The Radical Reboot Education Needs | Richard Gerver x Shekhar Natarajan

**Richard Gerver** (0:00)
In order to feel in control of your life, you have to be capable and prepared to learn.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:10)
In the future, you should demonstrate intelligence with innocence.

**Richard Gerver** (0:18)
You learn nothing new by getting something right.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:26)
The single most important change in any school could make tomorrow with no extra funding.

**Richard Gerver** (0:35)
If we don't change the education system, we will elegantly continue to prepare people for a world that no longer exists.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (1:10)
Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow, Today with Shekhar Natarajan. It's my incredible honor to have the guy that I really admire the most. He's phenomenal. And his name is Richard Gerver.
You cannot describe Richard in one single sentence.
He's an author, he's an educator, he's an intellectual advisor to the Dalai Lama, Obama, Eric Schmidt, you name it, like Wozniak.
He's won like UNESCO Award, Global Gurus 30 Award. Yeah. I don't know, like, it seems very interesting, but it's like fascinating. But the most important contribution that I personally like and that we were actually recognized for is the National Teacher Achievement Award. I think that's where your journey started in life. 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 guests are going to 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?

**Richard Gerver** (2:39)
Yeah.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (2:40)
Yeah.

**Richard Gerver** (2:40)
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 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 in the next few months.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (3:18)
Very good. Very good. I look forward to it. And I'll be cheering for you and I'll be rooting for you, and I'll be posting about your book all along. So let's get to the beginnings of your story, right?
A lot of people don't know, you're a very confident talker right now. But not so much the case.
So it takes me back to the early days of your life, the trauma that actually that you went through, the challenges you had with Stammer, how you overcame that. And I want to unpack it in great detail before we actually get into how we got into education. Sure.

**Richard Gerver** (4:03)
And I think, by the way, those things are linked. So 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.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (4:21)
So they are your parents?

**Richard Gerver** (4:22)
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. 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 yes, 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 classes.
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 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.