Eric Booth – Keynote Speech
You may want to sit next to me at dinner, but you don’t want to dance with me shortly after that. Thank you for inviting me here, and a special thanks for the kindness that my hosts have been showing to me. I notice that my hosts are represented in banners up here on the stage; we have the Scottish Arts Council with the tallest banner, we have the Inspectorate with two banners, and we have Teaching and Learning Scotland; and I don’t know what it means that their banner is leaning forward. But I want to respond to the kindness that I have been shown in typical American fashion, with rudeness, presumptuousness and demandingness. So in this next chunk of time I want to challenge you all for the opportunity of a lifetime that I think lies before you.
Part of my rudeness is that I am going to present way too much information in this short period of time, and speak too quickly. It is only partly because I am from New York, it is mostly that I have this urgency to share as much as I can, and I will say it is returning the favour; I have understood almost forty per cent of the words I have heard from Glaswegians since I have been here. And part of the urgency comes from this rare alignment of resources and opportunities that I see here.
Before I jump into my cheerleading mode I want to take the luxury of a little autobiography – that is one of the pleasures of being a keynote speaker, you actually get to indulge in a little self-storying. It is very hard to stop people, once they are up here on the stage with the microphone, although I shouldn’t challenge you with that, but it was exactly thirty years ago this week that I made my first step into education. I was a broadway actor who hated doing eight performances a week, and to try to enrich the tedium of that life, I thought let me go work with young people, see how that feels. And on my very first day, thirty years ago, I was send to an elementary school in the South Bronx, and I was instructed by the teacher how to find the classroom, and she said, you go down the top corridor and it is the fourth door on your right, right after you see ‘Rosita is a slut’ that is my classroom. And I didn’t know what to expect, and I walked into this classroom, and the teacher said I am so sorry we are going to be delayed a little bit. Someone had broken into the school on the night before – true story – and had smeared human excrement across the walls of her classroom. So she and I cleaned up the classroom - all the while the kids are waiting for the artist they are going to work with to begin – and as I was cleaning it up with her I was thinking, this is the most degraded learning environment imaginable.
And I, with no real skill as an educator, led these fourth graders – in the US that is nine year olds – in a real stupid exercise that was presented and articulated badly. I, with great shame, will confess it included paper plates and drawing a little mask on the paper plate, and taking a superhero character and embodying it in your body, and then putting the superhero mask in front of your face. And there were two kids I particularly remember from this day; one was ‘the big guy’ the big nine year old that was the powerbroker of the classroom, and then there was this little runt who was way off in the corner, the smallest kid in the class, nobody really paid attention to him. And when it came time for them to present their superhero with the mask the runt said he wanted to go first. So I allowed him to go first – not knowing anything – I said sure, so show us your little routine. And he took the mask, and he put it up in front of his face, and took this posture, and I remember the big kid went whoa! And when he was done with his little presentation I noticed that the big kid went over and stood next to him – that’s all that happened – but I remember thinking at the time, I want to be around something where you can just take a piece of paper, and do a little something to it that holds something about who you are, and make the bully go whoa, and want to come over and stand next to you.
The reason I tell this story is a metaphor about Scotland and America, which is I have noticed you are a very modest nation. That the word small always appears in everything I am told about Scotland; extremely self-abnegating about some of the accomplishments that you have got.
And then there is America – you can imagine which character this is in the story – and recently I have come to see what you have got going here as the little kid – self proclaimed – who has created something that makes the big guy go whoa, and want to come over and stand next to it. I became aware of what was going on here originally in 2006, at the first ever UNESCO worldwide arts education conference. I got to go to that, and was a keynote speaker, and was hearing all the talk all this week from all over the world, and three country’s names kept coming up; it was Scotland, England and Finland, the three countries that over the course of this week emerged as really the leaders for arts learning in the world. I got to come over to Scotland and spend some days in Glasgow later that year, and that’s when I found out about the music curriculum you were developing. I began to talk to educators and get a sense of what your expectations in norms were, I began to hear about the Curriculum for Excellence, I saw student work; and that is the point at which I saw – and I got to make a speech and say this – that you have the raw material coming together in a way I have never seen in my lifetime. And now I am here three years later, and I beginning to get the sense that not only is the raw material there, but the opportunity to really kick it into high gear stands before you, to really allow you to become the world’s leaders in education. And that is why I am going to be demanding, in this next few minutes, because it is my one chance to offer some ideas that could help you catalyse this opportunity and kick it into the highest gear possible.
So part of my presumption is I am going to turn your own language back on you by redefining some of the key terms, not the least of which is the word art. There is a strong tendency in the US – and less so here – to equate art with the nouns of art; art as the artistic disciplines, art as the stuff that happens in those special buildings, and we would do this in America, America is noun central in the known universe. And I am interested in the verbs of art; what it is humans actually do to create those nouns, what people do when they enter the worlds of those nouns, that is where the learning juice lies. So I am going to refer to art – the expressive arts – I am going to be thinking of the verbs of art more than I am the nouns. A true story about where I first got this idea. In the single worst moment of my professional career, live on television on a morning talk show, I was being interviewed – and this was a morning news talk show, so it was a peppy young woman – and she said to me Eric we have just two minutes left in our interview time, so could you wrap up this interview for us by giving us a very quick and clear distinction between art and entertainment? I had no idea what to say, and the hogwash that poured out of me for the next two minutes on television was such a humiliation I swore I would never live through that again.
And the distinction I figured out afterwards lies at the heart of what I want to talk about today, which is that entertainment which is not, please god, the enemy of the expressive arts, what distinguishes entertainment is that it happens within what we already know.
Whatever your reaction; laughing, crying, enjoyment, underneath it entertainment says, yeah the world is the way you think it is, and that feels great, I love having highly skilled people confirm my sense of the way the world is, I will pay big money for that, that is a wonderful thrilling experience. Art on the other hand happens outside of what you already know. Inherent in the artistic experience, at the very heart of the expressive arts, is the capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is or might be. The art doesn’t lie in the now, the art doesn’t lie in the fact that you have your hands on clay, or that you are learning how to dance. The art lies in that amazing human capacity to expand your sense of the possible; that is the verb of art. And I am going to look at some of the specific skills that lie in that verb capacity, after we do another little bit of more linguistic business.
I am a fanatical etymologist – no that is not someone who likes bugs – this is someone who loves to look at the history of words, rude to do on this soil where you invented this language, but I want to look at your four major outcomes through their etymological lens, because they uncover where art lies in relation to the Curriculum for Excellence.
First of all a successful learner: etymologically success is not this quantified definition of success that we tend to live in in the western culture. Etymologically it simply means to have a follow through, as in the succession of queens and kings. And etymologically a learner is one who gains experience by following a track. So I my eyes the verbs of art define a successful learner as one with the capacity to have a natural follow through gained by the experience of following a track. Our curriculum sparks that urge toward lifelong learning, that wish to keep making stuff you care about, or entering worlds others have made.
A confident individual: the etymology of confidence, with faith, and individual, indivisible. So a confident individual is an indivisible person with faith; what a definition of artists in fact. And I don’t just mean artists in an artistic media, I mean the art of bricklaying. The bricklayer who can take bricklaying to the level of an art form is a person with faith in her or his indivisibility, it is the work of art that takes us there.
Responsible citizen: the etymology of response is to promise back, and the citizen is one who belongs to a culture. To me a responsible citizen is one with the ability to promise back to one’s community. Boy did you see dancers who could do that this morning. Not just do a good job as a part of teamwork, but go an extra step – the artists step – to promise back something about yourself to make that community come to life. As Jill said, the memory of being in a play when you were seven years old, that is why it sustains when you have forgotten everything else about your education.
And being an effective contributor: etymologically a contributor is one who – this is really interesting etymology – means brought together to give. It is from ancient Rome. And so an effective, effectively meaning able to accomplish, an effective contributor is one capable of bringing people together to give. Again that artists generosity. So here is my big argument for you, here is my big point - I am going to pause for emphasis - your Curriculum for Excellence has three areas of learning across the curriculum; health and wellbeing, literacy, numeracy. My presumption is such that I want to propose you actually have a fourth that goes across the curriculum, and if you could manage to engage the teachers of Scotland in this fourth it will bring the other three to life to accomplish those four capacities as nowhere else on earth. And that fourth is creativity across the curriculum. That does not necessarily mean it is owned by the expressive arts teachers, in fact expressive arts teachers are as nervous about creativity across the curriculum as everybody else. This is one of the things we have discovered in the US, as mediocre as our arts education is, the only reason I can be as presumptuous as I am is that we have a lot of experiments that happen around the hodgepodge of a place I live, and many of those experiments are producing information, data, research that when called produce some clear results that I am sharing with you. And I am lucky enough in that my career takes me to a lot of this hodgepodge of best practices, and best examples, that don’t really add up to much because the country’s arts education doesn’t add up to much. But there are so many, and there is such consistency amongst these experiments, I feel I can report back to you that I see this as the key piece that can light up your Curriculum for Excellence.
So let me share with you what I have gleaned, and what I bring to you to say go for this. It is held in a handout that I have hidden on your table. I didn’t put it in your packet because I was afraid people would peek early, and I am a control freak. Come on, I have worked in the arts a long time, we get that way. And so somewhere on your table there are a couple of handouts, and one of them has Her Majesty’s Inspectorate’s name at the top. And I am going to spend a little while with that handout, because it is the best I have got. The other is possibly of interest at another time; it is entitled the habits of mind of creative engagement, and that is just a body of work I will describe at the end – it is some work I have been doing in the US that is resonant with what is on this handout – but the handout is my best shot at distilling for you the key ideas that I think can contribute.
So you will see a couple of little lists there – how unexciting can you get, lists – and these lists are ... well let me describe where they come from. The first was inspired by some work I did not long ago, working with business people in the US, and I worked with several different groups. And there were the business people who love the arts and creativity, and love to talk the big fluffy stuff about the arts, and they think the arts are great, and they give money to the arts, and they were amazingly not useful as collaborators. The most useful group was this group of business people I got to spend an intensive retreat – three days together with them – and this was the group that thinks the arts are not very interesting; that you say the word art and they begin to yawn, you say the word creativity and they begin to go to sleep, these are the hard tacks people, come on get on with it. And their rigour, both about language and the results that they need, proved extremely valuable. They were the ones who said, oh man creativity, sounds like another one of your fluffy art words, everyone goes oh yes creativity, yes good it is going to save us, but you don’t really know what you are talking about. They said, if you can distil for me a handful of skills that you mean when you say creativity I will get interested, and in fact if you can not only tell me those five skills, but you can demonstrate to me in legitimate research evaluative terms that you actually accomplish those, I will give you unlimited amounts of money. They said, but you can’t do that, they said but what I don’t want is a whole bunch of new employees who think it is great to be creative, that is my nightmare. What I want are employees who know the ten per cent of the time when it is appropriate to apply multiple creative strategies, and that they can, in that targeted amount of time, produce innovations, that is what I want. So it is a body of work that I and some colleagues have been working on to distil what we are calling the habits of mind of creative engagement.
Now what it really boils down to is, what are the crucial verbs of art? What are the actual skills and capacities that make the art seem to light up learning? So that we don’t just vaguely, and in a rough generic way, use the arts to pep things up, but that rather strategically we can start to develop the skills that illuminate learning. For a long time I was doing work around interdisciplinary work; bringing dance together with maths to create an interactive curriculum that made both of them go better. And we got a lot of really good results, but what I finally figured out after years of doing this work, it wasn’t about the disciplines, it was actually about the skills that both contained. And that the more we began to actually focus on the development of those skills, rather than the effort of bringing disciplines together, trying to push nouns together, if we focussed on the common verbs the learners lit up.
So that is what that first list is, some of those verbs that underlie all subject areas, so that we don’t have to think so much about changing the curriculum so we can get the arts working in all these other different disciplines, but rather what lies at the heart of what the arts are that could be spread across the school day and beyond to light up learning. And I want to give you just a little example of some of them - I am not going to talk too tediously through this entire list - but when I say attention skills, let me take a minute to talk about what I mean there. Attention, which etymologically means to stretch out, to stretch toward, our culture, and to some degree yours, is enforcing what I call permanent partial attention, and there is increasing research on the damage of multi-tasking in the inability to muster the attention quality that it takes to learn well if you cannot attend well. And it has been my experience that by bringing kids into what is sometimes call the flow experience, or optimum engagement in any subject matter, they start to develop that attention muscle that gets stronger and stronger. Even though we don’t have a strong research case to affirm it, it is unmistakeable in the US that at every school that invests in high quality arts programmes, the kids start doing better in all the other subject matter. We don’t have good causal data that shows the direct connection, but we notice that they start to be able to do different things, and one of them is they start to be able to apply full attention. And then, at the next level, they start to be able to intentionally guide their attention; they become strong guiders of what they are looking at.
I want to take a little pause to do an arts activity to you. We will be passing out the point shoes now since ... just setting the bar very low, but I want to make a little distinction about the nouns and verbs of art. Would you imagine with me that this stage set we are looking at, in fact let’s say everything from here back is a stage set for a play. You have plunked down your £20 to come and see this performance, and you are politely waiting for the performance to begin, but you are looking at the stage set and from what you see you are beginning to gather details about what this play is going to be like. And you know what scenic designers are like; there is nothing random, every single thing that is up there has been meticulously placed, and it is intentional, every single thing. By looking at that what are some things you can tell about the play that’s going to happen?
Q&A Session
EB: What do you see that gives you a hint, a suggestion about the play? You will see something?
Q1: [inaudible]
EB: And what time, what does this suggest for a time setting for this play?
Q3: [inaudible]
EB: Temporary, yeah. So we are looking 2009, although maybe 2008. What other details, pieces are you seeing that give you a hint about the play?
Q4: Yes, there is a very strong artistic statement, although it could be ironic, but there is that word right smack up in there, and one of the least inspiring things you can do to people is tell them they are about to be inspired. What else do you see? What are some details that give you hints?
EB: Okay good, so he is seeing several players, also he then uses the word players, we have a stage, we have a play within a play, we have an elevated stage and then we have this other outer area with a stairway to nowhere and lots of cables, and this business of four somethings. Is this going to be a comedy? Yeah?
Q5: [inaudible]
EB: Educate, and what gives you that?
Q6: The biggest word is education, and you know anything that is about education sells tickets, oh boy! Yeah, so we have a bomb on our hands. What else?
EB: And how do you get that the characters are inviting you in?
Q7: [inaudible]
EB: Great, so the actual images, the few images you are given, there is something reaching, running toward you, and that they are young people. What other little details give you hints?
Q8: [inaudible]
EB: Where do you get energy?
Q9: [inaudible]
EB: From the running, from up here. So there is something about this that feels like high energy. Any other little details that say something quirky about this play?
Q10: [inaudible] sharp corners.
EB: Good, so it may say inspiring but it sure looks pretty rectangular. And then there is this odd thing happening down here, what is that all about?
Let me just pause for a moment. Would you notice the way you were just looking at this space in the last three minutes, versus the prior hour and a half you were looking at it. Think about the quality of your attention in the last three minutes versus the previous ninety. That is a quality of attention. All I did was give you the smallest expressive arts invitation there is, what if, play a what if game with me. And if the what if game worked, your internal chemistry changes dramatically. You go from the way we usually attend; you know this one, what have you got? What are they going to serve for lunch? Oh that was vaguely interesting, oh my god he is wearing sneakers. All that stuff that passes for paying attention – and believe me that is a child in school – that is the quality of attention, endless hours per day versus the tiny shift of what if, and to actually start noticing what is here, all this same stuff was up here before but it had no real potential, it couldn’t expand our sense of the way the world is or might be. But my hope was with that little exercise you would slip into the world of art and start making connections, coming up with ideas, seeing what is there and playing with the possibility of its potential, and even better we change our atmosphere in the room, instead of just blowhard talking, and lots of other individuals waiting and having whatever experience they are having, we become more of a community, we start going ooh that was a really smart observation, I hadn’t thought of that, she is smart, I want to check her out later. We start to become a more functional community just through the simplest invitation, and it had nothing to do with art, it is the verb of art. So the verb of attention developed powerfully through the expressive arts. When you bring that to the biology classroom, and to the water cycle, and to the patterns of mathematics, that is when you reach the potential of the Curriculum for Excellence.
The second skill I just wanted to mention briefly is inquiring skills, and in the US we are starting to call this now executive function; a very American phrase for how do you manage the pursuit of your own learning, what skills of managing and inquiry process do you have. In the US we have a tendency to define that pretty much by the scientific method; you will ask questions, set up hypotheses, gather data, come to conclusions, all of which is very good. Except that it includes almost all the ways human beings make meaning in life, the aesthetic method if you will.
Very often when I give a speech to business people in the US I will start with a POP quiz, and I will ask them how many of you out here have made an important business or personal decision recently based on your high school trigonometry? No hands are raised. How many of you have made an important business or personal decision recently based on the arts or aesthetics; and let me just remind you that was a decision that you may have made based on a gut feel, or translating previous experience to a current problem, or intuitively making a choice and wondering if it is the best? Every hand is up before I have let these poor business people out of their suffering, only to say well now that we have established the relative importance of the arts versus some of our more scientific subject matter, let’s look at how the arts can light up learning. And part of the process we are talking about is to have many ways to inquire, the way humans do in life. We spend a stunning small percentage of our significant engagement in life following logical processes. Very few of our significant learning events are from a sequence of logical pursuit. It is this mish-mash of the way humans work; intuitively, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, those are the energies that drive our executive function And if learning can open up so that kids can discover relevance, can find their own voice, suddenly all curriculum becomes material that is worth inquiring into.
A third is brainstorming, a very simple and often most obvious skill of the arts that moves across curriculum. The capacity to develop multiple answers to questions. If we had a little more time I would give you an assignment which would be – and I will tell you what you are missing – we would take exactly sixty seconds for you to write down a many ways that you can think that the animal a mouse and a refrigerator are the same. So you would go, how are the mouse and refrigerator ...? And you would be using the lexicon of inquiry skills to analogically connect to disparate categories, and we would then parse out your learning process to see your personal success with inquiry skills, using analogical thinking in a brainstorming process.
I have schools who are working with what we call two minute arts activities, across the curriculum. So three times a day they focus on one of the habits of mind of creative engagement – that is on your other handout – almost like an isotonic exercise; rather than try to carve out forty blocks of time for American kids to get more expressive arts in their school day – an impossible task in America – you can get two minute blocks of time, three times a day, five days a week. And they are finding if you focus on one of those skills like analogical thinking three times a day for two minutes, within a week metaphors are starting to appear on the playground. Just from the habit, the pleasure – feeling the pleasure – of that work. So brainstorming across the curriculum and metaphoric thinking across the curriculum; analogical thinking.
And people tend to think of analogy or metaphor as the touchy feely zone, I defy you to find a major scientific article in a scientific journal that does not use metaphor essentially as the way to communicate the scientific information of that fact. In fact metaphor is one of the two or three most essential tools we have to communicate and to hold complex understandings, and yet in America – it would never happen in Scotland – we live in such a belligerently literal society that I am witnessing analogical capacity diminish just within my lifetime. I actually see kids struggle – and teachers – harder and harder to think metaphorically, to actually not feel the pleasure of making a good metaphor, but the discomfort of the difficulty of the unfamiliarity of the task, to such a degree that I have actually witnessed an essential human capacity atrophy in my lifetime. And yet it is one of our essential human pleasures, highly assessable and accessible, and yet we let it slip away.
Just to tick through a few of these others that I am going to leave you with. The importance – especially important for you – of ongoing self assessment. One of the things I have learned in the US is that the habit of mind of self-assessment is more important for the learner than any other kind of assessment we surround and support that kid with. And most of the tools we are using in the US to evaluate learning diminish the self assessment instinct. So I would insist that what the arts provide is the natural impulse, the natural way that artists and learners determine the quality of what is going on. Artists are exemplary self-assessors in their work, it is suffused in their actual action, and these are habits of mind that can be developed.
I want to also mention the inner attitude of play, the sense of responsibility, wanting to make stuff to share with your colleagues. And most important the motivation to learn, the yearning to find personal meaning. And in fact I probably should save this for a spectacular inspirational finish, but I think more important than anything else, we are in the yearning business. Our opportunity is to awake the yearning in young people, and guide it into worthwhile engagements, projects, challenges, so they get the feeling that artists get, which is pouring yourself into a challenge and discovering the satisfaction that comes from successful completion -successful as in follow through – so that you develop the pleasure of this cycle, of yearning and making, yearning and making. If that energy is flowing through every subject matter, you not only have a lifelong learner, you have built it on lifelong yearning, and I think our opportunity is to be in the yearning business.
The second set of bullet points there are just some indicators that I see in the US when I see an example of a highly creative school environment. Here is some of the stuff I see. And I mention it to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate because we need you to be looking for, talking about, sharing examples of what a highly creative school environment looks like. That is one of the most important things; we need to know what it looks like. You are probably flailing to know exactly what the criteria of excellence are for creativity, we need you to settle that and live that for us, the rest of the world is looking to you to find that. And that is why there is my most presumptuous statement of the morning; I think the work of the education inspectors is the final piece here in Scotland.
You know – whether you like to admit it or not – how significant your role is in the equation of education, that all of the practitioners are aligned with what is going to be looked for, what is determinant of success. If you can get good at engaging people in discovering what highly creative learning environments look like, so that they know what to look for and not just vaguely try to change their work in a creative direction, but actually be guided toward what you want to explore with that. And you don’t have to know everything; you just have to invite the enquiry with them. And here are the things that I see; high quality questions, all over the place. And not only high quality questions, high quality problems; and high quality problems are crucial, there was a recent study of Nobel prize winning scientists, and it was proven that they are no better at problem solving than anyone else, but they are way better at problem posing than anyone else. Work in the arts develops the capacity for great problem posing, relevant problems that have an emotional bite, that bring high intensity participation.
Planning time: the bottleneck of this work in the US, all the good intention, all the skilled people, and we squeeze its throat to death so that it cannot breathe by not providing adequate planning time.
Community engagement: parental, family engagement, corporate community engagement is a clear sign of a creative environment. In fact I tend to think of porous membranes of the school encouraging the growth of the creative learning environment.
A variety of reflective tools: so that reflection becomes a habit of mind, as is stated in the curriculum for excellence.
Project based learning: so that students take the abstract knowledge they have and they forge it in the old apprenticeship mode of learning by doing with the extra intensity of a project; a play, a dance, a community project.
The balance of roles: so you aren’t just a performer, or just a creator, or just an audience member, or just a critic, but the interplay of these roles in all subject matter.
Certainly pedagogical vitality, and the key to that is a rule of mine, that I use in the US, I call it the rule of eighty per cent, and that eighty per cent is a made up number, but it captures an actual truth, and the rule of eighty per cent says eighty per cent of what you teach is who you are, the other twenty per cent is available for detail by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate. But that the real learning impact comes out of the quality of the person in the room, and as you are teachers and co-learners with educators across the country, your quality of eighty per cent, the quality of creativity you bring into the room, and into that inquiry, for how are we going to spread creativity across the curriculum? How do we light up these subject matters to accomplish those four capacities, as opposed to – and I know no Scottish educator would ever think this, but in the US it is very common - okay here comes another big curriculum, I will just duck and let this one pass over two. I have had about ten of these in my lifetime, I know how to endure them, I don’t really feel like ponying up another huge effort to change the way I teach for this new one. That is the teacher that needs to be engaged through the quality of your creative eighty per cent.
And here are a few strategies in our last set of bullet points for ways that we can address a school community to transform in that way. That we can invite educators not to think, don’t make me do more, don’t make me change again, but in fact capture the positive artistic energy of that teacher to really invite her to make the modest adjustments that it takes to go from a standard curriculum to a creative curriculum. And some of the ways that I have seen running some projects in the US, things you see that work to transform a school community are lots of visible examples of evidence. That it isn’t just great stuff happening in room 206, but in fact the whole school community becomes aware of what high quality, high engagement work, in a variety of classrooms looks like.
And, again, adequate planning, to me the ultimate bottle neck in opening up this work.
Endlessly forgotten is an intra-school communications plan about creativity; how you communicate amongst all the stakeholders, inside and outside the school, what is happening in this school that makes it creative across the curriculum. And to really have a plan for communication engagement; because people warm to it after there hear of it for a while. If it looks like a sudden new demand to ‘be creative’ people tend to resist. If after a year of seeing and feeling the value, and getting some of the hit of excitement an enjoyment, people start to be drawn toward it. I have become very fond of whole school practices, small little gestures at creativity throughout the school day; school announcements, school assemblies, things that happen as people are coming into the school and leaving the school. Things that we call art attacks, which is little artistic things that happen as a surprise all over the school, to actually just enrich the school environment with expressions of creativity across the culture.
And then finally, how do you make whole school change? We have determined three ways and I have one very strong preference here. One is you have a lead group that takes on being leaders of this change within the school. And then there is an overall statement of others, come and join us, come and join us; that tends to work in some schools. The strategy that works least effectively is a strong administrative mandate to be creative. That tends to be where you get the most resistance, and the most grudging participation that doesn’t turn into the pleasure of this work. And the strategy I have got there in the middle, that seems to be the most successful in America, which is you have a lead group of experimenters for a year, making their work highly visible, articulated, understood, kids work shared. And then an expectation that next year everyone will participate, but just a little bit, only as much as you want, and that work shared and discussed, we find that over about two or three years whole school faculties will join this kind of work, if they are not forced, if they are constantly shown the upside of this work, and most importantly if their eighty per cent, gets this feeling of artistic satisfaction.
So let me close with a couple of presumptuous statements. One is this pleasure principle I am describing – I first got turned onto that by Plato of all people, and he said if you want to transform a society, the one thing a society needs above all others to be successful is not to do with institutions or governance, the one thing it takes to transform a successful society is teach its young people to find pleasure in the right things. And there is no righter right thing than that expressive arts, pouring yourself into making something you care about, in all the different subject matters of a school, and having the courage to share that with others inside the school and out; and the habit of mind of curiosity that makes you eager to explore the worlds that others have made. So carrying it from Plato, that is the key to a successful culture. You have the pieces here in Scotland that no-one else in the world has got, and as a representative of the rest of the world I can’t tell you how much we need you to succeed in this opportunity, to actually put those pieces that are in close alignment into high gear, to make the modest changes – and it does take some energy to make those changes, and lord knows you have applied a lot of energy - and your role in establishing what the governing structures are going to look for, and how we are going to talk about your work. And what our priorities are when our eyes come into your school from the outside to reflect the quality of what is happening, the degree to which you invite, demand high quality creative learning cultures across the schools for all students is the degree to which the thousands and thousand of individuals make those minor adjustments to open up their curriculum to creativity, to accomplish those four capacities, and to establish the kind of learning for every kid in a culture that this world needs more desperately than anything else.
It was a year ago today in the United States we elected Barack Obama to be president, something better than we deserve after many years of inattention to education and world citizenship, in the hope that he brings to us is, I hope, the hope I can bring to you for what is possible. And that you too can leave here today saying yes we can.
Thanks.
[End of Recording]
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