Release the power of our young people!

If our children are only expected to know that which school and society wants us to know, then curiosity and creativity will cease and even the instance of innovations and entrepreneurs. This was the message of ‘guru’ Richard Gerver when Week 45 was inaugurated.

The first principal speaker up to bat during the intensive Week 45 was Richard Gerver, once selected as “School Head Teacher of the Year” in Great Britain, one-time adviser on education issues to Tony Blair, and currently travelling and lecturing as a ‘guru’ within the field. It’s something that provides him with new, exciting experiences.

“A year ago today I was speaking in front of 6,500 people in Pakistan. Before me, the country’s prime minister spoke, surrounded by all his security staff. The organiser was a national private, secular school with a total of 150,000 students. Suicide bombers are a part of daily life in the school environment. But the remarkable thing is, if all those students came here to Sweden or to my country, they’d push all the competition aside! What is happening over there that we can learn from?”

For years, Gerver has worked in some of the more vulnerable school environments in England, and he argues that an increasing number of students feel that they don’t have control over their lives, let alone their education.

“Yet when we call attention to the problem, we often get a response from our politicians that we need to be more creative. The problem is that everyone has different ideas about what is creative and what spurs development. In the world’s most successful schools, the focus now is on collaboration and building on curiosity, but in England, for example, we’re returning more to memorisation, which occurs in isolation; each and every student must learn on their own. Helping each other is cheating.”

Gerver’s own philosophy builds heavily on the sentence “Live a little, learn a little, laugh a lot”.

“Why does constant learning have to be all that important? Why do some people advocate ‘hard work’ in schools to stay competitive? Children don’t go to school to prepare for adulthood through hard work. They’re curious, and want to learn things. It’s natural for children.”

The most successful businesses in the future, according to Gerver, will be those that continually challenge their employees to break the patterns, question things, and think in new ways. For example companies such as Apple under Steve Jobs, or Google, or Pixar. Simply put: take risks.

“The big challenge is that when we get older, we become less curious and more afraid of making mistakes or taking the risk of learning something new. You only learn something new when you’re on unfamiliar ground, so taking risks should be rewarded.”