Transcript: Five Dangerous Things Every School Should Do (Gever Tulley)

Full text of Gever Tulley’s TEDx Talk titled ‘Five Dangerous Things Every School Should Do’ at TEDxKids@Vilnius conference.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Gever Tulley – Founder of Tinkering School

I would like to tell you about this idea I have about education, which is that fundamentally it ought to be a lot more interesting for children to be at school than it seems to be in general.

So I present to you today for the first time on the planet: FIVE DANGEROUS THINGS EVERY SCHOOL SHOULD DO.

I’m going to start by telling you a little bit about myself.

I grew up in a practically mythological land called Northern California. This is the view from the trail that starts where my house was into the little bay where my brother and I used to play. We were so poor that the houses that we lived in fell apart and were demolished or consumed by nature.

Nobody thought they were worth preserving and my neighborhood has almost disappeared and so this place where I grew up is now in my own mind a magical place. My parents were beatniks, they were poets, they were children who grew up in the fifties and the forties and now saw the world through a different set of eyes.

For many years my brother and I had this beach to ourselves. It’s now a quite famous tourist destination but when we were children we could walk on this beach and a day later our previous day’s footprints were the only footprints we would see. We spent every day here after school and on weekends, every moment we could, catching fish, building forts, making fires.

This was our kingdom, our little private beach for these two poor children who had very little else but we had this amazing thing and as you can imagine it left a lasting impression on us, a way of viewing the world as endless possibility where you could make something out of just sand and sticks.

Many years later when I was in my forties I began to notice this disturbing trend: Parents were not letting their children do very much of anything as near as I could tell.

You never saw a child without a parent within five or ten feet and they started attaching leashes to them to keep them close. In my country, and I don’t watch Lithuanian news very often so you’ll have to let me know if this is true, we see news stories about parents who get arrested for letting their children play in the front yard of their house unsupervised. Unsupervised play in the front yard is now something you can be arrested for.

It doesn’t make any sense and in fact there’s no law that says this is actually dangerous or anyone should be arrested for. It’s just nervous neighbors and other parents calling the police and it’s a little bit embarrassing to be an American and have these kinds of stories going out.

So I did what any slightly crazy person who is idealistic and believes there ought to be change in the world, I created a summer camp where parents could drop off their children on a Sunday and pick them up on a Saturday and they would never know what we did. The very first year we built this roller coaster. It took us all week and we worked sometimes from before breakfast till after dinner and at the end of the week we had this amazing thing, a little roller coaster, 40 meters of track and the children convinced their parents to ride on this roller coaster that they had built and we saw something amazing happen.

It changed how the parent perceived the child. This week away from the parents allowed the child to do something and the parent comes back and sees the incredible thing that the child has built and all of a sudden they’re like, who are you? I didn’t know you could do this. The kids didn’t know how to ask to be able to do that.

So using everyday materials, cardboard and plastic and tape, you know, we built boats and of course we put the kids in the boat and we put them in the ocean to see if it worked and we took broken lawn mowers and we turned them into the world’s most dangerous motorcycles. We took an abandoned railroad track and we built sail powered trains and, you know, an old plastic tarp might be the surface for an airplane and yes, it flies.

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So I started to wonder after working with these kids summer after summer, this was about ten years ago, why isn’t school more like this? The kids would ask too. We’d be sitting around at dinner kind of thinking about the work and talking about everything. They would often say, I wish school was more like this. I wish that school was this fun. I’ve never worked this hard in my life or had this much fun at the same time. Working hard and having fun don’t have to be separate. They should be brought together.

So, like any idealistic, slightly crazy person, I started a school. This is a school where children of all ages work together, kindergarten all the way through twelfth grade when they graduate and go to college. This is the school they go to. We have children who have never been to a different school, the only school they know.

The thing that I discovered after starting this is the thing that we all discover when we make something. The hard part is not figuring out what to do with the children. The hard part is figuring out how to explain it to the world and their nervous parents who are wondering, well, what are their test scores going to be? Because we don’t give them tests. Instead, what we do is give them an opportunity to do something incredible and the children do that on a regular basis. And suddenly we see the parents starting to relax and we see the children getting more creative because their parents are not so nervous.

So after ten years of doing my summer camp and four years of running my school, I’ve brought for you something, five dangerous things that every school should do starting now because the future is happening and we shouldn’t wait for it to surprise us. We should create the future we want and I think it starts with this.

LET CHILDREN BE CO-AUTHORS OF THEIR OWN EDUCATION

Number one, Let Children Be Co-Authors Of Their Education. I mean, really, it’s such a simple question and it’s such a simple idea. Children should participate in what they’re learning, not just be consumers.

Let’s try a little exercise. Raise your hands if you were ever in school and you had like just a burning question to ask a teacher, just a really important question. Come on Lithuania, this is a very low participation country. Get your hands up, yeah, right? You had a brilliant question and you were dying to know the answer, right?

Now put your hand down if the teacher said, well, that’s a good question but we don’t have time for that. We got to move on to the next chapter in the book. We got to figure out this algebra. We have to, whatever it was, it was clear that what you were doing in that class had nothing to do with what was going on in your mind. It’s sad. It’s a terribly sad thing to happen.

Imagine instead what would it have been like if that question had led to a conversation and that conversation led to more questions and suddenly what had been planned for the whole class the next day was put aside because this question you had was so good, the thing that we planned with the school administration pales in comparison. We should do something different and now you and the rest of your class are outside and you’re doing a quick experiment with this giant piece of flexible mirror and it doesn’t work perfectly but it suggests that this idea might have credibility. It might be worth exploring.

Your first prototype that afternoon kind of works, kind of doesn’t work and the wind is moving the plastic around so you head back in and you start working on this and you learn about this new thing. It’s a special kind of curve that focuses light. It’s the curve that a piece of material makes when you hang it. It’s called a parabola. You’re eight years old and you’ve never heard this word or if you did you don’t remember and it has to do with algebra which you’ve never done but you don’t care because it’s what stands between you and burning a marshmallow with sunlight and that’s worth doing so I’ll do this math.

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So you plot out your parabola and you start drilling and this is going to be the most powerful solar concentrator on the planet and you start building it and it’s coming together and look at that beautiful parabolic arc made out of little sticks. You hang your sheet in it and then right there in the class in the school you can see that it’s kind of starting to work so you recruit a friend and she helps you carry it out to the park where you set it up and it makes really warm marshmallows.

Yeah, they get really warm, kind of hot to the touch but they’re not cooking. Not nearly as well as your friend who tried a different approach of gluing tiny little squares of mirror to a satellite dish that he rescued from the trash. Later you present your results to the class using your fancy infographics and while you’re looking at it right there on stage you have the sudden realization you know why yours wasn’t working.

Take a deep breath and you turn around, does anybody have any questions and yes, of course they do because they’ve been following your story for the last two weeks and we want to know how it ends.

The goals we have as a society for education can all be met in ways that do not train children to be obedient or good at taking tests, passive to authority. We can achieve all of those goals, everything we want to learn, math, history, science, art, everything we can learn by following the excitement of the child.

TRUST CHILDREN MORE

Number two, We Should Trust Children More, we really ought to, they’re very trustworthy and they just love being trusted, they do so much better when we trust them.

I think we’ve all seen a lot of pictures of classrooms today but the psychology, the architecture of this room is designed to reinforce that authority of the teacher standing at the front of the room and giving you precious knowledge that you don’t know what it’s for and she promises that later when you’re an adult you’re going to use it, you know. And fifty years ago it looked the same as it did a hundred years ago and ten years ago and two years ago, I think we already saw this very slide.

If we decided that trust was important, if we decided to extend, let’s start with the fact that we trust you, we might build a very different school and our classrooms might look a little different, maybe a little more chaotic, our school certainly does.

Maybe we wouldn’t need walls to hold them into the classroom because with that trust the children felt a sense of responsibility and if we trusted them they wouldn’t have to ask permission to go to the bathroom, like an adult they could just wait for a good break in the conversation and go to the bathroom. I trust you, you appear to be on an important journey, come back as soon as you can.

If we trusted them they could learn to use tools, they would be braver and more courageous, they would be all those things that we hoped for in adults and they could start practicing it when they’re six instead of when they’re twenty-four and they graduate from college and they would bring their hearts and their minds to everything they did because they knew that we trusted them.

SAY YES MORE OFTEN TO CHILDREN

Number three, The Default Answer Is Yes. Just imagine what that would be like, can I go on that rope swing? Yes. Can I help build classrooms this summer? Yes, you can. Can I build a room where we can try this thing I read about called high-speed photography? Yes, you can. Why not? That’s going to be awesome.

Can I study chess? I don’t know what that has to do with what else is going in the school but yes, you seem pretty serious about that. Let’s do some chess. Can I go to the café to work on my blog? Yes, yes you can. Try to be back before the end of school because your mom is going to be here to pick you up.

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Yes, it’s just about the most interesting answer to any question ever. Can I make fireworks? Yes, but first figure out how to do it safely and legally because we’re a little worried about the insurance so do some research.

It is, without question, infinitely more interesting than no. No is the most boring answer you can get when you’re a child so let’s start giving them yeses and not beating over the heads with no.

FOCUS ON HABITS AND CHARACTER (NOT GRADES)

All right, Focus On Habit And Character Instead Of The Test Scores because you know what? You only need those test scores in school and we don’t use them. I hired hundreds of programmers in my life and I never looked at their test scores.

What is it that keeps a young student working away on his idea for a chair, this prototype? I would suggest that there are only two ways to get a small child to build many chairs before he builds one he likes. You can make him do it or the children can believe in the process, the effort that it takes to go from an idea to a finished product and launch themselves into it because they trust their school.

My chair is terrible right now, it’s going to get a lot better I bet. Yes, it is. That’s an amazing chair. This teaches persistence, tenacity, that rare quality that you take on a challenge and you don’t stop until it works.

CURIOSITY, the exact same thing. You know, if every curious question you have leads to nothing, you’ll stop being curious. It happens to everybody. It happens to children all the time. They just get less curious.

Sir Ken Robinson, great TED speaker, estimates that by the time we graduate from high school, we have lost over 90% of our creative capacity. 90%! That is a global resource being wasted at an enormous scale. The answer to every problem we ever had has probably been thrown out along the way with all those millions of children being less creative.

LET’S AGREE THAT EVERYTHING IS INTERESTING

Number five, let’s agree, all of us here today, that everything is interesting no matter what the topic. An activity seen from a distance might seem silly. She is reproducing a research paper that shows that the stride length that people exhibit in a city tells you something about the wealth and welfare in that city. So she painted her feet and walked on a piece of paper and measured the distance. It’s not perfect science, but she never forgot about that piece of research.

Spend a day without sight? Yes, of course, Clementine, you can do that. What school would help them do that? We tell children a camera works like an eye. We took apart a camera, then we took apart an eye. Now they know what the inside of an eye is like. Everything that kids want to learn or that we want kids to learn can be taught in this way. Every educational goal.

Life at school shapes how children see the world. We want them to see the world as wonderful, delightful, creative place that’s worth protecting. That starts when they’re six and we don’t stop working on it until they go out into the world and make change.

So I say, let’s be brave. Let’s create the kind of schools that we want to see our children in. And if the government won’t let us do it, let’s cheat.

Thank you very much.