I have just come across this beautiful and sensible speech made by Shakira and, as public education is going through such a hard situation in Spain, I would like to share with you.
Thank you Oxford, and thank you Oxford Union.
It is truly an honor and a privilege to be here today and that you have afforded me this opportunity to speak to you.
I must confess, I am somewhat mystified as to why you are here. I won’t be singing… and there won’t be any hipshaking.
So, how do I, a girl from Barranquilla, Colombia come to occupy the same stage as Newton and Churchill? Lord knows I’m no Mother Teresa, but here I am, nonetheless.
I realize that the one point of view from which I can depart is that of an artist. After all, it is who I am. We artists depend on our imaginations.
When I first learned I was coming, I thought about the past and I imagined the future. From your minds, ideas will sprout that will give new shape to the world. I cannot help but fast-forward to what the world will be like in 50 years. What will be happening? Who will we be? How will we live? What challenges can we overcome?
I have a fantasy about this future that I want to share with you.
Let me put it this way, if civilization were a car, we would have been cruising at 20 miles per hour for millions of years only to hit light speed in the last hundred.
What made us accelerate so quickly recently and how can we continue this pace? There is only one explanation: the democratization of education.
Think about it: just recently a fossil was discovered in Africa, the oldest human fossil at over four million years. Our ancestors may have been slightly smaller than they are now but not significantly so particularly if you compare them to me since I am 5’ 3”….well ok 5’2”).
From then to now, humans learned, slowly but surely, the tools and methods they needed to survive and thrive in what would become modern civilization. We learned how to walk, then run, then dance; we learned to grow our food, to store our food, to share our food; we learned the basics of commerce, and mathematics; we learned to work with tools, and fight with tools, and write with language, and fight with language. We learned how to harness fire, and harness horses, and harness the power of the wind and the sun.
All before we got here.
Over 4 million years.
We know that in the Middle Ages, education was reserved by, and for, a few, a handful of people with access to the precious resources of knowledge -- writing, reading, libraries. The rest of the population, well, they weren’t so lucky; they lived unexamined lives, carting stone and wood from one place to another, unable to participate in intellectual conversation.
No doubt that intellectual elite felt safe and secure in restricting knowledge and information -- believing, as they did, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But what they didn’t appreciate was that hoarding knowledge was far more dangerous.
There was no critical mass of thought that allowed humanity to truly advance, to rescue them from plague, to invent the vaccines that would extend their lives, to devise the sociological models that would allow society to flourish.
These civilizations rose and fell and rose again; but in comparison to the present, the pace of development was incredibly slow… like a river one must stare at, with unbroken concentration to detect the movement of the current.
But what they didn’t anticipate was the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and later the Industrial Revolution! Suddenly, a middle class emerged, and everywhere people began to engage with each other, sharing their knowledge -- and instead of having a few thousand people thinking for everyone, there were millions of readers, writers, creators, artists, academics, teachers and students, becoming a true collective of shared resources, an ongoing, endless exchange of our most vital resource: information.
But then, a hundred years or so ago, we really picked up the pace. Suddenly, we pushed down hard on the accelerator. Suddenly, we were aboard a space shuttle, speeding through the sky, piercing the boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere, traveling thousands of miles to the moon, staking a flag on its surface, and sharing that breathtaking moment with the rest of the world through a device known as the television. Thank God for Televisions…
How could we moved so quickly?
It shouldn’t be surprising, really. The human race, after all, has only one collective conscience. We exist in a vast ocean, but we are the school of fish that moves in concert, zigzagging from left to right, together, in unison. Education is how we communicate, how we coordinate, how we cooperate.
What we know now that they didn’t know then is that all minds form one common intellect. The more people share knowledge the stronger the knowledge base grows, just as a burning fire grows when stoked by an increasing amount of wood.
We have achieved so much and we owe it to one basic but transformational concept.
The democratization of education
It is the airplane that brought me to England, the medicine that allows grandparents to meet their grandchildren, the philosophy that expands our individual liberties, and the technology that sent us to the moon.
I do not subscribe to the idea that the older days were better days. I strongly believe that the best is yet to come, with universal access to education to feed our collective intelligence, with our commitment to meet and organize in places like this, among students like you – we could be so close to creating a network of intellects, an enormous think tank devoted to sharing the best ideas and inspiring each other to keep learning, keep informing, and keep advancing our world. And finding solutions to our common issues. Wouldn’t that be great?
We have evolved so far in the course of human history, with so many technological advances in just the past century, how will we evolve in the next ten tears, or twenty years, or fifty years – now that we know that the world has shrunk and has become just one big neighborhood.
You are the architects of change. So tell me, how many things that seem inconceivable today will be obvious tomorrow? How long will man live? How will society be structured? Will we still be organized in couples? In communities? Governed by governments, led by presidents and prime ministers? Will we be able to breathe underwater? Will we eat junk food without gaining weight? I’d like that. Will Nike invent a pair of sneakers that will allow us to fly like Harry Potter?
Like John Locke, I am too impatient to wait. He says it, I sing it: “Why wait for later; I’m not a waiter.” I like to make things happen. (by the way, that ‘s from a song on my new album SHE WOLF in stores now). Anyways…
Nine years ago, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, leaders from around the world made a pledge to transform the world so that every child would have access to a primary school by the year 2015. That is just over five years from now. Sadly, their actions have not met their promises. Sadly, at the current pace of change, we won’t have universal access to education in a hundred years, let alone five. That is unacceptable.
Especially, when the world has the resources to feed itself several times over, then, why are children starving? Latin America, alone has 3 times the necessary abundance to feed it’s own population.
These children can’t wait a hundred more years.
They need us to cure a child with Leukemia or AIDS with a simple pill or a breakthrough vaccine. We need to live in a world in which together, we can find a solution to global warming so we don’t have to worry every single time a storm begins to form on the horizon. We need to find new ways to distribute food so no child goes to bed hungry.
And I know that education is our ticket.
How do I know? Because I’ve seen it.
I was born and raised in a country marked by civil conflict, social strife and inequality. Growing up in the developing world, where education is perceived as a luxury and not as right; where children beg for an education and parents are desperate to provide it; where if one is born poor, one is destined to do die poor.
But the good news, is that there is an exit strategy to break the cycle of poverty in which millions are trapped because of lack of access to education. From the moment I turned 18, I decided to establish my own foundation in Colombia. And since then we have been working on providing high quality education, nutrition for children and occupational training for their parents, building schools that also work as community centers for families that have been displaced by violence that have lost everything they had.
We found the way to keep kids in school and maintain parents involvement in their children’s education. Providing nutritious meals in schools we have decreased the number of dropouts and we have eradicated malnutrition among our students.
So we know that creating comprehensive models of education in areas where the population is vulnerable to extreme poverty and conflict, transforms the minds and the lives of not only children but entire communities. And it works. Believe me, it works.
I’m still a student on all these issues, but I’ve come to learn that there are ways to change this. So no government can say that the challenge of bringing education to every child is an impossible task. Because we know how to enroll all those 75 million kids who don’t have access to any kind of primary education, by:
Abolishing school fee’s
Hiring quality teachers
Providing uniforms and textbooks to children
And providing most importantly food, because no kid can learn on an empty stomach and because we’ve proven that it becomes the best incentive for parents to send their kids to school and reduce child labor.
Now I want to be clear about this, this isn’t about charity. This is about investing in human potential. From an ethical point of view, from a moral point of view, it accomplishes a purpose. But also from an economic point of view, this could bring enormous benefits to all mankind. Universal education is the key to global security and economic growth.
Security
We all want safer nations. And in a world where weak states are often a haven for violent extremists, getting more children into school can dramatically help reduce the risk of instability and lay the groundwork for more stable democratic political systems to emerge. A child who lives in extreme poverty away from school is 10 times more likely to be recruited by a militant group then one who is receiving an education. For instance in Colombia we have kids in our schools who were destined to be a part of the drug trafficking business or recruited by guerrillas, today, as we speak they are going to college and like you, are graduating soon. So yes, education promotes peace and stability worldwide. Isn’t that what we all want?
Economic Growth
On the other hand, education helps catalyze economic growth.
One single year of primary education invested means a 10 to 20% increase in wages in their adult life. For every dollar invested in early childhood development programs, that same child will give back 17. So yeah, education also boosts economic growth.
So I, for one, would definitely like to go faster. I want to go faster because, with so many challenges, faster is better. I want to go faster because faster is more just.
And they need us to do it all tomorrow. I say: let’s do it today.
So I look to you to help us go faster. I look to you to foster -- no, more than that, to become -- the network of collaborative minds that can stimulate the evolution of human understanding. I look to you to press down on that accelerator so that in fifty years, your children will look back and say:
“A long time ago, people could not formulate an efficient form of distribution of food to eliminate starvation and hunger, despite the technological advances of the time and the excess of food. But then they began to incorporate millions and millions of children in the web of knowledge -- because they began to realize that the democratization of education is the engine that propels the world.”
That is how I want the youth of 2060 to see us. That our mission for global peace consisted of sending 30,000 educators to Afghanistan, not 30,000 soldiers. That in 2010, world education became more important than world domination.
Because only education will accelerate our evolution.
Only by investing in our children, by tapping their potential that has remained untapped for too long, can they one day cure our diseases, or bring us to Mars, or secure us peace here on earth.
Because, it bears repeating, we are one world.
One civilization.
One conscience.
One engine.
One destiny.
And so, if I have just one more thought to offer you and to add to our one collective conscience here today, it is this:
Education for all.
John Locke, who I believe was one of yours, once said, “the only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, and the earlier the better.” So yeah, the earlier the better. There is no time to waste. It is you who are in the driver’s seat. It is your foot on the accelerator.
And please, step on it.
Thank you very much. This has been a true honor.
It is truly an honor and a privilege to be here today and that you have afforded me this opportunity to speak to you.
I must confess, I am somewhat mystified as to why you are here. I won’t be singing… and there won’t be any hipshaking.
So, how do I, a girl from Barranquilla, Colombia come to occupy the same stage as Newton and Churchill? Lord knows I’m no Mother Teresa, but here I am, nonetheless.
I realize that the one point of view from which I can depart is that of an artist. After all, it is who I am. We artists depend on our imaginations.
When I first learned I was coming, I thought about the past and I imagined the future. From your minds, ideas will sprout that will give new shape to the world. I cannot help but fast-forward to what the world will be like in 50 years. What will be happening? Who will we be? How will we live? What challenges can we overcome?
I have a fantasy about this future that I want to share with you.
Let me put it this way, if civilization were a car, we would have been cruising at 20 miles per hour for millions of years only to hit light speed in the last hundred.
What made us accelerate so quickly recently and how can we continue this pace? There is only one explanation: the democratization of education.
Think about it: just recently a fossil was discovered in Africa, the oldest human fossil at over four million years. Our ancestors may have been slightly smaller than they are now but not significantly so particularly if you compare them to me since I am 5’ 3”….well ok 5’2”).
From then to now, humans learned, slowly but surely, the tools and methods they needed to survive and thrive in what would become modern civilization. We learned how to walk, then run, then dance; we learned to grow our food, to store our food, to share our food; we learned the basics of commerce, and mathematics; we learned to work with tools, and fight with tools, and write with language, and fight with language. We learned how to harness fire, and harness horses, and harness the power of the wind and the sun.
All before we got here.
Over 4 million years.
We know that in the Middle Ages, education was reserved by, and for, a few, a handful of people with access to the precious resources of knowledge -- writing, reading, libraries. The rest of the population, well, they weren’t so lucky; they lived unexamined lives, carting stone and wood from one place to another, unable to participate in intellectual conversation.
No doubt that intellectual elite felt safe and secure in restricting knowledge and information -- believing, as they did, that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. But what they didn’t appreciate was that hoarding knowledge was far more dangerous.
There was no critical mass of thought that allowed humanity to truly advance, to rescue them from plague, to invent the vaccines that would extend their lives, to devise the sociological models that would allow society to flourish.
These civilizations rose and fell and rose again; but in comparison to the present, the pace of development was incredibly slow… like a river one must stare at, with unbroken concentration to detect the movement of the current.
But what they didn’t anticipate was the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and later the Industrial Revolution! Suddenly, a middle class emerged, and everywhere people began to engage with each other, sharing their knowledge -- and instead of having a few thousand people thinking for everyone, there were millions of readers, writers, creators, artists, academics, teachers and students, becoming a true collective of shared resources, an ongoing, endless exchange of our most vital resource: information.
But then, a hundred years or so ago, we really picked up the pace. Suddenly, we pushed down hard on the accelerator. Suddenly, we were aboard a space shuttle, speeding through the sky, piercing the boundaries of the earth’s atmosphere, traveling thousands of miles to the moon, staking a flag on its surface, and sharing that breathtaking moment with the rest of the world through a device known as the television. Thank God for Televisions…
How could we moved so quickly?
It shouldn’t be surprising, really. The human race, after all, has only one collective conscience. We exist in a vast ocean, but we are the school of fish that moves in concert, zigzagging from left to right, together, in unison. Education is how we communicate, how we coordinate, how we cooperate.
What we know now that they didn’t know then is that all minds form one common intellect. The more people share knowledge the stronger the knowledge base grows, just as a burning fire grows when stoked by an increasing amount of wood.
We have achieved so much and we owe it to one basic but transformational concept.
The democratization of education
It is the airplane that brought me to England, the medicine that allows grandparents to meet their grandchildren, the philosophy that expands our individual liberties, and the technology that sent us to the moon.
I do not subscribe to the idea that the older days were better days. I strongly believe that the best is yet to come, with universal access to education to feed our collective intelligence, with our commitment to meet and organize in places like this, among students like you – we could be so close to creating a network of intellects, an enormous think tank devoted to sharing the best ideas and inspiring each other to keep learning, keep informing, and keep advancing our world. And finding solutions to our common issues. Wouldn’t that be great?
We have evolved so far in the course of human history, with so many technological advances in just the past century, how will we evolve in the next ten tears, or twenty years, or fifty years – now that we know that the world has shrunk and has become just one big neighborhood.
You are the architects of change. So tell me, how many things that seem inconceivable today will be obvious tomorrow? How long will man live? How will society be structured? Will we still be organized in couples? In communities? Governed by governments, led by presidents and prime ministers? Will we be able to breathe underwater? Will we eat junk food without gaining weight? I’d like that. Will Nike invent a pair of sneakers that will allow us to fly like Harry Potter?
Like John Locke, I am too impatient to wait. He says it, I sing it: “Why wait for later; I’m not a waiter.” I like to make things happen. (by the way, that ‘s from a song on my new album SHE WOLF in stores now). Anyways…
Nine years ago, as part of the Millennium Development Goals, leaders from around the world made a pledge to transform the world so that every child would have access to a primary school by the year 2015. That is just over five years from now. Sadly, their actions have not met their promises. Sadly, at the current pace of change, we won’t have universal access to education in a hundred years, let alone five. That is unacceptable.
Especially, when the world has the resources to feed itself several times over, then, why are children starving? Latin America, alone has 3 times the necessary abundance to feed it’s own population.
These children can’t wait a hundred more years.
They need us to cure a child with Leukemia or AIDS with a simple pill or a breakthrough vaccine. We need to live in a world in which together, we can find a solution to global warming so we don’t have to worry every single time a storm begins to form on the horizon. We need to find new ways to distribute food so no child goes to bed hungry.
And I know that education is our ticket.
How do I know? Because I’ve seen it.
I was born and raised in a country marked by civil conflict, social strife and inequality. Growing up in the developing world, where education is perceived as a luxury and not as right; where children beg for an education and parents are desperate to provide it; where if one is born poor, one is destined to do die poor.
But the good news, is that there is an exit strategy to break the cycle of poverty in which millions are trapped because of lack of access to education. From the moment I turned 18, I decided to establish my own foundation in Colombia. And since then we have been working on providing high quality education, nutrition for children and occupational training for their parents, building schools that also work as community centers for families that have been displaced by violence that have lost everything they had.
We found the way to keep kids in school and maintain parents involvement in their children’s education. Providing nutritious meals in schools we have decreased the number of dropouts and we have eradicated malnutrition among our students.
So we know that creating comprehensive models of education in areas where the population is vulnerable to extreme poverty and conflict, transforms the minds and the lives of not only children but entire communities. And it works. Believe me, it works.
I’m still a student on all these issues, but I’ve come to learn that there are ways to change this. So no government can say that the challenge of bringing education to every child is an impossible task. Because we know how to enroll all those 75 million kids who don’t have access to any kind of primary education, by:
Abolishing school fee’s
Hiring quality teachers
Providing uniforms and textbooks to children
And providing most importantly food, because no kid can learn on an empty stomach and because we’ve proven that it becomes the best incentive for parents to send their kids to school and reduce child labor.
Now I want to be clear about this, this isn’t about charity. This is about investing in human potential. From an ethical point of view, from a moral point of view, it accomplishes a purpose. But also from an economic point of view, this could bring enormous benefits to all mankind. Universal education is the key to global security and economic growth.
Security
We all want safer nations. And in a world where weak states are often a haven for violent extremists, getting more children into school can dramatically help reduce the risk of instability and lay the groundwork for more stable democratic political systems to emerge. A child who lives in extreme poverty away from school is 10 times more likely to be recruited by a militant group then one who is receiving an education. For instance in Colombia we have kids in our schools who were destined to be a part of the drug trafficking business or recruited by guerrillas, today, as we speak they are going to college and like you, are graduating soon. So yes, education promotes peace and stability worldwide. Isn’t that what we all want?
Economic Growth
On the other hand, education helps catalyze economic growth.
One single year of primary education invested means a 10 to 20% increase in wages in their adult life. For every dollar invested in early childhood development programs, that same child will give back 17. So yeah, education also boosts economic growth.
So I, for one, would definitely like to go faster. I want to go faster because, with so many challenges, faster is better. I want to go faster because faster is more just.
And they need us to do it all tomorrow. I say: let’s do it today.
So I look to you to help us go faster. I look to you to foster -- no, more than that, to become -- the network of collaborative minds that can stimulate the evolution of human understanding. I look to you to press down on that accelerator so that in fifty years, your children will look back and say:
“A long time ago, people could not formulate an efficient form of distribution of food to eliminate starvation and hunger, despite the technological advances of the time and the excess of food. But then they began to incorporate millions and millions of children in the web of knowledge -- because they began to realize that the democratization of education is the engine that propels the world.”
That is how I want the youth of 2060 to see us. That our mission for global peace consisted of sending 30,000 educators to Afghanistan, not 30,000 soldiers. That in 2010, world education became more important than world domination.
Because only education will accelerate our evolution.
Only by investing in our children, by tapping their potential that has remained untapped for too long, can they one day cure our diseases, or bring us to Mars, or secure us peace here on earth.
Because, it bears repeating, we are one world.
One civilization.
One conscience.
One engine.
One destiny.
And so, if I have just one more thought to offer you and to add to our one collective conscience here today, it is this:
Education for all.
John Locke, who I believe was one of yours, once said, “the only fence against the world is a thorough knowledge of it, and the earlier the better.” So yeah, the earlier the better. There is no time to waste. It is you who are in the driver’s seat. It is your foot on the accelerator.
And please, step on it.
Thank you very much. This has been a true honor.
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