I'm really happy to be here, and I have a lot to talk about.

About a year and a half ago, I published a book

with my colleague John Seely Brown

called "A New Culture of Learning."

And it addressed what we saw on some fundamental problems with what was

happening in education today.

And, it hit us very early on that learning is fundamentally an easy thing that we do,

that we do from the day we're born until the day that we die.

And that for most of our lives it is natural

and it's effortless

everywhere but school.

So, it's sort of a hit this, that maybe we need to rethink a little bit about what learning

looks like in our everyday lives,

and, start to think about

how we can recreate our educational systems, our classrooms,

our training seminars

to mirror

what learning really looks like.

And we came with the idea of a new culture of learning

based on really three different areas:

The first was the idea that we need to engage passion

and if you look at a child learning

you see in their eyes

the passion,

the wonder,

the joy.

A few months ago, I was with a colleague of mine with her three-year-old child

walking down the beach

in Santa Monica, where I live.

And he came across a very odd tree that had all kinds of misshapen branches

and a strange bark,

and he just sat there and stared at it and wondered and then like a child would do

when you're three, started taking the bark, you know, smelling it, putting it in his mouth.

He wanted to know everything about that tree.

And it was a moment when I thought:

"I'm really witnessing pure learning happening."

And if somebody has a passion for something,

trying to stop them from learning,

you can't do it.

No matter what obstacles you put in the way,

they will find the way to learn what they need to know.

This is the first thing.

The second thing that we found as an important component of a new culture of learning

is imagination.

And imagination

really begins with two words which I think are the two most powerful words in

English language:

What if.

It's the ability to imagine things differently than they are,

and the incredible power that comes out of those two words

can literally reshape the world.

So, those two things

form one component

of the new culture of learning.

The third component that's equally as important is constraint.

If you want to drive an architect crazy

give them a large smooth flat piece of land,

and then watch them, you know...

spin out of control trying to figure out what to do with it;

but if you really want to make them happy,

give them something that's impossible to build on.

Give them a river, a mountain, a tree,

a big rock in the middle and let them work around it,

and, they will create something brilliant.

I think when Ken Robinson, at the beginning, he was talking about creativity,

that's what he meant.

It's the idea of creating in the face of obstacles.

And putting obstacles in people's way

can harness that passion and imagination,

and the combination of those two things can create something great.

And out of all this, John and I talked a lot about what the fundamental ingredient was

in creating a new culture of learning.

We decided it was PLAY.

And play is a concept

that combines those three things.

And I come up with the definition that I rather like,

which is "the play is an emergent property of the application of rules

to the imagination."

And if you think about something like as basic as a game where you say

"take this ball, put it in that goal

but you can't use your hands."

What would you invent? Football or what we call soccer.

So that idea of just putting those rules in place

fires the imagination, and if you think of all the wonderful things that people

do in that game: the imagination, the creativity, the joy;

it all comes from that simple collision

of imagination and rules.

So, that was the fundamental idea

behind "A New Culture of Learning".

And I realized pretty quickly one of the great things about my job

as I get to go to talk about this book to lots of audiences,

and a lot of them are teachers.

And, instead of telling teachers what they need to be doing,

I spent a lot of time listening to them

tell their stories about how their schools were working.

And I learned four things from the teachers that I talked to.

The first

was that teachers, just as much as students,

have passion.

They care about what's going on the classroom, they care about their students

and they want students to learn;

that the reason they went into that job was to see the light bulb go off

over students head, to see their eyes light up with wonder when they found some... you know,

a new idea.

And going through that,

talking to these teachers, I found time and time again

they have roadblocks put in their way.

I found a ninth grade teacher

who teaches English in California

and on the curriculum,

mandated by the state,

is that he teach the book "Romeo and Juliet" by Shakespeare.

And he tells me

the first two pages of "Romeo and Juliet",

this is his favorite thing to teach, it is his favorite day of the year.

It is the day he looks forward to more than anything else

because the first two pages of "Romeo and Juliet"

are full of dirty jokes.

And he knows that he is going to get every student laughing and giggling and

they'll be the one student who sit in their going

"I don't get it" and somebody will whisper on their ear...

and they will go "Oh oh oh, I get it", right.

It is a joyful experience for him to watch

the language of Shakespeare come alive

and for them to say "Well, I want to read this... it's a dirty book" right?

"I'm very interested in what's gonna happen."

And this language, it has lots of different levels so they spend the rest

of the semester trying to find the double entendres and

all of the magic in Shakespeare's language.

What a wonderful experience! And to see him in one day and two pages

hook kids on Shakespeare,

that for him is why he became a teacher.

Except... this year,

because someone complained because he was telling dirty jokes.

And he was called in

not only to the principal's office

but in front of a tribunal to evaluate his fitness as a teacher.

He was suspended from school for a week.

He was absolutely, you know, found this mind-boggling,

he hadn't assigned the book and he said:

"Your problem isn't with me, it's with Shakespeare;

and if you're gonna tell me I have to teach this play I'm going to teach it properly."

So he was being punished for actually teaching the text he was told to teach

and the kids understanding it.

And at one point he turned this committee and said:

"Have any of you actually read "Romeo and Juliet"?"

And not one of them had.

But one of them

had children who had explained it to her,

and she said to him:

"Why can't you just make it a nice love story?"

And he said: "You do realize they both died at the end right?"

So that's the kind of battle that students are faced or teachers are facing

and, to make matters worse, I was just in New York talking with some teachers as well

and they've done a survey of New York students, and they've asked K-12 students

outside of the classroom what are their major learning resources?

And the things that came up with were their mobile phone or iPhone,

Facebook and Youtube.

So New York City did the only reasonable thing that you could do,

which is they banned all three,

immediately.

Not only for the students but also for the teachers.

So if you're a New York City school teacher,

you cannot access Youtube to show videos,

you cannot do anything with mobile phones,

and you cannot have any contact with students or use Facebook in the classroom.

And there is a big protest now, where I think forty seven or fifty one

of the commissioners of the New York School System

wrote the president chancellor and said:

"This is unacceptable"

"You must allow phones in the schools"

"but we agree they should be kept turned off."

So, that's the solution

I find this fascinating that kids are telling people:

"This is how we learn"

and the schools are responding by saying:

"You can't do that here."

So, when I look at what's happening in the classrooms I think

what we've done

is we've looked at a way to prepare our students for the jobs of the nineteenth century

it's just that we've taken two hundred years to perfect that method

and we've gotten it right;

we are now training people for industrial revolution factory jobs

and we're doing a very good job of it; unfortunately

those jobs no longer exists anymore.

And I thought that was the problem

until I talked to the teachers more

and this let me know my second conclusion:

that the system standardized testing we have,

has almost nothing to do with knowledge

and everything to do with surveillance.

The way in which standardized testing works is not about accountability

it's not about making ensure people learn things

but the goal of any system of surveillance

is about normalization.

It is about treating every student like every other student

and every teacher like every other teacher,

and I've come to believe that that kind of normalization

is incredibly toxic

to the things that we talked about like passion,

and creativity, and innovation.

Because it presumes that everything is equally, any deviation is to be treated

with suspicion and contempt,

and that's what we're seeing takeover in our school systems.

When I talked to these teachers I was feeling all kinds of amazing things

and the one that disturbed me the most

was because of the pressures

of standardized testing

New York City school teachers said to me this line

"We have no time for imagination."

And I thought that cut to the heart of exactly what it is that we're trying to rail against.

So I talked to these New York City school teachers

and I find that only a few of them are happy

and the thing I realized pretty quickly, is the ones that are happy

are teaching kindergarten,

and first grade,

and second grade.

And I assume that's just because they're getting these kids at that age when

they're still joyful;

and someone said "Oh no,

standardized testing starts in third grade."

That's what's making the teachers lives miserable

because they no longer get to

have any kind of learning in their classroom,

all they can do is teach to the test.

I come home from New York to California and hear a news report that California

has adopted something called the California Core Curriculum,

and it will now begin standardized testing

in kindergarten.

I don't know how you devise a standardized test for nap time,

but they're probably going to figure it out.

Now, what's happening is we're sending messages to teachers

that essentially they can't be trusted.

My next-door neighbor teaches third grade in California

and he actually was quote, unquote "called into the principal's office"

that's how he described it,

for sneaking Art

into the curriculum.

It wasn't in standardized test,

there was no place for it,

and the administration believed it was trading off with higher test scores as a

result of putting more information in