Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (64 page)

Once the fear transaction is made clear, it can get ever more subtle. A fearsome teacher might need no more than a glance to quiet down his classroom.

But that’s not enough for the industrial school. It goes further than merely ensuring classroom comportment. Fear is used to ensure that no one stretches too far, questions the status quo, or makes a ruckus. Fear is reinforced in career planning, in academics, and even in interpersonal interactions. Fear lives in the guidance office, too.

The message is simple: better fit in or you won’t get into a good school. If you get into a good school and do what they say, you’ll get a good job, and you’ll be fine. But if you don’t—it’ll go on your permanent record.

Years ago, five friends and I were put in charge of 150 rowdy fifth-graders for a long weekend up in Canada. It was almost impossible to be
heard over the din—until I stumbled onto the solution. All we had to say was, “points will be deducted,” and compliance appeared. There weren’t any points and there wasn’t any prize, but merely the threat of lost points was sufficient.

Instead of creating a social marketplace where people engage and grow, school is a maelstrom, a whirlpool that pushes for sameness and dumbs down the individual while it attempts to raise the average.

There really are only two tools available to the educator. The easy one is fear. Fear is easy to awake, easy to maintain, but ultimately toxic.

The other tool is passion. A kid in love with dinosaurs or baseball or earth science is going to learn it on her own. She’s going to push hard for ever more information, and better still, master the thinking behind it.

Passion can overcome fear—the fear of losing, of failing, of being ridiculed.

The problem is that individual passion is hard to scale—hard to fit into the industrial model. It’s not reliably ignited. It’s certainly harder to create for large masses of people. Sure, it’s easy to get a convention center filled with delegates to chant for a candidate, and easier still to engage the masses at Wembley Stadium, but the passion that fuels dreams and creates change must come from the individual, not from a demigod.

There has been no bigger change in 10,000 years of recorded human history than the overwhelming transformation of society and commerce and health and civilization that was enabled (or caused) by industrialization.

We’re so surrounded by it that it seems normal and permanent and preordained, but we need to lay it out in stark relief to see how it has created the world we live in.

In just a few generations, society went from agrarian and distributed
to corporatized and centralized. In order to overhaul the planet, a bunch of things had to work in concert:

Infrastructure changes, including paving the earth, laying pipe, building cities, wiring countries for communication, etc.

Government changes, which meant permitting corporations to engage with the king, to lobby, and to receive the benefits of infrastructure and policy investments. “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Education changes, including universal literacy, an expectation of widespread commerce and, most of all, the practice of instilling the instinct to obey civil (as opposed to government) authority.

None of this could have happened if there had been widespread objections from individuals. It turns out, though, that it was relatively easy to enforce and then teach corporate and educational obedience. It turns out that industrializing the schooling of billions of people was a natural fit, a process that quickly turned into a virtuous cycle: obedient students were turned into obedient teachers, who were then able to create even more obedient students. We’re wired for this stuff.

The system churned out productivity and money from the start. This result encouraged all the parties involved to amplify what they were doing—more lobbying, more infrastructure, more obedience. It took only 150 years, but the industrial age remade the entire population of the planet, from Detroit to Kibera.

The cornerstone of the entire process was how well the notion of obedience fit into the need for education. We needed educated workers, and teaching them to be obedient helped us educate them. And we needed obedient workers, and the work of educating them reinforced the desired behavior.

As the industrial age peters out, as the growth fades away, the challenge is this: training creative, independent, and innovative artists is new to us. We can’t use the old tools because resorting to obedience to teach
passion just isn’t going to work. Our instinct, the easy go-to tool of activating the amygdala, isn’t going to work this time.

The industrial structure of school demands that we teach things for certain. Testable things. Things beyond question. After all, if topics are open to challenge, who will challenge them? Our students. But students aren’t there to challenge—they are there to be indoctrinated, to accept and obey.

Our new civic and scientific and professional life, though, is all about doubt.
About questioning the status quo, questioning marketing or political claims, and, most of all, questioning what’s next.

The obligation of the new school is to teach reasonable doubt. Not the unreasonable doubt of the wild-eyed heckler, but the evidence-based doubt of the questioning scientist and the reason-based doubt of the skilled debater.

Industrial settings don’t leave a lot of room for doubt. The worker on the assembly line isn’t supposed to question the design of the car. The clerk at the insurance agency isn’t supposed to suggest improvements in the accounts being pitched.

In the post-industrial age, though, the good jobs and the real progress belong only to those with the confidence and the background to use the scientific method to question authority and to re-imagine a better reality.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham argued that if two kids playing hopscotch or push-pin
*
are gaining as much joy and pleasure as someone reading poetry, they have enjoyed as much utility.

John Stuart Mill took a different approach. He argued, “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates
dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

I’m with Mill on this one. One of the things that school is for is to teach our children to understand and relish the idea of intellectualism, to develop into something more than a purpose-driven tool for the industrial state.

Fortunately for my side of the argument, the economy is now reinforcing this notion. Simple skills and cheap pleasures (bread and circuses) worked for a long time, but they no longer scale to quiet the masses. The basic skills aren’t enough to support the circuses that we’ve been sold.

The fork in this road is ever more pronounced because there’s now so much more to choose from. A citizen can spend his spare time getting smarter, more motivated, and more involved, or he can tune out, drop out, and entertain himself into a stupor. The same devices deliver either or both from the online ether—and the choice that people make is one that’s going to develop early, based on the expectations of our teachers and the standards of our peers.

We can teach kids to engage in poetry, to write poetry, and to demand poetry—or we can take a shortcut and settle for push-pin, YouTube, and LOLcats.

The essence of the connection revolution is that it rewards those who connect, stand out, and take what feels like a chance.

Can risk taking be taught? Of course it can. It gets taught by mentors, by parents, by great music teachers, and by life.

Why isn’t it being taught every day at that place we send our kids to?

Bravery in school is punished, not rewarded. The entire institution is organized around avoiding individual brave acts, and again and again we hear from those who have made a difference, telling us that they became brave
despite
school, not because of it.

Harvard Business School turns out management consultants in far
greater numbers than it develops successful bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Ralph Lauren, David Geffen, and Ted Turner all dropped out of college because they felt the real challenges lay elsewhere.

The Sudbury Valley School was founded during the hippie generation, and has survived and thrived as an independent school for forty years. From their introductory handbook:

The way we saw it, responsibility means that each person has to carry the ball for himself. You, and you alone, must make your decisions, and you must live with them. No one should be thinking for you, and no one should be protecting you from the consequences of your actions. This, we felt, is essential if you want to be independent, self-directed, and the master of your own destiny.

While this is easy to dismiss as hype or pabulum, what if it’s true? What if you actually built a school from the ground up with this as its core idea, not just window dressing? This is precisely what they did.

Students ask for teachers when they wish. They play soccer if they choose. They take responsibility for everything they do and learn, from the age of six. And it works.

If a school is seen as a place for encouragement and truth telling, a place where students go to find their passion and then achieve their goals, it is not a school we would generally recognize, because our schools do none of this.

Greatness is frightening. With it comes responsibility.

If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.

And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s
promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone.

If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office,
the future is not your fault
.

That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. “I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.”

What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.

Because the industrial education system makes it so clear when someone has stepped from the well-lit path, it highlights those who leave it, making it pretty easy to find those willing to speak up and connect and lead. They’re noticeable at first primarily for the fact that they refuse to be sheep.

Rebecca Chapman, literary editor of a new online journal called
The New Inquiry
, was quoted in the
New York Times
. “My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”

The only surprising thing about this statement is that some consider it surprising.

Rebecca trained to be competent, excelling at completing the tasks set in front of her. She spent more than sixteen years at the top of the system, at the best schools, with the best resources, doing what she was told to do.

Unfortunately, no one is willing to pay her to do tasks. Without a defined agenda, it’s difficult for her to find the gig she was trained for.

Too many competent workers, not enough tasks.

Peter Thiel made headlines when he offered to pay students
not
to attend college—to start something instead. The reason this program works, though, has nothing to do with avoiding college and everything to do with attracting those bold enough to put themselves on the hook.
Education isn’t a problem until it serves as a buffer from the world and a refuge from the risk of failure.

Every day, beginning the first day and continuing until the last day, our teachers and our administrators and yes, most parents, seeking to do the right thing, end up doing the wrong one.

We mean well.

We let our kids down easy.

We tell ourselves that we are realistic.

We demand that students have a trade to fall back on, an assembly-line job available just in case the silly dreams don’t come true. And then, fearing heartbreak, we push them to bury the dream and focus on just the job.

The job with a boss and an office and air conditioning and a map of what to do next. A job with security and coworkers and instructions and deniability.

And when the job doesn’t come?

When all the dues are paid and for nothing?

Ouch.

Frederick Taylor is responsible for much of what you see when you look around. As the father of scientific management, he put the fine points on Henry Ford’s model of mass production and was the articulate voice behind the staffing of the assembly line and the growth of the industrial age.

Armed with a stopwatch, Taylor measured everything. He came to two conclusions:

Interchangeable workers were essential to efficient manufacturing. You can’t shut down the line just because one person doesn’t show up for work. The bigger the pool of qualified labor, the easier it is to find cheap, compliant workers who will follow your instructions.
People working alone (in parallel) are far more efficient than teams. Break every industrial process down into the smallest number of parts and give an individual the same thing to do again and again, alone, and measure his output.