RSA Animate created a visual representation of one of Sir Ken Robinson's talks on education, standardization and divergent thinking. We simply recopied the text, for your enjoyment. 

"Every country on earth at the moment is reforming public education. There are two reasons for it. The first of them is economic: people are trying to work out how do we educate our children to take their place in the economies of the 21st century. How do we do that, given that we can't anticipate what the economy will look like at the end of next week. As the recent turmoil has demonstrated. How do we do that?

The second is cultural. Every country on earth is trying to figure out how do we educate our children so that they have a sense of cultural identity and so that we can pass on the cultural genes of our communities while being part of the process of globalization. How do we square that circle? 

The problem is they're trying to meet the future by doing what they did in the past. And on the way they are alienating millions of kids who do not see any purpose in going to school. When we went to school, we were kept there with a story, which is if you worked hard and did well, and got a college degree, you would have a job. 

Our kids don't believe that, and they're right not to by the way. You're better having a degree than not, but its not a guarantee anymore. And particularly not if the route to it marginalizes most of the things you think are important about yourself. 

The actual RSA Animate video using drawings to represent the talk.

Some people say we have to raise standards, that this is a breakthrough. You know. Like really? Yes we should. Why would you lower them? I haven't come across an argument that persuades me of lowering them. But raising them – of course we should raise them! The problem is that the current system education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. 

Before the middle of the 19th century, there were no system of public education. You could get educated by the Jesuits, if you had the money. But public education, paid for by taxation, compulsory to everybody and free at the point of delivery, that was revolutionary idea. And many people objected to it, they said its not possible for many street kids, working-class children to benefit from public education – they're incapable of learning to read and write, so why are we spending time on this. So they're also build into this a whole series of assumptions about social structure and capacity. 

It was driven by an economic imperative of the time, but running right through it was an intellectual model of the mind, which was essentially the enlightenment view of intelligence – that real intelligence consisted in the capacity for certain types of deductive reasoning and the knowledge of the classics originally. What we come to think of as academic ability, and this is deep in the gene pool of public education that there are really two types of people, academic and non-academic, smart people and non-smart people. 

And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they're not, because they are being judged against this particular view of the mind. So we have twin pillars, economic and intellectual, and my view is that this model has caused chaos in many people's lives. It has been great for some, there have been people who have benefited wonderfully for it, but most people have not. 

Instead they suffer this. This is the modern epidemic, and it is as misplaced and as fictitious. This is the plague of ADHD. This is a map of instances of ADHD in America, or prescription for ADHD. Don't mistake me, I don't mean to say that there is no such thing as attention deficit disorder. I am not qualified to say whether there is such a thing, I know that a great majority of psychologists and paediatricians think there is such a thing. But its still a matter for debate. What I do know for a fact, is that its not an epidemic. These kids are being medicated as routinely as we had our tonsils taken out, and on the same whimsical basis and for the same reason, medical fashion. 

Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They are being besieged with information, and coursed for attention from every platform – computers, from iPhones, from advertising and hundreds of television channels. And we're penalizing them for getting distracted from what? From boring stuff. At school, for the most part. 

It seems to me not a coincidence totally, that the instance of ADHD has risen in parallel with the growth of standardized testing. These kids are being given Ritalin and Aderol and all matter of things, often dangerous drugs, to get them focussed and calm them down. But according to this, ADHD increases as you travel East across the country. People start losing interest in Oklahoma, they can hardly think straight in Arkansas, and by the time they get to Washington they've lost it completely. And there are separate reasons for that I believe. Its a fictitious epidemic.

If you think of it, the arts – and I don't say its exclusive of the arts, its also true of science and of maths – but the arts particularly because they are the victims of this mentality currently, particularly. The arts, especially address the idea of aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you're present in the current moment, when you're resonating with the excitement of this thing you are experiencing. When you are fully alive. 

An anaesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself to what's happening. And a lot of these drugs are that. We are getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them. And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn't be putting them asleep, we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves.

But the model we have is this. I believe we have a system of education that's modeled on the interest of industrialism and in the image of it. I'll give you a couple of examples. Schools are still pretty much organized on factory lines. Ringing bells, separate facilities, specialized into separate subjects. We still educate kids by batches. We put them through the system by age group. Why do we do that? Why is there this assumption that the most important thing kids have in common is how old they are? 

Its like the most important thing about them is their date of manufacture! I mean. Well I know kids you are much better than other kids of the same age in different disciplines, or at different times of the day. Or better in small groups than in large groups. Or sometimes they want to be on their own.

If you're interested in a model of learning, you don't start with this production line mentality. Its essentially about conformity, and increasingly its about that when you look at the growth of standardized testing and standardized curricula. And its about standardization. I believe we have to go in the exact opposite direction.

There was a great study done recently on divergent thinking. It was published a couple of years ago. Divergent thinking isn't the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking is not a synonym. But its an essential capacity for creativity. Its the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question. To think what Edward De Bono would probably call "laterally", to think not just in linear or convergent ways. To see multiple answers, not one.

I did a test with it. One cod example would be: people might be asked to say, how many uses can you think of for a paper clip? One of these routine questions. Most people might come up with 10 or 15. People who are good at this might come with 200. And they do that by saying, could it be 200 ft. tall and be made of foam rubber? You know like, does it have to be a paper clip like we know it? 

Now a test like this, they gave them to 1500 people in a book called "Break point and beyond". And on the protocol of the test, if you scored above a certain level, you were considered to be a genius at divergent thinking. So, my question is, what percentage of the people tested, of the 1500, scored at genius level for divergent thinking? And you need to know one more thing about them, these were kindergarten children. So what do you think? What percentage? 80? Actually, 98%. 

The thing about this was, it was a longitudinal study. So they retested the same children, five years later, ages of 8-10. What do you think? 50%. They retested them at ages 13-15… You can see a trend here coming. Now this tells an interesting story. You could've imagined it going the other way. Could you? You start off not being very good and you get better as you get older. But this shows two things: one, we all have this capacity. And two, it mostly deteriorates. 

Now, a lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up. A lot. But one of the most important things that have happened to them is that by now, they have become educated. They spent 10 years at school being told there's one answer and its written at the back. But don't look. And don't copy, because that's cheating. I mean outside school that's called collaboration, but inside schools…

Now this is not because teachers have wanted it that way, but it just happens that way. Its the gene pool of education. We have to think differently about human capacity, we have to get over this old conception of academic, non-academic, abstract, theoretical, vocational, and see it for what it is, a myth. 

Second, we have to recognize that most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth. If we atomize people and separate them and judge them separately, we form a kind of disjunction between them and their natural learning environment. 

And thirdly, its crucially about the culture of our institutions. The habits of our institutions and the habitats that they occupy.

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