我在大学做讲座时，曾和学生大力推荐TED，分别代表技术（Technology）、娱乐（Entertainment）、和设计（Design）。这个云集了来自全球不同学科顶尖学者与实践者们的讲坛，他们把自己的研究成果浓缩成18分钟的讲演，在会议上发表。这个凝聚着当代人类社会智慧结晶的平台深深吸引了我，伴随着我度过很多个做饭洗碗拖地等车坐车上厕所的时光。
我有很多个珍爱的TED演讲，其中最爱之一也是TED官网上点击率常年的排名第一：由Sir Kenneth Robinson做的《学校扼杀创造力吗？》（Do schools kill creativity?）
Ken Robinson于1950年出生在英国利物浦，是英国著名的教育家、作家、演讲家，后来全家移居美国洛杉矶。他的演讲满满的都是英伦风的冷幽默，但笑过之后，发人深思。这个他在2006年做的《学校扼杀创造力吗？》演讲我听了至少20遍。
Good morning. How are you? It’s been great, hasn’t it? I’ve been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I’m leaving. There have been three themes, haven’t there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about.
早上好，各位！所有这些讲座让我接受了一场知识风暴的洗礼，事实上我也快乘着这股风返航回家了。本次会议上贯穿着三个主题。
One is the extra ordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we’ve had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is, that it’s put us in a place where we have no idea what’s going to happen,in terms of the future, no idea how this may play out.
第一，人类的创造力。这在之前所有的讲座和与会者所身上有着突出的体现，只是领域和程度有所差异罢了。第二，未来会发生什么事情？怎样发生？处在今天这个位置我们没法预知。
I have an interest in education — actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education; don’t you? I find this very interesting. If you’re at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education, you’re not asked. And you’re never asked back, curiously.That’s strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do,” and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, “Oh my god,” you know, “why me? My one night out all week.” But if you ask people about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it’s one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right?, like religion, and money, and other things.
I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do, we have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.
And the third part of this is that we’ve all agreed nonetheless on the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacities for innovation.I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn’t she, just seeing what she could do. And she’s exceptional, but I think she’s not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. [applause] Thank you.
第三，儿童所拥有的超凡创造性，或者说创新能力，是大家一致认同的。我个人认为：每个孩子身上都蕴含着巨大的才能，可它们却被成人无情地磨灭、埋藏了。在这里，我想谈谈教育和创造力，我相信在当今这个时代，创造力在教育中的地位同读写能力一样重要，理应得到同等程度的重视。
I heard a great story recently, I love telling it, of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson, she was 6 and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, “What are you drawing?” and the girl said,“I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”
When my son was 4 in England — actually he was 4 everywhere, to be honest; if we’re being strict about it, wherever he went, he was 4 that year — he was in the nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it, “Nativity II.” But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: “James Robinson IS Joseph!” He didn’t have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened — we were sitting there and we think they just went out of sequence, we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, “You OK with that” and he said “Yeah, why, was that wrong?” — they just switched, I think that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in, little 4-year-olds with tea towels on their heads, and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, “I bring you gold.” The second boy said, “I bring you myrhh.” And the third boy said, “Frank sent this.”
What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
从这些故事里我们看到孩子有临场发挥的本领。不知情，便即兴，孩子可不是怕犯错误的人。当然，我并不是要说犯错误跟有创意可以划等号。但如果不做好犯错的准备，你永远都做不出有创意的事情来。可惜长大成人之后，曾经的孩子们绝大部分慢慢失去了孩提时代的创新能力，变得畏畏缩缩，唯恐犯错。
And we run our companies like this, by the way, we stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is, we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather we get educated out of it. So why is this?
公司运营中也存在对错误一味指责的情况；我们的国家教育体系同样也是一个对错误苛责至极的地方。长此以往，人们的创造力就被慢慢地吞噬了。毕加索曾经说过：每一个孩子都是天生的艺术家。问题在于我们长大之后能否继续保持着艺术家的本性。我坚信，随着年龄的增长，我们的创造力并非与日俱增，反而是与日俱减。甚至可以说我们的创造力被教育扼杀了。为什么？
I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago, in fact we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, so you can imagine what a seamless transition this was. Actually we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare’s father was born. Were you struck by a new thought? I was. You don’t think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don’t think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being 7? I never thought of it.I mean, he was 7 at some point; he was in somebody’s English class, wasn’t he? How annoying would that be? “Must try harder.”
Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, “Go to bed, now,” to William Shakespeare, “and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It’s confusing everybody.”
Anyway, we moved from Stratford to LosAngeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn’t want to come. I’ve got two kids, he’s 21 now, my daughter’s 16; he didn’t want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England.This was the love of his life, Sarah. He’d known her for a month. Mind you, they’d had their fourth anniversary, because it’s a long time when you’re 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, “I’ll never find another girl like Sarah.” And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.
But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same heirarchy of subjects. Every one, doesn’t matter where you go, you’d think it would be otherwise but it isn’t. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth.
And in pretty much every system too, there’s a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are nomally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn’t an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think maths is very important but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they’re allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don’t we? Did I miss a meeting?
Truthfully what happens is, as children grow up we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.
If you were to visit education as an alien and say what’s it for, public education, I think you’d have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners, I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it. They’re the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life, but they’re rather curious and I say this out of affection for them, there’s something curious about them, not all of them but typically, they live in their heads, they live up there, and slightly to one side. They’re disembodied. They look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads, don’t they? It’s a way of getting their head to meetings.
If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night, and there you will see it, grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it.
Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there’s a reason. The whole system was invented round the world there were no public systems of education really before the 19th century.They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism.
我们当今的教育体系以培养学术能力为理念，这是有缘故的。19世纪时为了满足工业化的要求，整个教育系统应运而生，在这之前世界上根本不存在公共教育体系。学科金字塔的构建植根于以下两大理念：
So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas: Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don’t do music, you’re not going to be a musician; don’t do art, you’re not going to be an artist. Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.
第一，对于工业岗位来说最实用的学科排在顶端。还是个上学的孩子时，你会在外界的“循循善诱”之下慢慢放下自己的爱好，因为很难指望靠这些爱好找到饭碗。
And the second is, academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can’t afford to go on that way.
第二，学术能力。高校按照自己的模式设计了现行的教育体制，在这种体制下，人们的智力观日渐狭隘，“学术能力”慢慢变为“智能”的代名词。自己的特长在学校中并没有得到珍视，甚至还被苛责，这种体制令许多才华横溢、睿智、富于创造性的学生对自我价值失去信心。
In the next 30 years. according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it’s the combination of all the things we’ve talked about — technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.
Suddenly degrees aren’t worth anything. Isn’t that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn’t have a job it’s because you didn’t want one. And I didn’t want one, frankly.
But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It’s a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.
We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think in esthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement.
“学历膨胀”的过程可以看出整个教育结构正在经历重大转变。首先，智能具有多元性。我们运用各种感官方式来认识世界，比如视觉、听觉、触觉、抽象化、动态化。
Secondly, intelligence is dynamic.If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments. In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally — by the way, there’s a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus collosum, and it’s thicker in women. Following on from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multitasking, because you are, aren’t you, there’s a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life.
其次，智能具有交互性。事实上，创新活动往往就诞生于学科间看待事物的不同方式之间所产生的互动，在我看来，创新就是“产生有价值的原创思想的过程”。
If my wife is cooking a meal at home,which is not often, thankfully, but you know, she’s doing (oh, she’s good at some things) but if she’s cooking, you know, she’s dealing with people on the phone, she’s talking to the kids, she’s painting the ceiling, she’s doing open-heart surgery over here; if I’m cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone’s on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed, I say “Terry, please, I’m trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break.” (You know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, did it happen, remember that old chestnut, I saw a great T-shirt recently that said,“If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”)
And the third thing about intelligence is, it’s distinct. I’m doing a new book at the moment called Epiphany which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I’m fascinated by how people got to be there. It’s really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, she’s called Gillian Lynne, have you heard of her? Some have. She’s a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did Cats, and Phantom of the Opera, she’s wonderful.
第三，智能具有独特性。目前我正在写一本新书，叫做《Epiphany》，这本书是根据一系列围绕“你是如何发现自己才能的？”主题的人物访谈写成的，因为我对人们自我实现的过程很感兴趣。写这本书的念头来源于我和一位女士之间的对话，Gillian Lynne，指导过歌舞剧《猫》和《歌剧魅影》。
I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet, in England, as you can see, and Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said Gillian, how’d you get to be a dancer? And she said it was interesting, when she was at school, she was really hopeless. Andthe school, in the 30s, wrote her parents and said, “We think Gillian has a learning disorder.” She couldn’t concentrate, she was fidgeting. I think now they’d say she had ADHD. Wouldn’t you? But this was the 1930s and ADHD hadn’t been invented at this point. It wasn’t an available condition. People weren’t aware they could have that.
有次和Gillian一起吃午餐，我问“你是怎么走上跳舞这条路的？”她告诉我当年在她在学校的表现几乎已经快令人绝望了，那还是在三十年代，学校没办法，写信给她父母说“我们认为Gillian有学习多动症”。那时候的她在学校无法集中注意力，总是坐立难安。
Anyway she went to see this specialist, in this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother and she was led and sat on a chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this doctor talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it — because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on, little kid of 8 — in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, “Gillian I’ve listened to all these things that your mother’s told me, and I need to speak to her privately.” He said, “Wait here, we’ll be back, we won’t be very long,” and they went and left her.
后来妈妈就带着她就去看专科医生，医生和妈妈谈论了Gillian上学时出现的问题，最后，医生过来说：“在这儿等着，我们很快就回来。”
But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk, and when they got out the room, he said to her mother, “Just stand and watch her.” And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched fora few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick; she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.”
他们离开房间的时候，医生拧开了桌上的收音机。走出房间后，医生对Gillian妈妈说：“就在这儿，看着她”。他们刚离开房间Gillian就从椅子上站了起来，和着音乐移动着步伐。在外面观察了几分钟后，医生转向Gillian妈妈说道：“Lynne夫人，Gillian没有生病，她是个舞蹈家。送她去舞蹈学校吧。”
I said, “What happened?” She said, “She did. I can’t tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me, people who couldn’t sit still. People who had to move to think.” Who had to move to think.They did ballet, they did tap, they did jazz, they did modern, they did contemporary.
She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School, she became a soloist, she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet, she eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company, the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, and met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She’s been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she’s given pleasure to millions, and she’s a multimillionaire.
后来，她考上了皇家芭蕾舞学校，毕业后她成立了自己的公司：Gillian Lynne舞蹈公司，之后她遇到了Andrew Lloyd Weber。Gillian担任过好几部史上最成功音乐剧的导演、舞蹈指导，为无数观众带来过美的愉悦，还有着数百万的身家资产。
Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.
Now, I think — [applause] What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and there volution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start tore constitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth, for a particular commodity, and for the future, it won’t serve us.
我认为未来唯一的希望在于创设一个新的人文生态构想，唯有在此构想上才可认识到人类能力之丰富。
We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we’re educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, “If all the insects were to disappear from the earth,within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish.” And he’s right.
我们必须得重新考虑教育儿童的基本原则。JonasSalk曾经有段精彩的引述，他说：“如果所有的昆虫都从地球上消失，未来五十年内其他的生物也将不复存在；而如果是人类从地球上消失的话，未来五十年内所有的生命形式必将繁荣昌盛。”没错。
What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we’ve talked about. And the only way we’ll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future — by the way, we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.Thank you very much.
TED所推崇的是人类的想象力天赋。明智地运用这种天赋，避免之前谈到的糟糕前景的发生，这些都是我们必须审慎地对待的。而要做到这些，我们必须先看到自己的创造力之蓬勃，看到孩子们希望之可贵。
