We educate people for various reasons one of them is economic we hope people when they become educated will get a job, don't we? I think most parents think that.

They hope their children will become financially independent don't we do you I do I can't tell you how much I want my children to be financially independent.

The problem is this that our current systems of education were never designed or intended to cultivate the great array of individual talent. 

On the contrary, they were conceived with a very particular view of intelligence in mind in the cultural conception of intelligence and the very particular sense of economic purpose in mind. 

In short, they were designed, conceived and implemented from the middle of the 18th century onwards in most countries to meet the needs of industrialism, which needed a very small educated class, and to produce a very large working class of people who would be selling their physical labour not their intellectual labour. 

And that's not a theory, that's evident in the structure of education systems everywhere. 

The trouble is the whole world is shifting into a completely different mode now and so that model doesn't work. 

In fact, if anything it's catastrophically ill-equipped for the world that we live just now. 

And my concern latterly, has been that we're spending a lot of time talking about how to improve education but there's very little point improving something that's basically inadequate. 

You have to rethink the principles on which we're doing this work, so that we come up with something that's rather better and different. 

I came across this image recently. 

I'm just want to tell you what I think the problem is and then what I think the answer is. 

I came across this recently.

Has anybody seen this image before? I'll tell you what it is. 

This was a picture that was taken in the Indian state of Bihar. This is an image which shocked the people of Bihar, including the political class as well.

The point is that this image was taken outside that building. That building is the venue for an important end of program examination for high school students and the results will determine whether they go on to the next phase of education. 

So they're in there doing a standardised test. The people clinging to the building are their parents who are handing cheat sheets in through the window to make sure they have the best opportunity to pass the test. 

What you can't see, are the people on the ground. The other parents who are milling around waiting for their chance to get up, to go onto the wall. 

I'm not being openly critical of that because that's the game they're in but it's an appalling game to be in isn't it? 

You have all these people with brilliant capacities and it's all being turned on a particular test. Now the reason I don't think we should get too smug about Bihar is we're doing exactly the same thing here, except it's horizontal. 

Our kids are being pumped through these systems in Europe, in Asia in many parts of America and our parents here are figuratively also being driven up the wall. 

I think this is where we really have to start to rethink the whole story of Education. 

There is at the moment a worldwide movement for education reform.

It's called the global education reform movement. 

A friend of mine Patty Solberg has referred to this as a germ and it is contagious. 

What you can tell around the world there are there are political attempts to improve education and there are three principles on which this reform movement is based, which are actually compounding the problem. 

The good news is there are alternative ways of thinking about education which will be a considerable improvement. 

And the reason by the way I was so interested to come here is because I know you all work in higher education for the most part but you have to see education as a whole system. 

And part of the problem is we don't we tend to think there’s kindergarten, then there's elementary school and then there's middle school and high school and then there's college.

Of course, the thing is we're dealing with the same human beings all the way through the process and what they become at different stages affects what becomes of them later on.

But there is something in the system of Education which hinges on the expectation of higher education, the whole system of k-12 education of America is now predicated on the ambition of going to college.

That's quite new. I was born in 1950 and at that time in the 50s and 60s in the US and the UK a fewer than 5% of people went to college. 

It shifted with the GI Bill and things of that sort here in America but it's now the target. 

One in three or one in two. It's become accepted that people, their education isn't complete until they go and do four or five or six or seven years in a university. 

And I think this is a very corrupting influence on the whole character of Education, the idea that you're not educated unless you get a college degree.

And I want to come back this in a little bit but higher education is strategically very important. It's a flexion point and more particularly the entrance qualifications to get into higher education is what's exerting the pressure downwards through the whole system.

We can't reform schools, we can't transform early years in school education, without rethinking higher education, and by the way you know a lot of people are starting to lose trust in higher education. 

The more people are leaving with large debts who can't get jobs as a consequence, these problems won't be solved by doubling down on the existing model. 

It'll only really be solved by rethinking what higher education is about and how best it can offer the sorts of skills and aptitudes that people need. 

Think of the impact of digital technology. A transformative technology does two things. 

One is it extends our physical reach, it enables to do things we simply couldn't do, but a really transformative technology like print or the motorcar or personal computing it transforms our mind. 

It enables us to think things we couldn't think without the technology, that were literally inconceivable and that's what happens. The transformative technology it changes everything.

Like the motorcar did, like electricity did, like printing did, like radio did, like digital devices are doing. The other thing about technology is it accelerates very quickly and its consequence are unpredictable.

When Henry Ford invented the motorcar at the same time as Benz and others, they did not anticipate the American freeway network, they didn't anticipate Los Angeles in the 40s, they did not anticipate OPEC and the tilting of the world economies in favour of the oil-rich countries, they didn't anticipate global warming how could they?

You couldn't possibly have done that.

If you go back and look at Steve Jobs's presentation of the iPhone in 2007 in Cupertino. It's on YouTube. Watch it again if you haven't seen it for a while. It's very interesting. He made no mention of the applications of the iPhone which have come to change most people.

I mean social media. There was no Facebook. There's no Twitter. Those things weren't around anything like the forum they are now. 

But people behave, especially young people, as if life isn't possible without these devices. 

More and more research is showing that not being a Luddite about this, but more and more families and kids are concerned that their children are becoming socially distraught by the impact of Facebook, that FOMO and all those things, online bullying, they're facing emotional and social impacts we didn't have.

So, what do we do about all this? 

Well, the problem I think is that our current systems of education were not intended to deal with this kind of challenge. They were designed to do something else and they're based on three principles which contradict the conditions under which human beings have always flourished and which we need to observe if we are to flourish in future. 

The first is that your education is based on the idea of conformity. 

I don't mean social performance, I don't mean people behaving nicely, I mean that embedded in the system of Education, the selection procedures, the examination procedures, the curriculum, the structure there is a conception of intelligence which has dominated our view of talent we have for a long time.

Now in the West we have conflated a certain type of academic ability with intelligence. 

In general, there's much more to human intelligence than that. In fact, the greater part of human intelligence is richer and goes beyond the rather strict confines of academic work and yet you have to be good at academic work to do well at all. 

Having a degree is always thought to be a much higher accomplishment than having a practical skill of some sort. 

The truth I think is that human intelligence isn't marked by conformity. Naturally it's characterised by diversity and it happens therefore that if you have a system of education that's based on a narrow view of ability, on a conformist view of ability people who don't fit that mould will think they are the problem. And will naturally feel that they are eccentric and so we end up inventing remedial programs for people who just aren't interested in the main diet that's offered at school. 

We have a dropout rate, I don't like the term dropout truthfully, but an on graduation rate in America from high schools that varies according to state between 15 and 40 percent of non-graduation rates. 

If you've got an average of 20% of kids not completing high school you can't blame the kids. 

This is the system that's at fault.

The evidence everywhere is if you refresh your conception of intelligence so it corresponds to how people really manifested, then all kinds of people become included, empowered and engaged in a way they didn't before.

This has implications for the curriculum clearly and for teaching.

The second is that the current system is based on compliance which is what the testing movement is all about, which is a multi-billion dollar industry. But we were looking at the testing industry, and I mean check the figures out, don’t take my word for it, I'm always a bit astonished and we kept checking it though, Well that's how it seems to come out. 

But in 2013 when we're doing these numbers, the NFL, the National Football League which incidentally is not football, just saying, the NFL was a nine billion dollar sector in terms of income generated. 

The US cinema domestic box office was an eleven point two billion dollar industry, the education testing and support industry was a sixteen billion dollar industry.

Can you imagine what we could do to improve universities, colleges, schools in early years education with sixteen billion dollars a year. 

And this whole testing industry has contributed nothing to the improvement of standards, nothing at all to empower teachers, nothing at all to engage students, nothing to remediate the non-graduation rate, nothing. 

It hasn't even inched America higher up these international league tables in the subjects that are being targeted like maths and science. 

The whole thing's been a calamitous failure and yet it is an article of faith and they keep going on with it.

So, compliance is a big deal. 

I already think we have to push back against it.

But the third element of the system is competition.

The whole thing is about competing schools against each other. League tables, when actually what drives human achievement is collaboration. 

It's the opposite. It's collaboration.

It can be driven that way, you know, there could be a shared goal but human beings are intensely collaborative. Our systems ought to be celebrating diversity, creativity and collaboration and they and they penalise all three of those. 

I think we have to get back to basics. 

For me one of these starting points is what's education about?

You'll have your own view of this, but there is another philosopher called Walter Bryce Gallie who said once that education is an essentially contested concept. 

What he means is it's one of those groups of ideas that are essentially troublesome. This is my attempt at saying what I think education is.

Learning to me is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. There's a difference isn't there, between learning, education and school. 

The problem is not kids. It's not learning. 

The problem is school. 

I think the problem is how we've come to do school, and the way we've come to think of Education. And that's I think our historic challenge, to rethink the purpose of Education and therefore how we do school. 

That's what this last presentation was about, among teachers who are in the end the beating heart of a successful education system, not testing companies, but the people who actually engage with the students.

I'll come back to that in just a minute. The fiscal and cultural and living world that surrounds us in which we make our way. 

So part of the role of Education has helped people understand that world as best we can and that calls for very broad curriculum, not just in sciences, definitely sciences, but in the humanities which is about understanding the nature of human affairs and culture, the arts which are about the nature of human experience in the world, physical education, mathematics and so on. 

You can't engage people in the world around them with a partial and biased conception of the mind which focuses on certain disciplines, and the exclusion of others. 

The other thing is, we have a kind of half-hearted attempt in most cases to help kids understand the world around them. We do very little currently to help them understand the world within them, and it is that world within them in the end which is who they are, and what becomes of them in their lives. 

And we only rarely fully understand the world around as mine, own our own passions, our own interests, our own capabilities and possibilities. 

And it's for that reason we need to have forms of Education which are consistent with the nature of human growth and development because children go through an immense metamorphosis from the moment that draw a breath to adulthood, they change in every way. They're changed physically, they change cognitively, emotionally, spiritually, they changed morally. 

Education has a vital role in all of these processes and to conflate the complex process of human development to a series of grades for a college entrance exam seems to me to be the most absurd reduction of the enterprise that you could imagine. 

But shifting that is our great aim. 

We have to think, well what sort of skills do people need now for the life they're going to lead, as AI begins to accelerate, we should be focused on those things which are distinctively human, the powers of curiosity, of creativity, of compassion, of collaboration, of historical understanding, of cultural empathy. 

There are at least three conceptions of knowledge that we should be thinking about in education now 

There is propositional knowledge which philosophers write largely about, which is knowing that something is the case. 

The Second World War started officially in 1939 it ended in 1945 and our curricula are full of those things, not least because they're easily tested or seem to be. 

But there's also knowing how to do things, how to put ideas into practice, the practical manipulation of technology is the application of tools and understanding in the real world.

Bringing things about, writing things, creating, innovation and our civilizations depend on people who can do things.

It's very hard isn't it that we've come to venerate academic ability in education, but outside of education the easiest way to knock down any argument is to say it's purely academic. 

You know academics are meant to live in ivory towers detached from the real world. 

This is partly by the way because the universities colonised the business of education at a very early stage but knowing how to do things is as important as knowing that something is the case.

There's also another category, which I think is more neglected, which is knowing what it is to be a person, knowing what this experience means, knowing what it is to love somebody, knowing what it is to feel depressed, knowing what it is to experience hardship, knowing what it is to be a refugee. That's what the arts are about.

It's the lived experience of a human being in the world and expressed in media that make it comprehensive in some way.

Our kids are suffering that, not just in America, by that I mean all around the world from untold amounts of stress, often depression, hopelessness, but these are starkly high figures that we’re contending with.

And it isn't the kids, it's the system clearly. 

It's not only education, it'd be quite wrong to think all these things originate in education, they don't.

But kids bring issues into the classroom with them. They live a life outside of Education. These issues show up at school. They don't all originate, but school often compounds them.

It doesn't help to remediate them. It becomes part of the problem, not part of the solution and part of the solution I think is to recognise that education is above all a social process and a personal process, that children learn to speak from other people, by the people who surround them. 

They learn values and the culture they're part of. They don't get born into the world speaking Polish or speaking Zulu. They learn this from the people that surround them like they learn everything from the people around them. 

It doesn't mean it in some way alters their innate disposition, but it's a social process as much as it is an economic, a cultural one and it's what's happening by the way in the flipped Classroom. It's what's happening in the kind of work that you've been discussing the last couple of days. It's recognising that education isn't a monologue saving here today, it's a conversation. 

I mentioned there was a question that came up at one point in this peace conference, that was put to the Dalai Lama, and he paused for a long time and he took a breath and he said I don't know and I thought what do you mean you don't know, not the Dalai Lama, you know you have the definite article right there your name and he said I don't know. 

I haven't thought of that. What do you think?

What he said to the room, Illustrated two things to me. 

One of them is that that human knowledge is a fabric, nobody knows everything. 

Nobody can know everything. It's a closely woven fabric. We all know bits of something, not everybody can know everything. 

And we should never attempt to do that then the classroom is full of people who have parts the puzzle and it interlocks in all kinds of interesting ways. 

And the other thing that struck me, is he said what do you think? 

It illustrates that one of the world's great teachers is also a constant student. He wants to know and the great teachers have always been great students. Great students are great teachers.

It's what the flipped classroom is about. It's what is meant by the agile classroom. It's one in which there is energy, agility and vitality, where it's a community of learners being facilitated by an expert teacher, but it's not a passive group of learners listening to a teacher.

Properly conceived education is a conversation. It's a dynamic encounter that's guided by expert and knowledgeable mentors and one that recognised that students are part of the conversation, are not just the recipients of the teacher’s wisdom.