I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. It's back to school time, which makes today's archive talk particularly timely. The paradox, we don't know what the future looks like at all, and yet educators have to prepare students for it. So in his TED 2006 talk, the author and educator Sir Ken Robinson proposes a different

approach to prepare our kids by making sure we aren't educating away their creativity. We're posting

this talk today because Sir Ken passed away last week. All of us at TED remain grateful for the

humor, generosity of spirit, and deeply inspiring thinking

he's brought to the world over the years. This is our most viewed talk of all time, and one of the

first six TED talks that we ever released. Please enjoy. I have an interest in education. Actually,

what I find is everybody has an interest in education, don't you?

I find it's very interesting.

If you're at a dinner party and you say you work in education.

Actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.

If you work in education, you're not asked. And you'll never ask back, curiously. That's a...

But if you are, and you say to somebody, they say, what do you do? And you say, you work in education,

you can see the blood run from their face. They're thinking, oh my God, you know, why me? It's my one night out all week. But if you ask people about their education,

they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people.

Am I right? Like religion and money and other things.

So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do.

We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp.

If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065.

Nobody has a clue what the world will look like in five years' time,

and yet we're meant to be educating them for it.

So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.

And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless,

...