Good morning everybody.
So... actually...
Keeran already stole two major segments of my talk.
Unbelievably, that pale blue dot thing
which he showed at the beginning was
actually supposed to be the
last three minutes of my talk.
I actually have a piece of paper
with the whole thing written out
and I actually have an image in my
slide which you'll see later as well.
I guess great minds think alike.
However... we come from...
We're talking about the same thing...
We're talking about education.
But we come from two slightly different perspectives.
He's trying to get education to as many
people as possible and I really believe in
that as well, as many people [as possible]
need to come into the picture as well.
But my talk is directed
more towards those
people who will actually
be watching this talk.
Those of you who are here;
people who are watching,
who might be watching from
the Internet and so on.
You guys are all educated, you guys have
already gone through the system before.
The question which I want to bring up
today is whether the learning
which you get in education is actually
good enough to prepare you for the life today.
Actually not you, but the generation
which is coming after you.
So, when Google+ came out earlier this year
they asked us to write a line under our names to identify ourselves,
and that's actually what I came up with.
Earthling, humanist, educator, and total geek.
Just by looking at me you
can tell that I'm a geek,
so I'm going to start
backwards, with educator.
In terms of education...
now it's going too fast...
So in terms of education, I'm an educator
who comes from a background where
I'm trying to transform the education system,
and if I fail to transform it, I would rather
replace it with something else completely.
Because I don't believe in what I'm doing today.
I love education very, very much.
But I don't think I'm
doing the right thing for
the people, for the kids
which I'm teaching.
And I'm going to talk to you about this.
Now these two people are my parents,
they're my greatest learning enablers.
The reason why I say so is because
they have given me all the tools
which I feel I am using in doing all
the learning which I am doing today.
Now, when myself and my sister
were in primary school,
they decided that the two of us needed to
take English a little bit more seriously.
So what they did was, they
started a little project
where we would only speak
English language at home.
Now, this did not last very long.
We usually speak Teochew, we
still speak Teochew right now.
But for about one year,
we spoke only English.
Now, during this time,
we were also encouraged to read,
we were brought to the library, they
bought us some books and so on.
And we actually picked it up so much,
that we ended up loving
reading very, very much.
It became part of our life, and we would...
It turns into entertainment, and
when it turns into entertainment,
it's something that you do
in order to procrastinate.
So to procrastinate studying for examinations,
we would be reading storybooks.
"You know, it's educational...
you told us it's educational,
we're gonna read and stuff like that."
But they wanted us to read
textbooks at the time.
So what we would do is, we would actually
take our reading to the throne room,
and especially close to
examination periods
we would have extra long
sessions in the throne room.
Every now and then we would have reference
books and we would prop it up like that
and we'll put a little
paperback novel in the middle,
and we'll be reading the paperback
novel while pretending to be studying.
A lot of people actually know this story.
Anybody who is very into reading
has probably done this sometime in their lives.
You'd cover yourself with a blanket,
with a flashlight at night,
all kinds of crazy things.
Now, while we were reading,
we came across a lot of English
words which we did not know
which they probably knew.
So we went up to them and asked them,
"Could you tell us what this means,
what's the definition of this," and so on.
And they would always tell us to look
it up for ourselves in the dictionary.
"We bought you one, you know, make
use of it, figure it out yourself."
And the last thing which they did
which is a little bit
strange for parenting
was that they would ask us,
they would ask me especially, to speak to complete strangers.
Kids, speaking to complete strangers.
This would be like ordering
food in a restaurant,
or going up to a shop and asking,
"Do you sell something?"
Or some uncle would come
and we would be asked to
come and talk to your uncle, this uncle,
tell him what you do at school, and so on.
Now, these three things, I think of as the
greatest ingredients of my personal learning.
And, since I'm an educator, I like to
generalize things and apply it to everybody.
So, language, basically,
English, especially
gives me access to an entire world
of knowledge and communication.
The idea that I can look
things up for myself,
the idea that the world
is understandable to me
even though I am still a young
kid, is very, very important.
And last of all, after I figure out,
the confidence that I should speak up,
 like I'm doing right now.
And these three things, are
things which I feel all children
actually pick up by themselves.
Nobody has to teach them to do this.
They will ask you questions
until  you're sick of it.
And some families will
actually nurture this
and some families will
actually shut this down.
It depends on which background
you're coming from.
But everybody will end up
going here, eventually.
Now, when you enter
the education system
certain things change in your lives.
You end up, like, living a second life,
and it's not like the life you
actually lead with your parents.
First of all, you're suddenly taught...
they call this discipline.
You're suddenly taught that
there is a specific thing
that you have to learn,
at a specific time,
and you must learn it in a specific order.
Now that is fine and all,
I'm not against discipline.
But what this also
tells children is that,
"You can't figure this thing out, we have a plan,
we know what's going on, and we're going
to tell you exactly how this works
and you just sit there patiently and quietly,
and let us tell you what exactly that is."
That is one problem I
have with education.
The second thing I have
with education is this.
The quest for the right answer.
Teachers do this, I do this
by accident or unconciously in class.
You always ask a question to test whether
the audience is following you or not,
but you already have an
answer in your mind.
Even if you're asking for an opinion,
there is always a better opinion
which you already have.
We don't spend enough time listening to the
opinions of the students which we're teaching.
Worst of all, at the end of the day,
the entire process becomes more about the assessment
rather than the actual learning itself.
Students quickly figure out that the most
important thing in life is to pass examinations
or to get A's if you want to
get a good job in the future,
and education is about this.
And [as] a teacher I can tell you that
almost all your students, no matter how
good or bad they are; they know this.
They know this for a fact.
And they will do everything they
can to pass your examinations,
if they care about their future,
but they don't necessarily
do what they need to do
in order to learn the subject
matter you're trying to teach them.
A lot of lecturers figure this out and it becomes and easy job for us as well.
When people ask me how hard it is to
be a lecturer, I usually tell them,
"It's hard and it's easy.
It's easy if you want to be one type of lecturer
and it's very, very hard if
you want to be another type."
And the last problem, and it's probably the
biggest problem I have with education,
is an example which Richard Feynman, a famous
physicist from a bunch of years ago...
He was reviewing maths textbooks
for a district in the United States.
He'll come across examples like this.
An example goes, "John and his father goes out to look at the sky.
They see many types of stars.
Red stars are four thousand degrees, blue
stars are ten thousand degrees" and so on.
There are several problems with this,
have any of you guys seen the color of stars when you look up at night?
You can actually see it, yeah.
With a telescope you can actually see it,
if it's dark enough out you can see it.
But the vast majority of people have never
seen the color of stars with their naked eyes.
Unless you're a crazy astronmer
[self-reference] and you actually see
the stars through a telescope.
But the bigger problem is, to teach mathematics,
they would give a question like this.
"John sees a red star, his
father sees a blue star.
What is the total temperature
of all the stars that they see?"
Why are you adding the temperature of two stars?
In no circumstances do we ever take two stars and
combine them together into a giant star;
it doesn't happen. It's pointless.
It's ridiculous. It's stupid, even.
And when Richard Feynman was
reviewing these textbooks,
he would see tons of examples like this.
His wife describes them as explosions.
he would explode in his study
every single time he reads...
multiple times while
he's reading a textbook.
And this is something which
happens throughout education.
It happens to me all the time.
If you take up an interesting
idea, or an interesting problem
and you chop it up into little pieces,
and you arrange it in a syllabus
and you try and teach it, you always have
to reach out for ridiculous examples
in order to make sense of things,
and this is a major problem.
And sometimes we wonder why children
think education is pointless
and I think this is a major, major aspect.
If you put these three things together,
You get one of the biggest symptoms
and one of the biggest problems
that you will face as an educator.
[As a student] you have no
freedom at all in what you do,
the main point is the assessment
and you don't see the reason why
you're doing everything you're doing.
This is a question which I asked my students.
I'll ask them to write on a piece of paper
the answer to two questions, "Have
you plagiarised in your life?"
and "Why did you do it?"
Out of hundreds of students
that I've surveyed
there will be one or two who
would actually say that
they have never plagiarised in their life.
I don't know whether they're lying.
Hopefully they're not.
But they have no reason
to, it's anonymous.
The worst thing is that those who actually do
plagiarise - they're pretty upbeat about it.
Like, "Why shouldn't I?"
That's the question, they asked me back,
"Why shouldn't I?" on the piece of paper.
They will say, "It saves me time. It saves me work.
There's too much homework to do."
They don't see the point in doing all the
things which we're telling them to do.
Now, I'm not excusing plagiarism.
As an educator I hate plagiarism.
I fail people who plagiarise in my class.
But should we give up on
the entire lot of them?
Some of them are smart students;
they're hardworking students,
but they do this all the same.
If everybody else in the world is doing this;
if everybody else in their class is plagiarising,
why shouldn't they?
And it's a very, very hard
question to answer as an educator
because you cannot tell
them what is the point.
"The point is that you have an exam two
weeks from now, so you should study."
That is not the reason why you
should be in the education system.
So if you compare the two things,
you get [two] very different worlds.
One is fun, it is open, it is for you
to explore and for you to understand.
And in the other one, everything
has been figured out for you,
you're supposed to figure out
the right answer at every turn.
Now, these three things are
problem in and of themselves, but
there is a bigger issue here.
If we continue doing this education to
to the young generation,
we are telling them;
we're sending them the biggest subliminal
message we are giving them in their lives.
Not from what we teach them, [but] from
the way which we're teaching them,
is telling them that the
world cannot be figured out
you cannot figure out
this world for yourself
and that you should accept things that you
don't understand at the end of the day,
and that the value of your own
voice and your own opinions
does not matter at all.
And these three things are very
dangerous things to tell children
in a world which is changing at the
rate which it is changing today.
So if you go to the;
this is a Google search
the first result if you search
up the meaning of learning.
You actually get the acquisition
of knowledge. Pretty simple.
If you look up education on the other hand,
you will see that the focus is actually
on a process; systematic instruction.
The word learning doesn't
even appear there.
But the most damning definition
actually comes from Wikipedia.
And I think this one actually
makes a lot of sense.
The means through which aims and
habits of a group of people
lives on from one
generation to the next.
What we want to do is actually to
pass on the way which we think.
While I was researching these slides, I was
watching the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
I don't know how well-known
it is in Malaysia.
There's sombody there.
Lewis Black, a comedian,
actually appeared on the show
and he had this to say
about the whole thing.
"Everything we do these days is
idealogical and it's killing us,
but our innocent children have fresh eyes and new perspectives...
which is why we have to do everything
we can to indoctrinate them now,
otherwise they will solve all the problems
we couldn't and make us look like jerk-offs.
And I think this is pretty much
a very accurate description
 of what we want to do in education.
I think we're actually afraid that our children
will figure out that we're all idiots,
and that they will do all the
things a lot better than we do.
If you look at it...
If you look at it, you can actually
see that education is about adults.
It's about what we want.
We think we know what is right for them,
 and we want to mold them to
fit our existing systems,
and we need them, in order to fill the jobs
which we have created to power the existing system.
But education should be about children.
It should be about opening up their minds,
opening up the world to them,
telling them that this is your world,
and that you can figure this out.
"You figure out your own way,
you solve your own problems,
because that time which you are alive is yours.
You shouldn't have to live
30 years of your life
trying to solve problems
which we created for you
and that you will pass on
to the next generation
because you were told that
this is how it works.
This is a perspective which
I've had for a lot of my life.
I used to call this a certificate factory
but I think Ken Robinson, another
one of the TED speakers;
he has a very good term for this.
He calls this the industrial
model for education.
This is very true I feel.
But whenever we're talking about this,
people will point out that
society needs to function.
We need to be able to fill jobs
which are in the industry today
so that the world doesn't come apart.
But the big irony with this is that...
if you're in education, you
hear these terms a lot.
I'm honestly sick and tired
of listening to this.
"When our graduates come out,
they can't do critical thinking,
they can't do problem solving, they don't
have entrepreneurship spirit, and all that."
You know what we do to
solve these problems?
We create subjects. Entrepreneurship 101.
Problem Solving 101.
Now what happens is...
How on earth, are you supposed to teach a
bunch of kids how to think critically,
if what you're doing is to teach them to memorize
a list of ideas about critical thinking.
They have to know what are the
aspects of a critical thinker.
In public speaking, are you supposed to
wave your hands like this or like that?
It's ridiculous. It's completely pointless.
And the students don't see the point
in learning all of these things.
If you want them to think
critically, do a debate session.
Have a debate every week.
Get them to talk about issues and topics.
Put another student to judge them.
There are better ways to do this.
And it doesn't necessarily
have to be in a classroom
where there is a specific syllabus you have
to follow and a textbook you have to read.
I cannot imagine how you're supposed to
read a textbook for critical thinking
and actually start thinking critically
- all the answers are there.
I think the major problem with
this is the qualifications system.
A lot of us want to solve this
problem of relevancy in education,
but a lot of us approach it from a
teaching and learning perspective.
This is good - there's a lot of technology
coming up - web videos,
 instructional videos which you
can learn things on your own.
But all of us still have to go through
college and formal education system
because there isn't enough focus on transforming
how assessment and qualifications work.
If we can change how assessment
and qualifications work
we can probably change how
the rest of it works.
We can open up the world so that
more people can learn on their own,
and still get a qualification.
The thing which I hope the young people
here and the older people here as well
would consider; as you become employers
or you become the human
resource personnel
please consider other perspectives
of how people learn in their lives
and not just the formal
qualifications systems that we have
because I do not think that they truly
represent the learning which we need today.
The second aspect which I want
to talk about is humanism.
Why is there an urgency for
us to make this change?
[From] a world which is closed to our children,
to a world which is open to our children.
I used to spend a lot of
time in my university
telling people that human beings, all
of us, may be no better than monkeys.
This did not make me very
popular with a lot of people.
If you think about it...
My biology teacher taught us that
humans are part of the animal kingdom.
We're very similar, we're like ninety
something percent similar to chimpanzees.
You can use a pig's liver
to clean your blood stream.
But what differentiates us
from animals is intelligence.
We have cool things; we have
civilization, you have cool gadgets
which is streaming things to the
Internet and all these crazy things.
But if you look at the average life cycle
of the average middle class person
you will get something which is
not very different from animals.
We all do this right?
Born, grow up, marry, have kids...
Animals do this as well,
they just do this without an iPod,
without iPhones and what not,
but they still do this.
The focus is about passing on the gene
pool, making sure that we reproduce
and that our species does not die.
The focus of the vast majority of
people on earth is about survival
and it's about just... living...
most of the time.
If we're going to be a
human being in the world
there is a very powerful
aspect of our intelligence
powered I think by language.
Every complex idea and every complex
concept that you can think of today
is powered by language.
If you cannot put it in terms of
a language, it is not an idea.
And how language differentiates
humans from animals
is that we have the capacity
to figure things out
and most importantly, transmit
it to a future generation.
That is why we have the civilization today.
You cannot build the next
generation of computers
without using a computer from today.
It's just impossible.
There is actually a TED Talk about somebody
trying to build a toaster from scratch.
Going to the mines and digging up
iron ore and things like that.
And the toaster turned out like crap,
because he refused to use any
devices at all to build it.
It's all done by hand.
So, language is actually the tool.
The conversation which we're
having as a human race
is actually what differentiates
us from animals -
the ability to pass on information.
The big question here is, if we,
as human beings, as individuals
do not contribute to the
conversation of mankind,
to the advancement and the cultural
changes which is defining mankind,
then how are we, how am I personally,
different from a monkey?
This is a question which keeps
me up at night, every day.
No, not every day.
I got better things to do than that.
There is a certain amount
of urgency in this.
This is a very relevant quote, "Civilization
is a race between disaster and education."
How many people here are actually
aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Show of hands?
That's like less than ten
percent of the room.
You all almost died, in 1962.
You all almost very nearly got wiped out,
 or maybe you'd have been
given three or four legs.
During the Cold War, the United States and
Russia very near came to actual nuclear war.
They actually nearly fired
missiles at each other.
And if they did, the world would've
landed in a nuclear winter.
It is something which is
amazing, I feel, that
we almost got killed, and
nobody knows about it.
It's like yesterday somebody
pointed a gun [at you]
[and the] next day you're
walking like nothing happened.
This is what is true about
the vast majority of mankind.
We're oblivious to things.
Financial crisis, climate crisis...
Yes, we know we're not
supposed to use plastic
but every day, you still see
people asking for plastic
for two small pieces of things which
they can carry with their hands.
And it just angers me so
much when this happens,
but you keep quiet right?
You're a nice guy.
You don't go like, "Hey, plastics!"
It's not something that we do.
But shouldn't we be doing
something about this?
If we do not solve these
kinds of problems in time;
we do not know how far the journey
of mankind is going to go.
We do not know where we're headed.
But if we do not open up
the world to our children
if we do not make people
think in their own terms,
we will never be able to get there.
The result of what is happening now,
the reason why people are just
happy to get on with their lives
and just move on with
whatever they're doing
and just live with whatever
existing systems which we have now
is because we don't think that we
know there's a better way to do it.
But every one of us have a mind
and every one of us is actually capable
of thinking our own opinions and ideas
about how things can work.
Is currency the right way to go?
Is the way which we're handling
money right now intelligent?
People don't even think
of money as a product.
We invented it. It's a human invention.
And if you can improve
phones and stuff like that
why can't we improve the concept of money?
This is a silly chart,
which I came up with.
If you think about it, it seems that the
world is surrounded by evil people.
Of course they don't kill people,
but they just don't seem to care,
they just seem to push people backwards.
Even out of all the people
who are good in the world,
it always seems like there's so few of
them who actually want to do anything.
Even people who have positive thoughts
or can think about the world;
they're just happily living in it
because it's such a huge problem.
Even if we increase the number
of good people by fifty percent
and the number of doers by fifty percent,
we'd still end up with
only twenty five percent.
This is a scary problem.
There is not enough people getting on board.
I think education is the key
to solving this problem,
but not education in
its current state.
I don't think that you can do this, and
get more people to think for themselves.
The last part is Earthling,
and this is what I meant
when I said Keeran has stolen my segment.
Which is good because now I think
I'm finishing almost on time.
His photo was a little bit zoomed
in, but this is zoomed out,
and this is still not the 100 percent picture.
This photo was taken in 1990,
by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
We originally sent it to
explore Jupiter and Saturn.
I find it funny that people
don't find it amazing
that we can send something 6 billion miles from earth.
Can you imagine...
sorry, 6 billion kilometers from earth.
Can you imagine 6 billion kilometers;
how long do you have to walk to
get to 6 billion kilometers.
In 1990, Carl Sagan actually got
NASA to turn around the spacecraft
and snap a picture.
What he wrote about this picture was
already read to you by [Keeran].
There is an urgency.
Humanity - we live in a tiny, tiny
dot in the middle of nowhere.
I'm not sure whether you
can see where earth is
so I'm just going to highlight it for you.
Yeah, that's Earth.
That's it. And this is zoomed in.
This is a crappy pixellated picture.
We are all living on this planet, and
we are so self-focused, we are
always constantly looking inwards,
and we are so jaded by what
is going around in the world
that we don't feel that we have a
say in what is going on around us.
Civilization is moving on, and we feel that
we don't have something to say about it.
And I think that every person
needs to be awakened to this.
So this is my dream.
Going back to the theme of today.
To transform education as it is today,
so that it awakens more people on earth to
participate in the human journey.
Take home: You can make sense of the world.
Don't be a monkey.
This is especially important
to the youth of today,
when it reaches your turn to
be where adults are today
please remember to get out of the way, so that
they can figure things out for themselves.
Thank you.
