The Radical Reboot Education Needs | Richard Gerver x Shekhar Natarajan

Tomorrow, Today

Richard Gerver shares his transformative journey from childhood trauma and stammering to becoming a leading educator, emphasizing the power of curiosity, mistakes, and human connection in reimagining education. His story

Key takeaways

• Stammering taught Gerver empathy and resilience

Transcript preview

In order to feel in control of your life, you have to be capable and prepared to learn. In the future, you should demonstrate intelligence with innocent. You learn nothing new by getting something right. for funies. If we don't change the education system we will elegantly continue to prepare people for a world but no longer exist. Welcome to another episode of tomorrow today with Sheker Naturajan. It's my incredible honor to have like the guy that I really like admired the most like phenomenal and his name is like phenomenal and his name is Richard Gerver. He's an author, an educator, he's an intellectual advisor to the Lai Lama, Obama, Eric Schmidt, you name it, like Wozniac, he's won like UNESCO Award, Global Guru's 30 Award. Yeah, I don't know, like, it seems very interesting, but it's like fascinating. And, but it's like fascinating. But the most important contraband. that I personally like and that we were actually recognized for is a national teacher like Achievement Award. I think that's where your journey started in life. Amazing, amazing, amazing individual. Like he's like what I call an embodiment of what like human potential is and his story is going to unravel as we talk today. So it's my incredible honor to have you here and I'm sure the the guests that would really love the conversation. I love your energy. I love the way you talk. It's fascinating and I think like your fifth book is coming out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think I said to you before we started, I never thought I'd write one book. Then when I wrote one book I thought I'd never write another book. And now I'm just finishing off my fifth book, which is all about curiosity and how I believe human curiosity, if we reignite it can be a profound found difference to the way human beings view the world of today and tomorrow, interact with it and feel more constructive and positive about it. So yeah, I can't wait for that to birth into the world, yeah, in the next few months. Very good, very good. Like, sir, I look forward to it and I'll be sharing for you and I'll be rooting for you and I'll be posting about your book all you love. So let's get like to the beginnings. So let's get to the beginnings the beginnings. A lot of people don't know, like you're a very confident talker right now, like you know, but not so much the case. You know, so like it take me back to the early days of your life, the trauma that like actually that you went through, you know, the challenges you had with stammer, how you overcame that and we, I know I want to unpack it like, you know, in great detail. we actually get into like how we want to education. Sure. I think and I think by the way those things are linked. So you know I grew up in what people on the surface would consider to be a very middle class English middle class family of immigrant descent from Eastern Europe. So my great-great grandparents were from Poland and Russia. You can trace my family. all the way back actually to various parts of Europe but also to Portugal and Spain and you know I come from a Jewish background so of course that Jewish journey comes from all over the world actually and so fascinating I've traced relatives back to Portugal in the 1600s but yeah so by the time I came along it was kind of the you know the dream you're an immigrant family who have made it into the middle class A profound thing for my grandfather in particular and I think this speaks often true of immigrant families into other countries is you want to become part of the society in which you've chosen as your home and in England one of the ways you would do that and kind of demark that you'd become successful would be to be able to afford a private education and so not because they were wealthy but they sacrificed everything they sent me to a private school. So there I am a middle class child in a relatively affluent English home going to a private school in the UK. And around the time of my ninth birthday, disaster hit if you like, although I think the rumblings have been there, but as a young child you don't detect them until that last minute. My parents went through a horrifically messy traumatic breakup, break up and consequently divorce and to think back. So this is in the mid to late 70s, 1970s. And of course, although tragically today, family breakdown is much more of a common occurrence and socially more acceptable in the 70s in English middle class society, the idea that your parents would separate and divorce was still a powerful taboo. I suppose a shyish but perfectly put together kid and experienced that trauma and my mother fought so hard to try and protect my brother and I from it but you can't help what you go through I ended up with two traits for a nine-year-old child which were mortifying one was a nervous stammer as you mentioned and the other was I started wetting the bed which for you can't imagine a nine-year-old boy is traumatic and so those things both started to happen to me. So I was... How did that trauma come about? What was the reason for the trauma? I think from my point of view, there was so many conflicting things going on at home. Again, my mother tried so hard to protect us from what was happening, but the stress, the anger, the rouse, my parents, my father in particular, projecting some of that anger and frustration onto me as his first-born... child, those things all paid apart in that trauma evolving. And also, as I said, you know, violence or there was just like a... There was more abuse. There was, there were moments of violence, but I wouldn't describe it as a violent, you know, it wasn't dominated by violence, but there was certainly abuse, emotional abuse of quite a high level. And also then of course you're in an environment which is quite status-minded, you know, private schools in the UK, you know, private schools in the UK, are quite status-minded places and the trauma of having to go through that with your friends and your friends parents seeing this thing as a taboo. As I say, people forget that today family trauma breakdown is kind of relatively common, right? But in those days it wasn't. So all of that as a nine-year-old child living with what was going on at home, seeing the emotional devastation, particularly to my mother. in our household and the emotional trauma of all of that together with I think I also grew up very short-sighted now this may seem unrelated but I think it is related so I had very thick glasses again before the technology that now is out there for pun me either contact lenses or to thin the lenses on glasses I had very thick glasses again before the technology that now is out there for pun me either contact lenses I had very thick like we described them as milk bottles glasses, right? Milk bottle glasses. And so I was already a kid that was very self-conscious because my, I marked myself out as different from a lot of my, my friends. And I think this layer of trauma just added to that anxiety at a time, you know, 9, 10, 11, you're just beginning, the hormones are just starting to play a part in your existence and I think all of those things profoundly came together. And my response was to so incredibly uncertain of myself and I'm sure that that was where the stammer that the speech impediment came from and the bedwetting and all of those things. I was always a kid that was desperate to please. I always wanted to be that child that made everybody else happy and I think the part of the trauma for me came in the powerlessness which I think has become a theme of what I've tried to fight against not just my life but for other people's lives as well. That sense of disenfranchisement of powerlessness as a child, not being able to make things okay, not being able to make life happy. All of that added to the complexity of my personal sense of a value and purpose as a young child, which led to those things. And it was in that period of time, without realizing that my path would take me to education. extraordinary educator and extraordinary teacher. Because amidst all of this, there was one teacher, one educator who really took an interest in me at a time where I was being seen as the pariah to most, you know, other kids didn't really want to play with me because I just wasn't cool at the time and I was, you know, and their parents clearly were having issues like in those days that societal perception. Oh my god if her husband's walked out on her, she'll be after our husband, she'll be after our husband's so this teacher took a real interest in me and was very supportive to my mother actually in terms of just trying to be there as a as a person who could shine light and he was a drama and he was a drama and English teacher and so drama was his passion and he was he was a drama and English teacher and so drama was his passion and he was putting on his he was putting on the school play and he was which you would say was completely counterintuitive. Because he turned with a new speech impediment and he took the aside and he said, get on the stage. I think you should take a part in the play. And I was like, are you mad? And he went no because and his belief was. And again in those days we knew a lot less about psychology and mental behaviors than we do today. And he said, I think that if you were to speak somebody else's lines, you might be okay. And it was an extraordinary thing because there was this shy boy with a speech impediment and I will never forget getting up on the stage being in a play that he wrote himself. What age was it? So this was nine, ten years old and and... Right when you had the trauma. Yeah, I was just to... during that period because he felt that was how he could help me because what he could see, really low self-esteem, really low sense of value and purpose. And I think he felt very passionately that maybe he could see something in me anyway, but he also felt very passionately that if I could learn to inhabit somebody else's character, that if I could speak somebody else's lines, it might be a route back both for me in terms of raising my self-esteem, because I think at that point I wasn't particularly sporty, I wasn't academic, I was very, I was just Mr. Average, you know. I was Tragically, like 90% of the kids in our education system globally are made to feel most of the time. Mr. and Mrs. average, we're just average, right? And that's where I was in the lower end of the kind of average, gray mass. Anyway, I got up on stage, I did the play, I loved it. Like, it was like a cathartic moment, it was like an epiphany. It was like, oh my, how did I not know? This is, you know, you know, it was, it was a, on of fear and nervousness and excitement and seeing a group of people look at me. How many people were sitting in the... I suppose we did the play for three nights and maybe there were a hundred, hundred and fifty people, parents and children and staff and families over three nights and I loved it and it really had a significant impact on my recovery, to a clumsy word, but that that route back, it gave me a sense of purpose, suddenly other children were coming up to me going, you were amazing, you were really good. And of course, I've not heard that forever, probably, and certainly it was the kind of reinforcement I needed at the time. I didn't stutter and stammer on stage because I wasn't me, I was playing. Exactly. And so that had a profound impact on me. And I'm sure all of that experience as we talked through it has had a profound impact on. And so that had a profound impact on. And so that had a, my life story since. Yeah. So what did Stammer take away from you? And what did that memorizing someone else's line give it back to you? I think what the stammer did, which is interesting, I don't know if I've described it as take it away from me. I think it almost gave me an excuse not to have to communicate with other people at a time where I wanted to shrink into my shell and be invisible. and I think that's an experience that so many of us feel in our lives at any age actually when we're going through trauma or difficulty or challenge that's yeah or do exactly which we now see in a much more sophisticated way is that idea that actually if I shrink away and become invisible the world I can leave the world out here somewhere and I was increasingly in that space so whether the stammer was the reason or whether it was almost the symptom it was it was it was a great to withdraw and not to suddenly be asked a question in class or not to... So I think that certainly was that. The speaking the other lines on a stage, I think I had become so vulnerable in terms of all I saw were my weaknesses, my thick glasses, I had big curly hair which was like all over the place which my grandma loved but she was the only human being on the planet that loved my curly hair. because I just was thin and gangly and awkward and and then I had the emotional trauma which had been amplified by what was happening at home and the fact that I was almost undermined deliberately by my father in so for example all the photos of me with my father taken before the breakup of their marriage I don't have my glasses on now when I say I'm severely short-sighted I can't see further than there without it going profound blurry, right? So can you imagine as a child being told to take your glasses off every time you're in a picture and what that does to you psychologically? So all of those things had happened, but then suddenly I'm on a stage and I'm playing a character in another costume and my hair's worn differently and I'm using other lines. First of all, it was great not to be in my skin and to be in somebody else's skin. And secondly that immediacy of realizing I was good at this, you know. one of the great tragedies for so many. So you did not want to play your character but you wanted to play someone. Exactly. And I, but I think, you know, in some ways when I look back on that, again, I think it's had a profound impact on my life because I think that tragedy for so many of, and I'm using the term to be deliberately provocative, the average kids, right, the gray mass, is that very rarely do you get the luck or opportunity. to find at a young age, particularly, something that just makes your heart beat faster and that you connect to and you feel has raised your sense of value and purpose. You know, a theme through so many things I think that I'm sure you do, you've experienced, we all talk about, is that moment in your life where you find a value, that you feel of value to something or somebody, that you find a body, that you feel of value to something or somebody, that you find a sense of purpose where you connect something in you that says actually my heart's beating faster now I can see what I want to do what I want to be what I want to become well I hadn't had that and probably would never have had that until that teacher identified drama as a possible route through phenomenal story phenomenal story it's public knowledge and I talk a lot about this Richard that my mother stood in front of the head minister's office for 365 days because I both my brothers went to a Jesuit school right like you know obviously like we were colonized all the top schools were Jesuit schools and so my mother used to work in a newspaper company just rolling up papers right so the guy in the morning deliver the papers every day on the cycle like she should like she'd go in the evening sit there like you know till midnight grab them and then let it go so because she worked there like one of the reporters who used to come because all the reporters actually get the journalism done like and like you know during the day and then they write reports in the night so she knew a reporter and the reporters uncle was a head minister okay so both my brothers like got in because they knew the reporter Then when I showed up they said, oh, like, you know, like, they asked me first what is this color? I said like it's blue. It was gray actually and I flunked. That's number one. But number two, like, you know, they they wanted like us to change religion Before we got admitted because like I come from slums, you know, like we are easy targets Yeah, and my mother said no, no, no, like I believe in God I also go to the church, I go to like, you know, I go to a temple like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, like, she would admit my son but like I think it's it's not fair for you to say that so she stood for a year and she fought and she finally got me in okay and I was a very playful kid like till a probably my sixth grade I would run around I would like I would do all kinds of like you know I would like never like very serious about studies never and then I flunked English 35, you know, you fast. If you get anything less than 35 or 100, like you failed. And then you have like the gradients, like you know, if you if you're like 90 plus your A like and so on and so forth again. So so my mother walks in, like she goes to the parentage meeting. She brings the report card, throws it at me. standing in front of the head minister's office for you and like you embarrassed the hell of right and that's it so I got the message and since then I like you know there are some of these incidents in your life which transformed so then I became who I didn't know who I was till then like you know I was I always thought like why studies who cares what happens I'll play right like you know I was I was I was a kid in the slum like you know like I wanted to be another I was I was I was I always thought I was a kid in a slum. Like I never understood the sacrifice of my mom. And that was also the first time I knew about the sacrifice of my wrong. Till then I didn't even know, like I was a kid like five years old, they were trying to send you off to school because a kid in the slum would pick up the wrong things. So my parents thought like, you know, we should never sit in the house, we should always go to the school. Like that's the place where you can develop intellectually. So some of these incidents in life are so it's very subtle right this guy showing up in the teacher showing up in your life and like you know making making you do something that like you know you thought was not so great but like you know it completely transform in your life and I we're all like we as humans we all experience some of these things in our lives and what is remarkable about your story is you know it takes a lot of courage for what you have done where you could have simply said no I cannot do that. Right? But like somehow you saw the good and what was getting presented and you took the opportunity to do that. Do you think also though that sometimes, because listening to your story which is profound too, right, and the background you came from which was different from mine but in some ways similar, this is the thing, right? Trauma is like everyone is. And here's the thing. When that teacher suggested go on stage. I had nothing to lose because I had no self-esteem I had no sense of external value my family was falling apart I was seeing as seeing myself as a victim right so actually taking that risk it's a bit like being a gambler right when you start with one dollar right you can put the dollar on a bet because the worst that is gonna happen you lose a dollar right then you have let's say you've built a hundred thousand dollars that suddenly becomes significant right you're, the innovation flows because you're, there's only one way to go, right? When you've got a successful business and you've got stakeholders and investors and employees and that whole litany of responsibility, the taking a risk becomes much more challenging. And I wonder whether actually, you know, I look back on my life and one of the things I often used to say to students was, don't ever see a moment of adversity is a bad thing. because if you learn from it, respond from it and it changes you for the better, having that moment of adversity in your life, you will look back on and realize was a profound moment of positivity. And I wonder whether in both of our cases, for different reasons, you know, if I'd been the popular kid in school that all the other kids thought was the cooler thing, I would never have taken the risk. I would never have done it because I wouldn't have wanted to look bad. And I just wonder sometimes, whether actually adversity adversity, adversity, early on in our lives helps to mold us into more entrepreneurial, more adventurous, more creative, more curious people than the lives we perversely look at and go, oh look at how lucky they are. And whether actually we need to recast that narrative for people, particularly young people, and say, actually you know those moments where it didn't go the way you thought, that where the sliding door went the wrong way for you? Actually, if we can coach people in that moment, if we can help not. them understand that that is a moment of profound opportunity instead of just the immediate emotional reflex of, oh my God, this is a bad thing, then actually I wonder whether we can transform or help people transform themselves more than they do. And in a culture where so many people now feel like victims of circumstance, victims of situation, victims of somebody else is making, victims of a disaster, and I'm not diminishing. some of that stuff. I do wonder whether we need to teach adversity as a constructive part of human narrative. Absolutely, absolutely. Like, you know, like, there's so many times in my life, like, I went to United States with $34 in my pocket. And I had the same attitude. I said, like, you know, what do I have to lose? Then like, you know, like my father died in 2005, like I had to go back and, you know, very painful story of unplugging them and other, And then I came back to the United States with $50 and said like, oh great like you know and I did not have a house to do I did not have a place to live because I was gone for two months and I came back all my stuff was like lying in the garage I had to pick all of that I put in the car I was driving and I like I did not break down as much after my dad passed away because I was trying to be strong for my mom but I did like you know in a rest area I said this is great I sleep in my car I'll figure out like for the next two weeks like you know because I had a job it's not that I didn't have a job but I had to go come back from the family leave and then get reinstated and then start working and then start making money so it was a two like I knew like the suffering is going to be two weeks yeah right but it's gonna be hell but I said you know what like I've lived in 34 I can live in 50 so what do I've Yeah, I always take that, like I use this phrase all the time with my team. Yeah, that's the common phrase, like if you went and asked my team, every company I worked, what do you have to lose? Yeah, let's go try it. And so I think that sense of false comfort that we like, you know, inculcate in ourselves, if you take that out, if you become insecure, and if you say like, you know, like, there's nothing that we're going to lose by trying something new. partly the challenge and problem of our society, right, going back all the way to our education. Because what we tend to do, for the best kind of reasons, is we teach young people very young, that if they get their head down and do what they're told in the way they're told to do. They're extremely successful. But no, their reward will be certainty. What we do is promise certainty. Yeah. You know, and that can be at every level. It's not a, you know, a socioeconomic high level thing, it's to academic and intellectual level. If you get your head down and make yourself indispensable, if you become as productive and efficient as possible, your reward will be certainty. You know, you'll get a salary. You might be able to contribute to a pension and a health care plan. You may be able to afford a car loan and a home. But what it'll give you is certainty and we kind of promise that if you keep peddling as hard as you can pedal, we can pedal, we promise you certainty forever, right? And of course what we've seen over the last 30, 40, 50 years is the breakdown of the certainty promise. And people are still peddling thinking, but you promise me, you promise me certainty. And I wonder whether in the workplace we see that, because people come in to work for a guy like you who's incredibly entrepreneurial and come on, let's push the boundaries. And they're thinking, no, no, no, I went to college, what I went to college for was to get to work for a company like a company like yours. But now what I want you to do is promise me that I've got a safe job, a safe salary, and so what I'll do is do what I know how to do, thank you very much. And actually that challenge is trying to break that in people and saying to trust me, trust it. And it's really hard because trust me for some, for most of us, when it's ingrained in us, to just seek out certainty, is an incredibly challenging thing in itself. Wow, that's a profound thought. that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, like it makes a ton of sense. Fantastic, fantastic. So you were an actor. A bad one. But like that gave you the confidence back like you know that like you know resurrected you from where you were and then you turned a teacher. How did that act? Okay so there are moments in my life that were defined by love. love. And so I wanted to be an actor and actually got into a small repertory theatre company in London and thought I was going to be the next great Olivier or you know great British actor. But the floor to my plan was essentially I was really bad. I was good as a school boy actor but like, but eventually I went back to college thinking I was interesting because when I left school and of course the natural for people when you leave school at 18 and remember my parents and my mother and my grandparents had invested heavily in giving me the best education they could afford is that you go to university at 18 I already realized I was like a fish out of water because I wasn't as I said before academic but I was very creative and I remember saying to my mom I think you know having that conversation when I was about 14 and she asked me so what do you think you want to do with your life and she reminded me and she reminded me what do you think you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to do you of this actually years ago. And my response was if I could spend my life writing and performing, that would be perfect. That would be the happy moment for me, right? So I left school at 18, but didn't want to go to college because I hadn't enjoyed the last two years of my studies, particularly that really rigorous academic part where you have to get the qualifications to get you a place at college university. And so I wanted to act. And so I mean, talk about courage of a parent, right, to let you go down your own path, which is another whole story. Because most parents would go, no, you do what we just talked about, safe option, you go for certainty, right? You go to college. And I said, I'm going to go and try and be an actor, got into a small theater company in London. And the courage of my mother to say, well, if that's the path you've chosen. She said, there's a roof over your head, but I'm not going to pay your rent, but I'm not going to pay your rent, you are going to have to learn that you've got to make a living but go follow your dream. Incredible courage for a woman with her 18 year old son, shirking. Luckily for her I was really bad at it and actually came to the conclusion after about a year, year and a half then maybe I should go back to college and study the arts, right? I wanted to study writing and I wanted to study performance and so I eventually went back to college. Now this is a very long wind-winded of answering your question. because in my first year of my degree at college you can imagine there I am now I'm 20 years old so young full of hormones and testosterone and I meet and this is really a book because I meet a young woman in the student bar who you know those moments in those really corny films where the music plays and soft focus and there she was right and the so the zoom happens and I'm like oh my good so I sit down and I buy a drink and I'm doing the vacuous thing No, I had contact lenses, yeah, yeah. I had contact lenses. I had contact lenses, and I had hair gel. So I got rid of the, I got really curly hair, but now you can picture it. The hair gel was in. And by the way, hair gel and contact lenses don't go very well, because by the end of the evening, the hair gels melted into your eyes. And your eyes are stinging and they're red. So I'm, this is before the red eye. So I'm sat there, I'm sat there talking to this young woman, anyway, right, right, right, right, and she's, and she's, and she's, at 18 she's literally coming to the end of her degree and I'm sat there and I'm saying to oh you want to be a teacher oh that's the best job oh what an amazing I would have said anything to get a second date right it could have been anything if she said she was training to be a computer program where I would have gone oh right I was just being shallow anyway we went on a day and built a relationship to the point where just if people want to know we're about to celebrate that same young and I are about to celebrate our 34th wedding anniversary. So God knows what she saw in me to stay that long. Anyway, she, because I was still at college and she'd gone and got it, luckily for me she'd got a job teaching in a local school near the college so we could be together. And she used to say to me, come and teach my kids drama, which you can imagine. Go back to my story as a child and the profound access swing when that teacher. saw that in me she said come and do some drama with my kids she said I think you'd love it they would definitely love you you've got the kind of personality and so I did and for the second time in my life the first time the first epiphany was being on stage as a nine year old child the second epiphany was being in her classroom working with her students and thinking to myself genuinely how did I not know this is where I belong And so I finished my first degree, did a postgraduate qualification to qualify as a teacher, and that's how I became a teacher. And love was involved in the early stages, but profoundly and weirdly. That moment in that student union bar not only changed the course of my personal life, but it changed the course of my professional life. Because of her, I discovered an absolute passion for it. Do you believe that everything in this world is like pre-ord? and pre- No, no one. No I don't I absolutely believe that what we need to be as human beings is people who are mindful of potential moments right and and how do you know that you don't but your instinct maybe says to you this is interesting but who's saying that it would be me I don't know but there's an instinct in me that will occasionally go that's interesting give that a go talk to that person try that is a really important characteristic often of people who are entrepreneurial who have our adventurers let's call people like where does that entrance come from I think it comes back from those moments in your life where I think if when you're very young you experience that sense of powerlessness I've got nothing to lose here I think that adversity in early life makes you more open to risk an opportunity you tend to see more You know, when I look at the young people I worked with as a teacher, often the kids that came from the most secure homes, perversely with the most risk averse and the ones who were most blinkered about their life. I often say to people now, when was the last time you sat on a train and rather than have your face in your phone or your laptop, you actually just looked out of the window. Because when you look out the window that's where opportunity is. The problem is metaphorically, if you spend all your time on your time on your time on your school on your school on your school on your school on your school on your school on your school on your school on your school you'll never spot that potential opportunity. And so I've always trusted my instinct which is interesting because I think as we get older it's another part of the curiosity thing for