system should be always an evolving process by itself when we think in terms of a perfect school we're thinking of again fixing it somewhere that's what needs to change as one can develop because can mention this IQ test I'm saying as one can develop muscle by doing certain things with the body one can develop intelligence the fundamental aspect of developing intelligence is right now there are some studies I know I don't know you must tell me I'm not an expert on these things we'd say if a child goes through 20 years of formal education and comes out with a PhD they say 70% of intelligence is irrevocably destroyed because I have a PhD I don't know it's just I'll leave that to you so essentially what's being said by these studies is we are mistaking information for education by deadening the brain with too much information definitely the possibility of intelligence is lost this is why I said what we accumulate and who we are should remain separate who I am should not be influenced by what I have accumulated whether they are material things or information or impressions this is of the world I would like to little differ in what was said in terms of child's inner world and external world what we are mistaking to be inner world is still external in my perception because a child's fears ambitions aspirations are all external inspired or infected I would say by the outside situation it is not natural aspiration of life natural aspiration of life if you look at it if you leave someone uninfluenced from outside the natural aspiration is always to expand not to become less but if you look at the form of education because it is purely intellect based education there is no other dimension of intelligence in it and I think in this part of the world there is a serious mistake that intellect has been mistaken for intelligence intellect your intellect can function only with the backing of your memory or in other words your intellect functions with accumulated information if I take away all your memory my intellect is quite useless by itself but there are other dimensions of intelligence within you which does not need the support of memory if education systems do not focus on activating these dimensions of intelligence you will find factory workers you will not find a genius in every home what you need is an innovative intelligence today when I say when I use the word innovation developing a new I-8 phone I'm not talking about that maybe we can develop a world without a phone we don't know what's an innovation innovation need not necessarily mean improvement of what we have little by little by little yes that is also needed but that is not what life is looking for people are not any better with phone without phone maybe we are doing more things but equally confused equally struggling as it was before so the point is not about what we have gathered what we have gathered is useful in creating comfort and convenience for the world what we have gathered is not useful for creating well-being for ourselves and for the world if well-being has to happen we have to access dimensions of intelligence which are not intellectual because intellect cannot function without accumulated information if you function always out of accumulated information you naturally get identified with it so depending upon what you have accumulated you become that kind because you have become that kind another kind and your kind always goes into conflict if the purpose of education is to expand horizons of individual human beings you can see that's definitely not happening the more educated somebody becomes as people get educated they really can't get along with anybody they not so educated people can live together 100 people can live together once you become educated you become isolated because this is the nature of the intellect because you're employing only one wheel out of four wheels of your car it is like that it's like suppose you're driving on the street and you are some kind of an expert you drive on just two wheels what moist you do you got a car for that you're driving just on two wheels maybe you're good at it but nobody else on the street want to drive with you they will all stop if you're driving on four wheels everybody will drive with you so the other dimensions of intelligence have to come otherwise the moment you get intellectual you send some way you exclude the world so in a way the way of our education has been to butcher the existence into tiny fragments and we're trying to fix the fragments it's not going to work like that if education has to become holistic there are systemic problems I'm not saying no but more than the systems the people who deliver the system if we can upgrade them in a huge way any system can be made to work good I've seen in India the most rudimentary system is the state education I've been there to these schools before we went into starting our own rural schools I just wanted to see what's right or wrong with these guys I found some schools are like as good as Pigs Day in terms of what they're producing some schools same stuff but they're doing wonderful work so it's the people who deliver that whatever the system if you upgrade the people who deliver this the best people see if we are interested in the future generations of our humanity the best people in the world must go into teaching but right now the lowest grade of people are going because everything is determined by economics how much are you paid that's how you go so this is where what I'm saying earlier is important what you accumulate should not determine who you are as long as that is so the economic values will rule as long economic values rule is the muscle which rules not the intelligence Mr Iken we tend to measure what we value when you were talking about standardised tests but so much of teaching and learning is about relationships that apply and caring and witnessing and seeing one another with a teacher I know you have a story about the teacher, the doctor who noticed that the little girl who was fidgeting was actually a dancer so how do we is it about training the teachers or is it supporting the teachers in a different way how do we create inspiring teachers or give them the room to help foster all the different types of intelligence they are different speaking about well you know there are excuse me there are several strands to education obviously one of them is the curriculum I've talked about organised education I mean people learn on their own and can learn informally but if we talk about organised education as in the schools that Sadger is describing or the schools you've been involved in there's always a curriculum which is what we want people to learn so a big part of this argument is we need a different sort of curriculum at the moment in America for example we have a very narrow curriculum that's based primarily on a fairly impoverished view of science, technology and math I say impoverished because math can be a fantastically invigorating interesting discipline years ago I asked a professor pure mathematics at the university I worked at how you would assess a PhD in pure mathematics his intelligence had gone at this point obviously only 70% but the small shard of it that was left I said I said to him how would you assess a PhD in pure math actually the first time I said to him how long is a PhD in pure math because I've never seen one and he said he'd seen one recently that was 20 pages long 20 pages of math page after page of math with equals at the end and I imagine I've never seen one so I said how would you judge one I mean presumed it's right you'd be annoyed wouldn't you spend five years doing a PhD in pure math comes back wrong see me and he said no they're normally right so how would you judge one and he said there are two criteria there's originality in other words it's how creative it is I'd like to talk a bit more about creativity in a bit but whether it breaks new ground but the second I loved he said it's aesthetic I said why does that matter he said because mathematicians believe that mathematics is the purest way we have of describing some of the truths of nature and since nature is inherently beautiful the more elegant the proof the more likely it is to be true he could be talking about a sonata or a dance or a poem and course mathematicians do feel that way to a mathematician mathematics is a beautiful abstract language like poetry and the problem people have is they don't speak math if you don't read music if you look at a page of notation what you see is a visual puzzle if you read music you don't see a puzzle you hear a symphony and it's the same with mathematics that mathematicians who speak math see a symphony they don't see a puzzle and so a lot of the problem in mathematics is it's a literacy problem we have phrase book math it's like trying to court somebody with phrase book French it's just not a very good idea take my word for that it doesn't work out so part of it is that we have a limited conception of these disciplines I'm fairly impoverished you and what I'm arguing for and it's implicit I think in what I've read about what he's been telling us is you need a broad curriculum that recognises that education has a whole range of functions and that we have to address physical development spiritual development emotional development is tied up with a bigger view of consciousness and therefore you need a school curriculum which has the arts, the humanities the sciences, technology not incidentally, not in a hierarchy but equally and co-equally important it's important for every reason and also because for some kids that's where their real lives are going to lie that's where they will discover themselves most fully the second part of education is pedagogy which is how we aim to teach people these things and I think you're right pedagogy teaching is the most important part of it I mean the reason sad guru is having the effect he's having on the world is because he's such a brilliant teacher teaching is what this is about and teaching is not something that can be reduced to direct instruction teaching is not about telling people what to think it's facilitating knowing it's creating conditions where people will come to understand for themselves by probing them, questioning them by providing them with curiosity probing them so they might go in a different direction giving them some tools, some techniques and to reduce it to a process of delivering information to people I really don't like this language that's got into education of delivering the curriculum it's like education is some branch of FedEx it's not great teachers know that instruction may be part of it but the larger part of it is enabling, facilitating peaking people's curiosity engaging them and inspiring their imaginations and seeing the possibility in something it's a very sophisticated process and one of the reasons that our education system stumble is precisely because we've demeaned the profession of teaching we haven't respected it in the way that we should we don't compensate people in the way they need to be in order to concentrate on the job and do it properly and the best teachers aren't necessarily the ones with the most degrees on the contrary I mean I know all kinds of very smart people with degrees who can't teach at all and it's the big mistake that we've made and the third bit of education is assessment well assessment is important I can't think of any education process that doesn't benefit by people making assessments of it but assessments are not testing assessment is about making judgments of what's going on and whether it's worthwhile or it isn't and how people are progressing all great teachers do that, they're sensing whether this is happening or not I'm going to give people numbers for that and what's happened I think in America is that we've ended with a very narrow curriculum which has been compressed because there was a piece of legislation passed here was it 20 years ago now almost called No Child Left Behind which is one of the great pieces of modern irony and what happened was that the government decided that America was falling behind in the international race and education and they had to the country had to compete and the children with the foot soldiers in doing this and that the way standards were to be raised was through standardised testing it's a terrible mistake to confuse standardisation with raising standards I think but then what happened was they released this opportunity to the publishing companies I looked at this recently so on the one hand you've got conformity is one of the big principles of the current system well if you want conformity then you need compliance and that's what the standardised testing movement is about and this is a business that's the point it's a business and it's really stifling our children at the moment in 2013 we looked at some of the figures the national football league in America which is not of course football as we know I'm a soccer friend and we have to call it soccer because they appropriated the word football it's not right you're not from Leicester I'm from Liverpool it's near enough but you know it's rugby isn't it in armour but the NFL was a nine billion business in 2013 the US domestic cinema box office in 2013 was an 11 billion dollar business in the same year the education testing and support industry in America was a 16 billion dollar business it's massive so it's a business and that's what's squeezing the life out of our kids the reason I'm saying this is that governments have taken the view that the way you raise standards is by focusing on the curriculum and on testing the way you improve education is by focusing on teaching because in the end it's children who are trying to learn it's students, you're trying to get students to expand and to learn and that's an expert personal job as soon as we lose sight of the fact that this is a very personal process of cultivating interest and curiosity and talent and ability and all of those things and an awareness of the world around you if we lose sight of that and the role of teaching then we end up in the mess that we're in but the good news is this can be changed it is being changed but I just want to say too that a lot of what you talked about I absolutely agree with I mean I agree with most of it I'm not saying there's some bit I just think it's nonsense but because I haven't heard all of it but this couldn't be more important with the PhD I expect that exactly exactly can't grasp all of it but it couldn't be more urgent you see one of the figures you quote and I do too is that we currently face on earth challenges which are without precedent in the history of humanity on the one hand you have exponential growth in technology and its impact on culture on the economy on the way that people live it's revealed all kinds of possibilities many of them are miraculously good as you said there are things we're capable of now we couldn't even contemplate it 50 years ago the big problem is that our spiritual development seems to be lagging a long way behind our technological capacities secondly the population now is accelerating at a point where we're already the largest generation of humanity for most of human history there's nobody around really it took a whole of history to get to a billion people in 1800 in 1930 it was 2 billion 1970 it was 3 billion between 1970 and 2000 the population of the earth doubled from 3 to 6 billion right after the summer of love as it turns out you can't tell me it's a coincidence and we're now at 7.4 billion for 9 billion by the middle of the century and we don't know if the earth can handle it actually we know that can't there was a really good program on the BBC a few years ago about how many people can live on earth it was called how many people can live on earth and it was presented by David Attenbury they're very good at titles of the BBC but they concluded this that if everybody because we all need food, fuel and water to survive and air to breathe and if everybody on the earth they concluded consumed food, fuel and water at the same rate all 7.5 billion people at the same rate as the average person in India the earth could sustain a maximum population of 15 billion people so we're halfway there we're 7.5 billion people because we don't all consume as they do in India they said if everybody on the earth consumed at the same rate as the average person in North America the earth could sustain a maximum population of 1.5 billion and we're 5 times past that that's on current methods of production and consumption so we are heading to an abyss here and if we don't change course by the middle of the century we need 4 more planets to make this work now the interesting to me is as I know it is too that these problems aren't being caused by the rest of life on earth they're being caused by human beings and it's a problem of consciousness and of creativity we've created these problems so we either have to by reproduction a lot of people are thinking they're being creative by reproduction a lot of people are thinking they're creative yes that's right people talk about saving the planet and I think the general conclusion has to be the planet's going to be fine the planet's been around for only 5 billion years it'll shake us off like a rash we tried humanity not so good we're going to stick with bacteria they're fantastic but it's a serious thing there's a very good observation by H.G. Wells the science fiction writer who said that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe and there's some truth in that there's a sense of developing our capacity as our awareness and our understanding of ourselves and of each other and of the world around us if we don't take seriously these principles then we're condemning our children to a very very bleak future and the idea that all this can be solved through fueling the profits of the testing companies is hard to comprehend that anybody takes it seriously it's a case of terminal myopia so to me it's an issue at every level it's personal it's about our children it's about ourselves it's our communities but it's about the larger enterprise that humanity is part of and it really couldn't be more important and the principles that I know you embody in the schools are exactly the right ones it seems to me that's what this is about but there isn't a single way to do it as you said there's no one perfect school there's no one particular way to do it circumstances vary but there's some principles it's about conditions of how children's growth and potential recognise the power of teaching and recognise that you need to get these balances right and that we can do it but it couldn't be more important that we get on and do it a lot of it has been articulated by Ken but what I would like to say is in terms of my experience of school I went to school only when it was absolutely necessary I had very innovative ways of staying away from school because right from my childhood one thing that somehow got stuck in my head was if someone is saying something which means something to them however simplistic or stupidity is I'm willing to pay full attention but if someone is saying something which doesn't mean a damn thing to him or her but it's some big stuff I am not interested in that because if you're not interested in that why should I listen to something that you're not interested in so essentially this instruction business comes from this when you think you need to instruct somebody you have assumed that those whom you instruct are of a lower intelligence than yourself which is a serious mistake that is sufficient scientific data to show everybody every one of us over 30 years of age are not as intelligent as a six-year-old child who's just coming to the school the substantial proof to show that only reason why we are looking out to be smart is because we have information and the child does not have information to be just showing off this information in the form of instruction if if we bring the teacher training process completely take away this word instruction and bring inspiration and transmission as a way of life for the teachers every school system could become a fruitful process whatever the thing because I don't believe we can transform all the systems around the world but in some way if you bring inspiration and ability to transmit whatever really matters to them then a child would sit up and listen for sure as a part of this in our schools we made it our school is a seven-day school there's no holiday and no weekend this may be shocking for America because thank God it's Friday is the philosophy if one knows the joy of learning I don't say why would they want to take a break well activity needs to be adjusted according to you know the child's ability to do things so in a month we have four to five activity days which are not determined it's always a surprise for a child the child will never know when is the activity day today when they come today could be activity day suddenly tomorrow you come again it's an activity day next fifteen days it's continuous academic day but academics are very well woven with arts music everything to such a point I found that when they come to in India system I don't know it's the same here probably they do first ten years from first standard to tenth standard and then there's eleven twelve which is like a pre-university kind of thing once they come to eleven twelve they all want to get into professional colleges in India you don't get into a professional college unless you have 99.5% ok the Delhi University has the legend of refusing children who got 100 out of 100 ok where are they supposed to go I don't know they got 100 and they refused because there's no space for them so this marks madness will catch up and the parents will go on overdrive and we have spent ten years bringing art, music, culture into their lives everything will be dumped and just mathematics and sciences being done whether they like it or don't like it so in the last two years I made this eleven twelve into three years I said it's three years if you want to come you come otherwise you leave it because we invested so much in art, music, culture everything now the moment you come to sixteen years of age you drop everything and go into professions you are a doctor who cannot sing you are a dangerous doctor, believe me yes you are an engineer who doesn't understand the engineering of your own body that's why your own dance if you did know the engineering of your body very effortlessly you would know how to move so we made this into two years into three years so people said one year later my children will go my neighbors children are already in engineering medicine I said this is not a race education is not a race one year later what's your problem you are not in that condition he has to earn a living at this age one year later he will go more mature and more complete so we did this and the amazing thing is almost ninety percent of the parents want their children back in the school one year extra for the same education but we brought many aspects of leadership management, business which are not in the curriculum and above all music, art, theatre in a big way and each working out wonderfully for the children they coming out much more rounded out and when the school started the first question that came was naturally me being who I am because education is not my full time involvement so people said Sadguru you are going to give them a spiritual teaching I said the spiritual teaching is for the stupid who lost life sense people like you I said to the parents people like you who lost the fundamental life sense you need a spiritual teaching if you allow human intelligence if you know how to nurture human intelligence without influencing it because teachers think they have to influence parents think they have to influence religious teachers of course they want to influence intelligence need not be influenced it just needs to be inflamed all the time but everybody wants to influence this wanting to influence human intelligence comes from I think in these parts of the world there is a religious thread in the education system of very strong sense of opposites something is God something is devil something is heaven, something is hell something is evil, something is good this is so strongly set up in people's minds naturally they want to influence because you think they will join the other party like how the two political parties in the country look like two religions as far as I am concerned the language that's being used on the news channels in my perception they look like two different religions to me because it is such strong opposites no that's not what a democracy was about democracy means today you could vote for this tomorrow you could vote for that as it was necessary you would shift no more shifting people are already clearly identified this is me that is you finished maybe people were telling me only 6% travels next 47, 47% 94% is fixed as two different religions in the country this is very much present in the education mechanism that we have strong sense of opposites this is where I think there is something that education systems in the world can pick up from the east where we don't have strong sense of opposites because our gods are devils also our devils are gods also somebody who looks like this is what is beautiful, what is ugly you cannot determine in the east what is unbig happening I think if you want to nurture human intelligence this strong sense of opposites have to go there is nobody in this room who is 24 hours good or 24 hours bad isn't it? you can confess me to me it's okay yes nobody is 24 hours good or 24 hours bad it's just when you're conscious you function in a wonderful way when you're unconscious you may do something lousy what happens to every human being now instead of recognizing that fundamental quality of the human being and how to nurture this because the basis of our intelligence is just this that we can do this or that if you were another creature which doesn't have the same level of intelligence as the human being has a tiger will only do that we know exactly what he will do a hyena will only do that a buffalo will only do that but if we are fixed a human being can do just about anything that is where the intelligence comes in that an active intelligence would choose an unconscious and a kind of conditioned intelligence will tend to do a certain thing the purpose of education is to decondition the intelligence so that it becomes an active intelligence adapting to the situations doing the right thing for the situations in which we exist not positions that we have already taken that is the sense of intelligence but today in some way education system is trying to condition the intelligence this way or that way because I think there is a strong thread of religion in the background though it may not be spoken I see that everywhere there is a strong sense of opposites very strong opposites which cannot meet I wanted to get back to something that you both have said about creativity and curiosity in order to not be too rigid in one way or another and so can you say that curiosity is the engine of achievement and so I'm wondering what happens to our curiosity as we grow older and how do we get it back and sustain it and how do we keep I mean you both have different methods for reaching this but in terms of people are blind dating out of curiosity that's one reason but in terms of people if creativity can be valued as literacy is valued and if curiosity is a few will keep us somewhat awake and aware how do we hold on to that as maybe we are even out of school and just continue to address all the time we learn from them all the time but as adult learners I wonder if you can speak to that I just want to comment if I may first on what Sadgurus says about opposites I think that's absolutely right we've the western rational view is very much that thinking is a process of making distinctions it's what the whole logic enterprise is about it's fine chopping seeing differences between things and making things into categories I remember writing and it's been a brilliant success in all kinds of ways it's been without its benefits of course not we live off the fruits of rationalism all the time but a really good example to me is this the whole taxonomic process that developed in the 18th and 19th centuries in the natural world gave us an amazing system of classifying natural things into genus and into species and subspecies Linnaeus spent a long time figuring out all these different classifications and if you go to a natural history museum you see all of this at work if you go into a natural history museum you can go into a room and I've done this that's got nothing but butterflies in it and it's very impressive it's got butterflies in cases against the wall pinned to the back, dead but all in species big ones at the top small ones down at the bottom go to another room you see the beetles not the beetles, other beetles all classified and it's a very interesting way to think about it it's a way of studying these things but if you leave the natural history museum and go into the countryside you don't see all the butterflies flying in formation with the big ones at the front and the small ones at the back and the beetles all in some separate part of the field keeping their own company in actuality in life these things all mixed up with each other they cross pollinate the environment that they all depend upon that's the principle of economy it's about relationships, it's not about separate categories and for example in schools we divide the arts and the sciences but it's just a device because in the world all the scientists I know are deeply affected by aesthetic interests look at the work of engineers I was going to ask you later if you have time about dance, I'm a big advocate for dance and in most school systems dance is out of the picture entirely though because we need to spend more time on math and I think dance is as important as math but it's not separate from it, these things are integrated, you can talk about your liver and your kidneys as separate entities but they only function together it's the only way it actually makes sense if you take your liver out and put it on the table it's not doing a very good job at that point is there something wrong with my liver, yes there would be it's out of your body now it's about how these things connect that matters so much so I think the better way is to see that thinking is also about making relationships and making connections and not seeing separation so we end up for example in school saying are you an artist or are you a scientist it's going to be this or it's going to be that it doesn't have to be a choice so when I talk about creativity I often ask people I have to get a life ready but I do ask people large groups and it's interesting to me how many people who are creatives so to speak will also say but they're not really very smart or people who think they're intelligent will say they're not very creative and actually creativity and intelligence aren't separate they are functions of the same thing creativity is about having fresh ideas and that's a function of intelligence so when I say creativity is important it's not separate from it but creativity seems to me to be the hallmark of human intelligence however describe it and there's something prior to it which is imagination imagination is the power to bring into mind things that aren't present creativity is putting that to work in some way but the best evidence of the power of human creativity is that we all create our own lives every human life is a unique achievement there have been 100 billion people on the planet in the past 150 200,000 years and every single life has been different everyone because you create your life unlike most of the creatures and human beings don't live as other creatures seem to only in the direct physical world we live in worlds of ideas and beliefs and values and cultural practices and traditions and we human beings invented virtual reality long before Oculus we all live in virtual worlds and what the great cultural conflicts are about when people's conception of the world come into conflict like this the great religions tearing each other apart over ideas and cultivating creativity and curiosity seem to me to absolutely be paramount and it's the starting point of education you have to help people to see that many things we think are provisional the contingent they can be changed we can think differently we don't need to be trapped into our own biography we can recreate ourselves and that's what this work is about giving people another sense another realm of possibilities that they can come to occupy and inhabit but it begins by enlivening the capacity to ask questions the sense of intrigue about the world around us and it's that that gets killed in schools when it comes down to direct instruction testing and multiple choice bubble tests it's the very thing that should give life to education at the bottom this is so wonderful I don't feel crazy when I listen to you too I think there's a couple things you have this idea you have someone like each of you I always think I have two children and I think if we raised each child like they were the found Dalai Llaman they go to find the Dalai Llaman for some diligence it raised this child to think that they are this divine person if we were to revere and raise each child in that way I think thinking in the next whatever I don't think that would completely change the way in other words what you said earlier about how we look at kids and we think we know so much more but really I think we're here to serve them that too many Dalai Llamas what would you do there would be a lot more peace on earth I think no the thing is I know this is a common word used in this part of the world about raising children you can't raise children you can raise cattle you can't raise children this is an idea you must give up children grow up as can point it out in the beginning a conducive atmosphere they grow up it doesn't matter you have two children how old are they one is almost seven and one is nine you will see as they grow though it is the same genetics same food same homes maybe same school you will see one will go like this another will go like that because there are different ways to perceive the same thing the receptivity in our mind is of different ways if we have to get into technicality of this in yoga we recognize ten dimensions of receptivity I'll talk about five because other five are too esoteric these five are referred to as centers of sleep centers of memory centers of imagination centers of right perception of perversion it is there in all of us if it comes something let's say the same information or a same aspect comes to all of us right now somebody is lit to let them sleep you more some of them are they will perceive it one way somebody is deep into their memory of whatever their experience of lives are they will perceive it one way somebody is in a heightened state of imagination they will perceive it one way somebody is in a state of equanimity they will perceive it one way somebody has taken extreme positions of right or wrong they will perceive it another way so whatever I may give you depending upon from which center you receive accordingly it becomes that so you may have two children same home everything same all inputs same but one will go like this because every moment how they are receiving what is coming their way so now the important thing is as I said earlier when you say picking up an young child and saying you're the Lailama you're the spiritual teacher with all your respect to the institution of what it is I'm saying you're trying to influence them powerfully an intelligence should not be influenced an influenced intelligence is a dangerous intelligence an intelligence which is on but not influenced will always be a solution an intelligence which is profoundly influenced by a this or that is always a divisive intelligence it is me versus you it will become strong sense of right and wrong strong sense of this is it or that is it will always create conflict however good it may look to you see right now I'll take an extreme example an example you're not supposed to speak in America for example right now there is an Islamic state we need to look at this in reality what it is there is somebody out there who believes in something which is more precious to them than their life yes when a man is willing to die for something that he believes you have to at least recognize he's genuine all right there's no better proof but the result of that what horrendous things happen is another thing okay the consequence of that firm belief is another thing but you have to appreciate this man believes that there is something that he believes in which is far more precious than his own life when I say life I want you to look at this whether it's an ant or an elephant whatever life you take every life holds its own life of highest importance you try to catch a little ant a little ant does not think oh I'm just a little ant let me die he does everything possible to live this is the nature of life that is so for a human being also this life is precious for this life but I'm willing to throw this away for something that I believe in I'm saying the belief is genuine okay but the result is horrendous so if you strongly influence your children whatever you think is right don't think the result will be good I'm not of this generation and I really appreciate what you're talking about something visually apparent you don't have to announce but I'm more ancient than you you can see my question is in listening to both of you I was wondering why the economic is not part of what perhaps it's what I feel I feel children who have economic wealth and more means are able to do the testing able to go to those private schools able able able and I think that's changing the tender of education certainly in our country and I'm disturbed by it and I don't know how you guys think about that there's no question about it all the figures support that view that the kids from middle class and wealthier backgrounds do better at school they do better at tests kids from impoverished backgrounds do much less well non-graduation rates are much higher in impoverished backgrounds of which there are many more than there used to be it's true in certain of our African American communities and Hispanic communities it's also the case that although it would be wrong to say if you don't graduate from high school you go to jail that's not true people often have wonderful hours they didn't have to finish high school what is true is a very high proportion of people in jail actually over 60% of people in the correctional system in America did not complete high school so there's a very considerable and significant economic dimension to all of this and it's creating a chasm in the country that I think you it has to be addressed in an urgent kind of a way America pride itself it keeps telling itself it's the best country in the world we have to watch this I live here I lived here for 15 years there's a reason we like it here a lot but nobody has a guaranteed place anymore there's a book written about the fate of empires I call Jared Diamond it's a very good book it's called Collapse if there's a problem for Jared it's that he gives you too much on the cover he needs to come up with a more elliptic title if he wants to sell copies of his book what happens to empires they collapse we're done he should have called the book what does happen to empires, read on I'm from England I'll keep mentioning it from now in the middle of the 19th century Britain had the largest empire in human history that's not jingos it's just a matter of historical fact the biggest military program the biggest economy the biggest colonial program if you had gone to the court of queen Victoria in 1870 and said this empire will be over within the generation you'd have been laughed at at the building but it was by 1918 we'd lost a generation of people in another foolish war we were virtually bankrupted by it in 1939 it all happened again and in 1945 it was finished I was born in 1950 in Liverpool and we played in bomb craters and we were on rationing we had powdered orange juice powdered eggs and powdered milk on rations from the central government that's how I grew up with the first ten years it was over completely gone it collapsed what I'm saying is that America is living a dream at the moment which is that all this is completely sustainable and can carry on in perpetuity and it won't I'm not preaching for an empire either America is the most powerful place on the planet at the moment and it's hemorrhaging generations of children with no economic hope no purchase on a life that can add up to anything so far wallowing in all kinds of crime and drug abuse I'm going to Chicago next week where they have terrible problems with the education system and to say that this isn't the consequence of America's economic policies is just self delusional it's a sort of flagrant disregard of the well-being of the people America's being hoist on its own patate economically with so much wealth concentrating in such a small group of people and so and I'm not wishing for it, argue for it, I don't wish it on any country it's just this is a very serious issue for this country as we're in this country we're talking about it but the good news is as well there are lots of wonderful people doing fantastic things, I travel around the country a lot I'm going to Chattanooga in the morning and they're doing a whole thing to revive their education as you were saying empires and you talked about England it was a changing situation in the world and there was a terrible war and whatever but empires have closed down without any major disasters like World War II for example in India many empires rose which spread right across subcontinent and they just closed down by themselves without any war without any external interference and there is a significant diffuse look at the thing, there was a time when 36% of the world's economy was India, where everybody wanted to go to India and one guy made a mistake and landed up here, you know it's a celebrated mistake a very wrong perception of which direction is which, alright he missed up the sunset for sunrise he went west instead of east anyway that economy which was over 30% of the world's economy just closed down simply because they were doing so well and they decided they need to protect themselves this was the biggest mistake they did in trying to protect themselves what was a very transparent culture, they tried to become little introvert and they successfully did it and that just pushed it down completely then came the innovations then came all the other things but one of the biggest undoing for IndiaVs they became introvert they thought they had to protect themselves till then they never protected themselves they embraced everything the moment they thought they have to protect themselves it started going down if you protect it you must understand the walls of protection that you build are also walls of self imprisonment after some time you ask me or him I ask you maybe I grew up I didn't have a terrible time at school I have to say the school I went to kind of broadly worked for me the main thing was that I went to a grammar school although I am very keen to qualify the importance of academic work I always rather liked it it worked for me because it meant to work for some people but the thing I disliked most about it was we were put on a fast track at school and it meant we had to drop certain things so I liked art at school and because we were supposed to be taking our exams at 15 I went to see the head teacher and I opted to do art and he said it was either art or German that was an interesting conflict wasn't it? and I said what do you think I should do? he said if I were you I would do I said I want to do art and Germany so the thing is you can't do art and German which baffled me because I had seen films of Germany and there were pictures everywhere I thought well Germany is capable of doing art and and he said if I were you I would do German I said why? he said it would be more useful and I was baffled by it I thought why would German be more useful than art? I mean it is useful I'm not saying it's not especially in Germany it's absolute bonus but the implication is somehow art was useless and that's what became clear is that the school curriculum was divided into two groups of subjects it still is the first problem is the idea of subjects but if you accept that for a moment most school curriculum was divided into two groups of subjects useful ones and useless ones and the useless ones are art and music and dance and things like that so I had to drop art to do German it never worked out I never got the hang of German and the reason is it's impossible you cannot speak German we know this to be true I tried but Germans like Latin you have verbs that conjugate nouns that decline the word has to come in the same the verb has to be then the sentence they're long sentences so you can have a long compound German sentence with the verb at the end so if you talk to somebody in German it can be ages you know what you know who was involved where this thing happened but you have no idea what they did until the last word show because verb occurs about 15 minutes later that was what they were doing absolutely no idea I went and gave a talk at in Vienna when I graduated college I went to speak at this education conference and I was picked up at the airport in a taxi and the guy said to me in German where are you from to which I replied yesterday evening in which I now know was a mixture of French and German and he said are you English I said yes but I can do art and but it's funny because when they call me about this thing in advance they said you know if this talked to all these educators would you like to give your talk in English or German so on the phone I acted like this was a big dilemma you know because in Germany they all speak English anyway that's the thing you get they all speak English to you so I acted like it was a real kind of a real tear I said look I think in the end I'll give this talk in English because I should say I took my oral exam in German at school and I failed it twice twice and the reason is that you know it's a very complicated language it's like Latin but if you've got a Latin translation to do you've got till next Tuesday you know and a pencil you know whereas in Germany they expect to reply immediately I just couldn't get the hang of this thing at all so I did the German oral exam and I failed it the first one because I spent the whole exam standing up having misunderstood the instruction to sit down so failed it the right way anyway so when they called me on the phone said do you want to give this talk in English or German I said look I'll do it in English I think they said why is that I said well look there's several reasons one is it'll be longer more than three minutes which is my conversational range in German currently secondly it will deal with more complicated issues than my favourite things you know what I'm largely confined to and thirdly the audience won't have to keep standing up and sitting down because I'm still annoyed about that you know so it was that these choices I had to drop it to do something I didn't want to do we never did music at school because it wasn't thought to be relevant to the academic track so it was that stuff and I wouldn't over-psychologise it but it was the lack of those things on my own education to be think hard about why they mattered in fact I wanted to ask you if you don't have trans now obviously it's not trans yet too but one things I've often argued is that is that dance in schools is as important as math and to most western people that sounds like a bizarre exaggeration of something but it's not people are embodied we are physical creatures I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of dance companies I'm the patron of the London School of Contemporary Dance Martha Graham's company in the UK and to watch dances at work is the most extraordinary thing it's not just a physical activity of course not it's a holistic activity and I know in one of your scores dance is a very central part of I remember you saying in one of your talks that you equated dance with science is that right? I'm not saying it is a science but the scientific nature of dance the way I perceived the world I'll continue from the question that Max asked what is the most terrible thing about the school? I don't know because I was not there I didn't suffer that I remember so well that I remember so well that this assessment that she was talking about a big investment in assessment some 16 billion in assessing children which is unknowingly grading them and this grading life does not respect only schools and education systems respect in there and who does well in the world is not determined by how much marks they got somewhere but they are given an extra advantage because they got so many marks so I remember this monthly test and are the monthly report cards that were given out I would see some children strutting around because they are first, second something and some children sitting and crying was there afraid to go home I don't know what they had in their report cards as far as I was concerned whenever it was given to me I just took it and gave it to my dad he would open and he would blow I just didn't know what's happening there's a communication between my teacher and my father I never once opened and saw what is written in it because I thought this is something between the two of them because as far as I was concerned every test paper I always gave it empty didn't write a word on it or I doodle something if they insisted I wrote my name otherwise I wouldn't write that either and every time I would change the spelling of my name because the Germans pronounce J S A or Y so my name starts with J for some time I wrote it with Y sometimes I wrote it with W I tried all kinds of spellings according to English language they said a proper num can be spelled any way you want it so every test paper I spelt it differently as I felt like it why I'm saying this is and when the final test or exam came that I have to go to the next class my concern was I don't want to be left behind with junior students I want to go with my friends so I always pass that one so people always wondered is six zeros in every test how do you get to pass this one I wrote my paper only for 35 marks which is passing mark I write through my education till half an hour bell in India you can't get up and leave I'm just waiting for the 30 minute bell the moment the bell rings I'll get up and leave because by then I've written and I've calculated I'm getting 37 36 I'm done I'm out always if you look at my report cards right through everything is 35 36 37 35 36 37 all subjects teachers would beg me you may know something else please sit down and write I said that's not the point I got 35 I'm moving to the next class and that's all that matters to me that's the only concern that I don't want to be left with younger children I want to move with my friends except for that I had no interest in anything this doesn't mean I had no interest in anything at all I paid enormous attention to every detail of what's around me with which I developed a certain sense of geometry about everything by the time I come to 8th standard my mathematics paper was divided like this it is 30 marks for geometry 30 for arithmetic arithmetic and the remaining for algebra I I never bother I don't understand why alphabets and numbers are mixed up so geometry I got 30 out of 30 everything else arithmetic I got 5 that's about it I went on because my sense of geometry is about how everything stands when I look at the body I look at the geometry not at the complexion not at the shape and form I look at the geometry how you're sitting if I just see how you sit and stand I will tell you in next 10 years time what problems you will have with your body so my sense of geometry came by simply paying enormous attention to anything and everything it it grew to such a point if I just find a leaf I could just sit like this for five six hours at a time this is one thing I feel we have to bring to our children ability to attend to something whether it's important or not important is not your business my father being a very high level academic excellence in his life being a physician supposed to be a very sixth strict disciplinarian which unfortunately or fortunately didn't work on me every day evening six seven o'clock nine o'clock we're supposed to read our textbooks however uninteresting they are it doesn't matter so I would open the book like this I find a little speck on the paper this spec would absorb me for the next two hours without reading a single alphabet I would sit like this for two hours I wouldn't read a single alphabet on the book but I would not be looking here and there I'm totally with the tiny little speck on the paper I'm saying this is a big mistake we have done earlier we have said strong opposites this is important this is not important I think if human intelligence applies itself to every little thing every little thing will explode into a new cosmos by itself this is what a human being is here for to enhance life in such a way that no other creature can do it but unfortunately we have taken strong positions this is important this is not important so it's going away right now the only thing that's important is what serves our economic engine is the only important thing this whole desertation about German and art is just this what is important what will earn you more bucks what will not earn you money that's the question that is the fundamental base question if we do not remove this from our education system there will be no education there will only be one more manufacturing unit I hope that I would have power to ask you a question Sir, can you still wear your single function device I hope your daughter is now wearing a multifunctional watch my serious question is your comment about flawed enterprise as an education is really resonated with me especially how the government and regulatory policies are influencing our education system and America is really the most powerful country in the world but we have worse than some of the third world country education system but we also have the best universities and best boarding schools and we have very flawed public school system as well as community colleges if you are the single advisor to the new president what policies would you recommend so that America becomes again the most powerful country in the world in our human capital and we can make the impact moving forward just to say I think there are brilliant public schools in America and public education is one of the jewels and the crown of America's achievement over the past 200 years and I know there is a growth in charter schools and independent schools and all of that but for most kids public school is not their best shot it is their only shot and getting public schools right and not giving up on them I think it is a really major priority which I would want to say to any incoming president that there has been a clear attempt to break up public education or at least to bring the profit motive into it education worldwide is estimated to be just on the economic frontier a $5.5 trillion business it's why so many big publishers independent entrepreneurs are getting into education why so many tech companies are getting into it it's like another gold rush and I'm not against people with good interesting ideas getting involved in education as long as we keep remembering its children that we're dealing with and young people and they're not there to make people profits and I do think it's very important that any incoming president you know that I that's the first thing I'd want to say the second is that by the way the community college system is fantastic and more and more people are going to community college because the costs of going to college have become so ridiculous I mean student debt now as well $1.3 trillion more than all credit card debt so I think that's the second thing I think it's an amazing asset in this country but the third is just the things that we've been saying here about the importance of getting teaching and learning right I mean I'm not and I don't think any of us should be shouldn't have as our priority making America the most powerful country in the world and if I were in England I wouldn't want England or Great Britain to be the most powerful country in the world it's not but issues are bigger now than countries and international competitions like these aren't terribly helpful I think we need a much bigger global and compassionate view of what we're trying to get done much more collaboration much more integration of of interest I mean for example by common consent the best education system in the world at the moment is Finland and Finland set about revising its education system 40 years ago at around the same time that America did America got into all this after the nation at risk report under the Reagan administration and America went down the road of standardisation and testing and narrowing the curriculum and it hasn't worked billions of dollars being spent with no improvement to speak of massive frustration on the part of teachers, principals disaffection among kids hasn't worked Finland meanwhile over the past 40 years has created the best education system on earth nationally by student achievement retention, satisfaction engagement, fulfilment professional respect for teachers satisfaction of parents stability of their communities it's become an exemplary system and in so far as they matter at all these international league tables show that Finland is also close on the other top there too in the areas that are being tested it's a fantastic system and it's the exact opposite the Finnish education system is not based on competition it's based on collaboration schools work together teachers work together universities work with schools with parents there's no standardised testing in Finland as in none well as one at the end of high school and there's almost 100% graduation rate and it works then people say well you can't compare Finland to America well in population terms it's hard to do that because Finland has a population of what 5.5 million America's what 310 million now but the fact is that education in America is organised mainly at the state level and there are 30 states in America with population smaller than or equal to Finland I do a lot of work in Oklahoma there are 3.5 million people in Oklahoma, I think Vermont has something less than a million I was in Wyoming recently I was the only person there just me just me and the driver looking for the entrance so it's not that we should all try to be Finnish and call our capitals new Helsinki it's not that it's that the principles apply and the principles are pretty straight forward one of the things that we talked about the industrial revolution and the origins of education and the industrial revolution and it is, you can see it it's about conformity and compliance but the real I think the real comparison is not with industrial manufacturing it's with industrial agriculture which also developed during the 19th century and industrial agriculture completely subverted the old organic systems it was based on mechanisation which meant that you could cultivate single crop farms as far as you could see and you know you go to the midwest it's corn as far as it will take you or it's potatoes as far as you can see to the horizon that was made possible by mechanisation the other innovation was chemical fertilisers which made it possible to things to grow bigger and faster and the third innovation was pesticides because once you created these big monocultural farms they lacked the natural protectiveness that mixed farming creates so we had to soak these things in these pesticides to keep them from being infested with insects and it worked has worked for a while the problem is that it's destroyed top soils around the world which are eroding at a prodigious rate it's poisoned waterways it's polluting the oceans and it's not sustainable the whole world we all depend upon a very narrow smear of top soil less than a few feet thick that doesn't cover the whole world it just covers part of it most of the earth is rock or water and without this we can't and it's taken millions of years for this stuff to accumulate and industrial agriculture is destroying it and you see it, it's what happened in the dust bowl in Oklahoma, it's happened in other parts of the world too the thing about this system it's been very successful but it's completely unsustainable it's unnatural, same thing with animals we're keeping animals in these terrible compounds we're pumping them full of antibiotics hormones to make them grow bigger and faster and because they live in these terrible conditions they cross infect so we pump them full of this stuff the thing about industrial agriculture it's all been based on output and yield and people will tell you that industrial agriculture the interesting thing is the focus is on the plant or the animal, it's getting it bigger it's yield and output organic farming is based on the opposite principle which is they don't focus on the plant they focus on the soil the exact opposite thing if you get the soil right through natural process of composting crop rotation you don't need all these pesticides and you don't need to keep renewing the soil it does that itself and the organic farmers know that if you get the soil right the plant will be fine don't focus on the plant focus on the conditions of growth and the same thing has exactly happened in our school system I think we've been focused on output on yield, we've created sterile in human conditions in our schools where people are not learning even though we're getting data and so on and along the way what we've done is eroded the culture of learning and all schools know and I'm sure it's true of your schools if you get the culture of the school right get the culture right then things grow and it's implying those organic principles if we get all schools to do that then the problem will start to write itself I mean what Ken just now said is the most important aspect that is education is not a production line it's an organic happening at the same time from the question she asked see you cannot create an education system independent of the society in which we exist some ideal system America is America as he said some principles from Finland you can take but Finland is protected by oceans and all sides and it is what it is and cold also prevents lots of things America is what it is children are not just learning from their teachers they're learning from the street they're learning from the culture around so you cannot ever develop an education system independent of the ecosystem that's happening are we as a society willing to in some way cultivate the ecosystem in the society which is suitable for a child to grow up in the best possible way is a question that all of us should ask are we going to do what we like to do or are we going to be conscious of how this will impact future generations every action that we are performing is an important thing that we need to look at because educating a child is not just a teacher's business or school's business or parents business it is happening all the time so a more responsible attitude towards this a larger consciousness about this everything that you do our children are seeing and what will happen to them tomorrow if they start doing what you did at 18 they do at 12 what will happen if what they do at 12 somebody does it at 10 this is something that all of us need to pay some attention to because education is not just happening in the school alone yes a certain part is happening but I think child learns equally from outside as he learns from the school having said that this entire approach of bringing creativity I think the most important thing that schools are missing out is exposing children to more natural phenomena in the world they have become an isolated information cocoons of their own they are living their cosmos through the phone it's very very important I think every school invests in taking their children out exposing them to natural phenomena and different thought process in the world different cultures in the world so that there is a more homogeneous approach to intelligence rather than right and wrong kind of intelligence why I'm saying this particularly specifically for American education system is I see on the national news channel people use words like good guys and bad guys if somebody says such a thing in India he's finished I'm sure even in UK you cannot say that but on the national news channel major anchors referring to people as good guys and bad guys I'm saying this has to go if you really want to cultivate an organic system where everybody grows to his full potential rather than being a product of a particular system thank you