Dr.Tony Wagner: Your Highness,
Excellencies, friends and colleagues,
Asoloma mayhem!
Bonjour!
Buenos días!
Good morning!
As Jim suggested,
when we affirm creativity to be at the heart of education
we immediately encounter resistances,
we immediately encounter popular misconceptions.
Two in particular.
Number one: the belief that somehow creativity
is just given to a few people.
There are only a few people
who are born with creative gifts and talents.
The rest of us just bumble on.
The cond, but before we go to the cond misperception,
let me deal with that one,
becau that's a quick and easy one, isn't it.
Anyone who works with children
or who's studied child development knows
that we're all born curious, creative, imaginative.
That is the human DNA.
We learn by exploring the world,
We learn and understand by inventing,
as Gene Piarge said.
The average four year old asks 100 questions a day.
Most kindergarteners think of themlves as artists.
But by the time children have become, say, 12 years old,
they've come to understand that it's much more important
to give the right answers, than to ask good questions.
They've come to understand they are not in school to create,
but rather to absorb knowledge.
The cond misperception is that creativity is somehow a frill,
an extracurricular activity,
something that's kind of nice to have but not esntial.
Now, to confront that view,
we must deeply understand fundamental changes
that have taken place in our world
in the last few years with surprising speed.
For most of human history,
the people who had the greatest respect in our communities,
in our companies, in our countries,
were tho who had acquired the greatest knowledge.
Throughout human history,
we have revered people who have acquired
more knowledge than the rest of us.
And our degrees from our schools and universities
certify the acquisition of more knowledge
than other people may have.
That competitive advantage is disappearing very rapidly.
Why?
Today knowledge has become a commodity, it's free,
it's like air, it's like water.
It's on every Internet-connected device.
What that means
is the world simply no longer cares how much you know.
No competitive advantage.
Becau the person next to you can go
and figure it out and learn it just in time.
Rather what the world cares about, what matters most,
is not what you know,
but what you can do with what you know.
And that's a brand new and very different education problem.
Becau now it's not enough to have content knowledge,
sure that's important, necessary, but not sufficient.
So what that means
is that increasingly around the world
I'm encountering people who don't trust the credentials
that schools and colleges give out
certifying that you have rved a certain amount of at time
and acquired a certain amount of knowledge.
A couple of examples:
You know at Google, a famous company,
it ud to be that they only hired people from name-brand colleges
with the highest test scores and grades.
And you couldn't even get an interview at Google
unless you'd gone to certain universities.
Well they hired a guy by the name of Laszlo Bock
who ran the data, and discovered that
the diplomas were quite worthless.
His words.
Google has totally revamped their hiring process.
They no longer ask for your college transcript,
in fact 15% of their new hires don't have a college degree at all.
What are they looking for?
People who know how to tackle complex analytical problems.
And that's what they ask for in structured interviews.
They want to know your experience.
They want to know what you can do, not what you know.
I thought Google is maybe a one off,
crazy, Silicon Valley company,
but I was in Ho Chi Minh City last winter,
at an event sponsored by Deloitte,
the accounting and consulting company.
I was talking to the CEO over lunch.
She didn't know anything about Google,
but she said, "you know, we no longer hire our best students
from our best universities anymore.
They don't work out so well", she told me.
"Instead we look for good students
and we put them through a kind of summer camp
in order to understand how they work together to solve problems."
Talking to a CEO of a start-up recently.
