Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (61 page)

For generations, our society has said to communities like this one, “here are some teachers (but not enough) and here is some money (but not enough) and here are our expectations (very low) … go do your best.” Few people are surprised when this plan doesn’t work.

Over the last ten years, I’ve written more than a dozen books about how our society is being fundamentally changed by the impact of the Internet and the connection economy. Mostly I’ve tried to point out to
people that the very things we assumed to be baseline truths were in fact fairly recent inventions and unlikely to last much longer. I’ve argued that mass marketing, mass brands, mass communication, top-down media, and the TV-industrial complex weren’t the pillars of our future that many were trained to expect. It’s often difficult to see that when you’re in the middle of it.

In this manifesto, I’m going to argue that top-down industrialized schooling is just as threatened, and for very good reasons. Scarcity of access is destroyed by the connection economy, at the very same time the skills and attitudes we need from our graduates are changing.

While the Internet has allowed many of these changes to happen, you won’t see much of the Web at the Harlem Village Academy school I visited, and not so much of it in this manifesto, either. The HVA is simply about people and the way they should be treated. It’s about abandoning a top-down industrial approach to processing students and embracing a very human, very personal, and very powerful series of tools to produce a new generation of leaders.

There are literally thousands of ways to accomplish the result that Deborah Kenny and her team at HVA have accomplished. The method doesn’t matter to me, the outcome does. What I saw that day were students leaning forward in their seats, choosing to pay attention. I saw teachers engaged because they chose to as well, because they were thrilled at the privilege of teaching kids who wanted to be taught.

The two advantages most successful schools have are plenty of money and a preselected, motivated student body. It’s worth highlighting that the HVA doesn’t get to choose its students, they are randomly assigned by lottery. And the HVA receives less funding per student than the typical public school in New York. HVA works because they have figured out how to create a workplace culture that attracts the most talented teachers, fosters a culture of ownership, freedom, and accountability, and then relentlessly transfers this passion to their students.

Maestro Ben Zander talks about the transformation that happens when a kid actually learns to love music. For one year, two years, even three years, the kid trudges along. He hits every pulse, pounds every note, and sweats the whole thing out.

Then he quits.

Except a few. The few with passion. The few who care.

Those kids lean forward and begin to
play
. They play as if they care, because they do. And as they lean forward, as they connect, they lift themselves off the piano seat, suddenly becoming, as Ben calls them, one-buttock players.

Playing as if it matters.

Colleges are fighting to recruit the kids who graduate from Deborah’s school and I have no doubt that we’ll soon be hearing of the leadership and contribution of the HVA alumni—one-buttock players who care about learning and giving. Because it matters.

I’ve numbered the sections because it’s entirely possible you’ll be reading it with a different layout than others will. The numbers make it easy to argue about particular sections.

It’s written as a series of essays or blog posts, partly because that’s how I write now, and partly because I’m hoping that one or more of them will spur you to share or rewrite or criticize a point I’m making. One side effect is that there’s some redundancy. I hope you can forgive me for that. I won’t mind if you skip around.

This isn’t a prescription. It’s not a manual. It’s a series of provocations, ones that might resonate and that I hope will provoke conversation.

None of this writing is worth the effort if the ideas aren’t shared. Feel free to email or reprint this manifesto, but please don’t change it or charge for it. If you’d like to tweet, the hashtag is #stopstealingdreams. You can find a page for comments at
http://www.stopstealingdreams.com

Most of all, go do something. Write your own manifesto. Send this one to the teachers at your kid’s school. Ask hard questions at a board meeting. Start your own school. Post a video lecture or two. But don’t settle.

Thanks for reading and sharing.

A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hardworking adults.

Sure, there was some moral outrage about seven-year-olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work—they said they couldn’t afford to hire adults. It wasn’t until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.

Part of the rationale used to sell this major transformation to industrialists was the idea that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence—it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child-labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.

Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists.

Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?

Nobel Prize–winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (doing things that could be done somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs, and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the U.S. economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, he will find someone cheaper than you to do it.
And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers as adults) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some people argue that we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for
sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they’re told. Even if we could win that race, we’d lose. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you’re capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the ninety-third year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership, and, most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

It seems a question so obvious that it’s hardly worth asking. And yet there are many possible answers. Here are a few (I’m talking about public or widespread private education here, grade K through college):

To create a society that’s culturally coordinated.

To further science and knowledge and pursue information for its own sake.

To enhance civilization while giving people the tools to make informed decisions.

To train people to become productive workers.

Over the last three generations, the amount of school we’ve delivered to the public has gone way up—more people are spending more hours being schooled than ever before. And the cost of that schooling is going up even faster, with trillions of dollars being spent on delivering school on a massive scale.

Until recently, school did a fabulous job on just one of these four societal goals. First, the other three:

A culturally coordinated society:
School isn’t nearly as good at this as television is. There’s a huge gulf between the cultural experience in an underfunded, overcrowded city school and the cultural experience in a well-funded school in the suburbs. There’s a significant cultural distinction between a high school dropout and a Yale graduate. There are significant chasms in something as simple as whether you think the scientific method is useful—where you went to school says a lot about what you were taught. If school’s goal is to create a foundation for a common culture, it hasn’t delivered at nearly the level it is capable of.

The pursuit of knowledge for its own sake:
We spend a fortune teaching trigonometry to kids who don’t understand it, won’t use it, and will spend no more of their lives studying math. We invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature, but end up training most of them to never again read for fun (one study found that 58% of all Americans never read for pleasure after they graduate from school). As soon as we associate reading a book with taking a test, we’ve missed the point.

We continually raise the bar on what it means to be a college professor, but churn out PhDs who don’t actually teach and aren’t particularly productive at research, either. We teach facts, but the amount of knowledge truly absorbed is minuscule.

The tools to make smart decisions:
Even though just about everyone in the West has been through years of compulsory schooling, we see ever more belief in unfounded theories, bad financial decisions, and poor community and family planning. People’s connection with science and the arts is tenuous at best, and the financial acumen of the typical consumer is pitiful. If the goal was to raise the standards for rational thought, skeptical investigation, and useful decision making, we’ve failed for most of our citizens.

No, I think it’s clear that school was designed with a particular function in mind, and it’s one that school has delivered on for a hundred years.

Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers built school to train
people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy. And it worked.

All the rest is a by-product, a side effect (sometimes a happy one) of the schooling system that we built to train the workforce we needed for the industrialized economy.

Aware

Caring

Committed

Creative

Goal-setting

Honest

Improvising

Incisive

Independent

Informed

Initiating

Innovating

Insightful

Leading

Strategic

Supportive            
>
                  Or              
>
            Obedient

Which column do you pick? Whom do you want to work for or work next to? Whom do you want to hire? Which doctor do you want to treat you? Whom do you want to live with?

Last question: If you were organizing a trillion-dollar, sixteen-year indoctrination program to turn out the next generation of our society, which column would you build it around?

This is more of a rant than a book. It’s written for teenagers, their parents, and their teachers. It’s written for bosses and for those who work for those bosses. And it’s written for anyone who has paid taxes, gone to a school board meeting, applied to college, or voted.

If school’s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy, we need to change school, because the workers we need have changed as well.

The mission used to be to create homogenized, obedient, satisfied workers and pliant, eager consumers.

No longer.

Changing school doesn’t involve sharpening the pencil we’ve already got. School reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do.
We don’t need more of what schools produce when they’re working as designed
. The challenge, then, is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school.

The goal of this manifesto is to create a new set of questions and demands that parents, taxpayers, and kids can bring to the people they’ve chosen, the institution we’ve built and invested our time and money into. The goal is to change what we get when we send citizens to school.

That statement seems obvious, yet it surprises us that schools are oriented around the notion of uniformity. Even though the workplace and civil society demand variety, the industrialized school system works to stamp it out.

The industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning, to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling. All of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing.

Some quick background:

The common school (now called a public school) was a brand-new concept, created shortly after the Civil War. “Common” because it was for everyone, for the kids of the farmer, the kids of the potter, and the kids of the local shopkeeper. Horace Mann is generally regarded as the
father of the institution, but he didn’t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine—because industrialists were on his side. The two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers. The common school solved both problems.