Thank you Richard for your dedication and commitment to youth and children and to the community at large. Thank you for standing up and speaking out.

 I teach creativity. I teach this because I believe in Life. I teach that we must be in love with life itself.   I speak from my experiences in Children`s Art Houses. I speak for many young lives struggling to express themselves and to be heard. I speak because every child counts, every life matters and because I cannot give up on the creative spark in each of us.I believe that each one of us is valuable important precious and needed. I have wanted to see a revolution of creativity pour out of this country to see us all being infected with positive energy because we are able to release the creativity within us and use it for the betterment of society.

I believe each one of us is inextricably linked to all others. I teach there are others, there are others. No one is alone. I understand that we have a mark to leave on life which can contribute to humanities better future. I teach that creativity is about spirit rather than skill, that we are the creative species with the birth right to be creative. Merely compiling a check list of skills and working our way through these is no way to release the enormous potential of a child`s creative mind. Creativity is being educated out of us. It is seen as explosive dangerous and unchartered. Therefore dangerous to systems which contain us.  

Children must understand that they are precious creative beings. Adults need to assist children to claim and handle their creativity with checks and balances.  This means teaching wisely with understanding. Einstein`s, Imagination is more important than knowledge. We need the new, we need to know we can think differently. We need to know that we can change. We need to  understand that we have enormous potential never yet claimed by any of us. Why do we all wait in the wings????What are we afraid of? Why?

Humans have not used our talents or our creativity to our best advantage. It can be said that the true progress of humankind is in a crisis- a crisis of our own making resulting from our irresponsible and exploitative patterns of production and consumption, our egoistic lifestyles. We live in a materialistic and capitalistic society which has forgotten the human soul and eroded our human values, making the worship of knowledge over wisdom, power and greed over justice and compassion, the satisfaction of the wants and whims of a few at the expense of the needs of the many ,along with unbridled competition instead of cooperation, bringing our technologically advanced world to the endangered situation it is in today, the impending annihilation of the earth with all the life forms in it, including the human species and the destruction of the human spirit.                                                                                                                                                          

Civilization is now capable of destroying itself. The roots of global environmental crisis are spiritual, an outer manifestation of an inner crisis. Each one of us must take a greater personal responsibility for the deterioration of global environment. Having contempt for creation, heaping contempt on creation is dizzy and confused.” We cannot sew in the wind without reaping the whirl-wind.“  Time to stop and think is now . Knowing how creative we are is now, knowing that our creativity requires feasibility study before production is essential? Erikson says, “The possibility of species-wide destruction creates for the first time the necessity of a species wide ethic. ”The call of our globe is :-“The world is doomed, These are the last days The nucleus of the future now depends on the protection and development of our children`s creativity.

Childhood must be long and happy, steeped in wonder, surprize and magic, where bright sparks are ignited and where our supreme innovators are raised. Creative children ensure creative communities. Opportunities to explore, develop, invent, discover use their talents for the betterment of society need to be central to our nations plans and policies.

We must help the child to imagine the future better. Creativity is a universal matter about energy and motion it cannot be taught in isolation from the universe. The laws of the universe stimulate children. Children are in advance of us looking out with fresh eyes. They bring in the new and the original. They can find solutions. How do we recycle the sense of wonder we felt as children when the world was new to us, unless we value the child`s right to be creative as our best chance forward. Children will work their butt` s off for their own idea. Try, work and try, try again. Yes, we can be grateful, serene and respond with virtue.  We can live with joy, delight, peace, and we can honour our birth right by using our talents for good.

Education must teach respect for life itself.  Being in love with life is the issue which must be faced by youth. Many youth seek the way to observe the beauty and magnificence of a flower, a bird, a cat, the sea, the sky. Maintaining the pleasure of being alive, the privilege of being alive, the joy of loving life, of sharing the bounty of the earth, the diversity, the splendour of the universe is essential. It is essential to be human first, professional second. To laugh and cry, celebrate and grieve. Hiding feelings, building secrets, competing unfairly to satisfy others demands does not support humanity.  Fear of failure in our children through brutal infrastructure requirements is rampant and has a horrid outcome for society, Youth lives matter, Children matter.  My solution has been to set up Children`s Art Houses with the Love Art, be kind message .Children`s Art Houses can provide joy, can build better futures and lead to the betterment of society .These houses support humanities need to dream the future differently, inspire bigger picture thinkers, successful navigators, culturally respecting, environmentally life respecting, democratic, empathetic and empowered by love; and breed those who understand that there are others, that I`m not alone. The treasures of human creativity, accumulated wisdom, partnerships and commitment to our youth, remain underutilised, waiting to be discovered and developed. The future for many children currently looks bleak, and often unpredictable but if our youth learn to value their treasures their talents they will deliver the answers. Talents are gifts which count, which support, and build strong futures.  Schools should support the individual talents of each child with individual educational programmes as the first place of consideration for each child`s learning. Youth and children are not here to do what has been done before, or to copy any -one else.  Each youngster`s fullest potential matters so design of assessments and evaluations aiming to discover and assist this development rather than comparing them to standard norms is needed.

Mark Twain`s Tom Sawyer, asked Huckle Berry Finn, “Why do you do it?”  Answer, “So that I Huckle Berry me, know who I am, what I can be.” Reforms are necessary to support clubs, extracurricular activities, learning resource centres and networks where children and youth have opportunity to develop their talents and pursue their interests. Experience shows that unless youth develop positive and in depth understanding of themselves and learn to live with themselves, they will not be capable of learning to understand and live with others.

 The creative adult is the child who survived. The successful adult is passionate and compassionate.

Youth are at the crossroads, and for far too long we have imagined the fault lies in the brains of the children and we have diagnosing and drugging our children into conformity with our bureaucratic systems. Richard   is correct that we have literally become bystanders in the lives of our children and ultimately have underminded our ability to make the necessary adult interventions. How appalling that the medicating of the child has become the response to conflict in which the weakest member of the conflict, the child, is drugged into a more compliant or submissive state especially when the both the classroom and the family are exempt from criticism or the need to improve and instead the child is made the source of the problem. Drugs suppress all spontaneous behaviours they reduce exploration and curiosity socializing and playing. The very things which children and youth need, wonder, surprise, magic, exploration discovery invention. These things can get in the way and cause disruption to formula driven systems which masquerade as virtuosity.

Thank you, Richard for your courage and strength of purpose, for the long hours of exploration and consideration, for caring about the human condition and for standing up on behalf of humanity to bring  this book, Running on Empty, forward.

.Is the universe friendly? Einstein asked. Will we walk into a new dawn? One without drugs?  one with resilience, with balance and hope for nature and the belief in our families, in our talents and our creativity? It is about time and it is up to us.

I encourage everyone to do something original. Put our pills away and get going.