Shakira: Address at the Oxford Union on Education (2009)

“Education for All” · 夏奇拉 2009 年牛津辩论社关于教育的演讲全文

Speaker: Shakira, singer-songwriter and founder of the Barefoot Foundation (Fundación Pies Descalzos)

Date: December 7, 2009 (date given in the video description; video posted December 9, 2009) Venue: The Oxford Union, University of Oxford Source: https://onceuponourblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/education-for-all-by-shakira.html (full prepared text; no official transcript is published)

Video/audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yRm3GCZ2U4 (Shakira official channel, 10:30; the speech runs 1:24–10:26, after a short introduction)

Opening

感谢牛津辩论社；“今天不会唱歌，也不会扭臀”；一个来自巴兰基亚的女孩以艺术家的视⻆来谈未来。 / Thanks to the Oxford Union; no singing or hip-shaking; a girl from Barranquilla speaking as an artist.

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, because there won’t be any singing or any hip-shaking whatsoever.

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.

A Fantasy About the Future

想象 50 年后的世界；文明像一辆突然加速的⻋，唯一的解释是教育的普及。 / Imagining the world in 50 years; civilization accelerated thanks to the democratization of education.

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? What challenges can we overcome? How will we live?

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’s only one explanation to me, and that is the democratization of education.

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 history, with so many technological advances in just the past century, how will we evolve in the next ten years, 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,

Children Can’t Wait

照现在的速度，一百年也实现不了普及教育；孩子们在挨饿，他们等不起。 / At the current pace universal education is a century away; starving children can’t wait.

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. They 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.

What I Have Seen in Colombia

在内战和贫困中⻓大；18 岁创立基金会，用学校、营养餐和职业培训改变社区。 / Growing up in Colombia; her foundation’s schools, meals and training transform whole communities.

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 a birthright, like it should be; 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 many other peoples 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 of not only children but also the families and entire communities. And it works. Believe me, it works.

Not Charity, but Investment

教育是对人的潜能的投资，能促进和平与安全，也能推动经济增⻓。 / Education is an investment in human potential, promoting peace, security and economic growth.

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.

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 those same kids are going to college and like you, are graduating soon. So yes, education promotes peace and stability worldwide.

One single year of primary education invested in one kid 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.

Closing: Step on It

希望 2060 年的年轻人看到我们派去阿富汗的是教育者而不是士兵；你们握着方向盘，请踩下油⻔。 / Send educators, not soldiers; you are in the driver’s seat — please step on it.

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.

Education for all.

John Locke, who I believe was one of you, right, 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.

Notes

The only full-length recording available is Shakira’s official video, which is an edited cut of the speech: several prepared passages do not appear in it. The main text therefore follows what is actually spoken in the video, checked word by word against full speech recognition of the recording; passages of the prepared text that are not heard in the video are kept below as footnotes so nothing is lost. Notes marked “not spoken in the recording” may have been delivered in the hall but cut from the video. Applause is not transcribed.

1. ¶3, 1:45: official text “I won’t be singing… and”; spoken as “because”

2. ¶3, 1:47: official text “hipshaking.”; spoken as “singing or any hip-shaking whatsoever.” 3. ¶9, 3:20: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “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.”

4. ¶11, 3:55: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “the course of human” 5. ¶12, 4:38: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “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.”

6. ¶19, 5:56: official text “right;”; spoken as “a birthright, like it should be;”

7. ¶22, 7:18: spoken addition, not in the official text — “also the families and”

8. ¶22, 7:25: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “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.”

9. ¶24, 8:47: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “Isn’t that what we all want? On the other hand, education helps catalyze economic growth.”

10. ¶25, 9:15: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “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.”” 11. ¶28, 9:53: in the official text but not spoken in the recording — “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:”