Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (66 page)

I can’t think of anything more cynical and selfish, though, than telling kids who didn’t win the parent lottery that they’ve lost the entire game. Society has the resources and the skill (and thus the obligation) to reset cultural norms and to amplify them through schooling. I don’t think we maximize our benefit when we turn every child’s education into a first-time, home-based project.

We can amplify each kid’s natural inclination to dream, we can inculcate passion in a new generation, and we can give kids the tools to learn more, and faster, in a way that’s never been seen before.

And if parents want to lead (or even to help, or merely get out of the way), that’s even better.

When we think about the role of school, we have to take a minute to understand that we
backed
into this corner; we didn’t head here with intent.

A hundred and fifty years ago, 1% of the population went to the academy. They studied for studying’s sake. They did philosophy and mathematics and basic science, all as a way to understand the universe.

The rest of the world didn’t go to school. You learned something from your parents, perhaps, or if you were rich, from a tutor. But blacksmiths and stable boys and barbers didn’t sit in elegant one-room schoolhouses paid for by taxpayers, because there weren’t any.

After the invention of public school, of course, this all changed. The 1% still went to school to learn about the universe.

And 99% of the population went to school because they were ordered to go to school. And school was about basic writing (so you could do your job), reading (so you could do your job), and arithmetic (so you could do your job).

For a generation, that’s what school did. It was a direct and focused finishing school for pre-industrial kids.

Then, as often happens to institutions, mission creep sank in. As long as we’re teaching something, the thinking went, let’s teach something. And so schools added all manner of material from the academy. We taught higher math or physics or chemistry or Shakespeare or Latin—not because it would help you with your job, but because learning stuff was important.

Public school shifted gears—it took the academy to the masses.

I want to be very clear here: I wouldn’t want to live in an uneducated world. I truly believe that education makes humans great, elevates our culture and our economy, and creates the foundation for the engine that drives science, which leads to our well-being. I’m not criticizing education.

No. But I am wondering when we decided that the purpose of school was to cram as much data/trivia/fact into every student as we possibly could.

Because that’s what we’re doing. We’re not only avoiding issues of practicality and projects and hands-on use of information; we’re also aggressively testing for trivia.

Which of society’s goals are we satisfying when we spend 80% of the school day drilling and bullying to get kids to momentarily swallow and then regurgitate this month’s agenda?

Go back to the original purpose of school: we needed to teach citizens to be obedient (to be good workers), to consume what marketers sold them (to keep industry going), and to be able to sit still (to be good workers).

Academics are one way to reinforce those ideas. Sure, there were a few things (like basic arithmetic and the ability to read) that all civilized people needed, but we kept adding to the list, creating a never-ending list of topics that students could be confronted with as a test of their obedience. By conflating learning (a good thing) with obedience (an important thing for the industrial age) and consumption (essential for mass marketers), we confused ourselves. We came to the conclusion that increasing all three of these in tandem was what society wanted, and we often used one to get more of the other.

Of course, those who were creating the curricula got focused on the academic part.

At first, we used primers and memorization as a direct method of teaching obedience. Then, though, as we got smarter about the structure of thought, we created syllabi that actually covered the knowledge that mattered.

But mattered to whom?

School is still about obedience and compliance and consumption, but now, layered on top of it, are hours every day of brute-force learning about how the world actually works. The problem is that we don’t sell it well, it’s not absorbed, it’s expensive, and it doesn’t stick.

Now that obedience is less important and learning matters more than ever, we have to be brave enough to separate them. We can rebuild the entire system around passion instead of fear.

That feeling you’re feeling (if you haven’t given up because of the frightening implications of this manifesto) is the feeling just about every parent has. It’s easier to play it safe. Why risk blowing up the educational system, why not just add a bit to it? Why risk the education of our kids merely because the economy has changed?

That whisper in your ear, that hesitation about taking dramatic action—that’s precisely why we still have the system we do. That’s how we get stuck with the status quo. When it’s safer and easier and quieter to stick with what we’ve got, we end up sticking with what we’ve got.

If just one parent asks these questions, nothing is going to happen. Every parent has an excuse and a special situation and no one wants to go out on a limb … but if a dozen or a hundred parents step up and start asking, the agenda will begin to change.

The urgency of our problem is obvious, and it seems foolish to me to polish the obsolete when we ought to be investing our time and money into building something that actually meets our needs.
We can’t switch the mission unless we also switch the method.

Those were the three requirements for most jobs for most of the twentieth century. Only after you fit all three criteria was your competence tested. And competence was far more important than leadership, creativity, or brilliance.

If you were applying to be a forklift operator, a receptionist, an insurance salesperson, or a nurse, you showed up with a résumé (proof of a history of compliance), you showed up (proof that you lived somewhere nearby), and you knew about the salary on offer (of course).

School didn’t have to do anything about the local part, but it sure worked hard to instill the notion that reliably handing in your work on time while making sure it precisely matched the standards of the teacher was the single best way to move forward.

And it certainly taught you to accept what those in authority gave you, so the wage was the wage, and you took it until someone offered you a better one.

Each student had already had a job—from the age of five, a steady job, with a string of managers giving instructions. Built right into the fabric of our lives were the ingredients for compliant and cheap. Local was a bonus.

Institutions and committees like to talk about core competencies, the basic things that a professional or a job seeker needs to know.

Core competence? I’d prefer core incompetence.

Competent people have a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems. They solve a problem the same way, every time. That’s what makes them reliable. That’s what makes them competent.

Competent people are quite proud of the status and success that they get out of being competent. They like being competent. They guard their competence, and they work hard to maintain it.

Over the past twenty to thirty years, we’ve witnessed an amazing shift in U.S.-based businesses. Not so long ago, companies were filled with incompetent workers. If you bought a Pacer from American Motors, it wasn’t all that surprising to find a tool hidden in a door panel of your new car. Back then, it wasn’t uncommon for shipped products to be dead on arrival.

Computers changed that. Now the receptionist can’t lose your messages because they go straight into voice mail. The assembly-line worker can’t drop a tool because it’s attached to a numerically controlled machine. The telemarketer who interrupts your dinner is unlikely to overpromise because the pitch is carefully outlined in script form on paper.

Oh, there’s one other thing: as we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.

Competence is the enemy of change!

Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat.

If I’m going to make the investment and hire someone for more than the market rate, I want to find an incompetent worker. One who will break the rules and find me something no one else can.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dr. Derek Cabrera noticed something really disturbing. The secret to LEGO’s success was the switch from all-purpose LEGO sets, with blocks of different sizes and colors, to predefined kits, models that must be assembled precisely one way, or they’re wrong.

Why would these sell so many more copies? Because they match what parents expect and what kids have been trained to do.

There’s a right answer! The mom and the kid can both take pride in the kit, assembled. It’s done. Instructions were followed and results were attained.

LEGO isn’t the problem, but it is a symptom of something seriously amiss. We’re entering a revolution of ideas while producing a generation that wants instructions instead.

The real debate if you’re a worker is: Do you want a job where they’ll miss you if you’re gone, a job where only you can do it, a job where you get paid to bring yourself (your true self) to work? Because
those
jobs are available. In fact, there’s no unemployment in that area.

OR do you want a job where you’re racing to the bottom—where your job is to do your job, do as you’re told, and wait for the boss to pick you?

School is clearly organized around the second race. And the problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win. Being the best of the compliant masses is a safe place (for now). But the rest? Not so much.

There are two recessions going on.

One is gradually ending. This is the cyclical recession. We have them all the time; they come and they go. Not fun, but not permanent.

The other one, I fear, is here forever. This is the recession of the industrial age, the receding wave of bounty that workers and businesses got as a result of rising productivity but imperfect market communication.

In short: if you’re local, we need to buy from you. If you work in town,
we need to hire you. If you can do a craft, we can’t replace you with a machine.

No longer.

The lowest price for any good worth pricing is now available to anyone, anywhere. Which makes the market for boring stuff a lot more perfect than it used to be.

Since the “factory” work we did is now being mechanized, outsourced, or eliminated, it’s hard to pay extra for it. And since buyers have so many choices (and much more perfect information about pricing and availability), it’s hard to charge extra.

Thus, middle-class jobs that existed because companies had no choice are now gone.

Protectionism isn’t going to fix this problem. Neither is the stimulus of old factories or yelling in frustration and anger. No, the only useful response is to view this as an opportunity. To poorly paraphrase Clay Shirky, every revolution destroys the last thing before it turns a profit on a new thing.

The networked revolution is creating huge profits, significant opportunities, and a lot of change. What it’s not doing is providing millions of brain-dead, corner-office, follow-the-manual, middle-class jobs. And it’s not going to.

Fast, smart, and flexible are embraced by the network. Linchpin behavior. People and companies we can’t live without (because if I can live without you, I’m sure going to try if the alternative is to save money).

The sad irony is that everything we do to prop up the last economy (more obedience, more compliance, cheaper yet average) gets in the way of profiting from this one.

I don’t know how to change school, can’t give you a map or a checklist. What I do know is that we’re asking the wrong questions and making the wrong assumptions.

The best tactic available to every taxpayer and parent and concerned teacher is to relentlessly ask questions, not settling for the status quo.

“Is this class/lecture/program/task/test/policy designed to help
our students do the old thing a little more efficiently, or are we opening a new door to enable our students to do something that’s new and different?”

School is doing the best job it knows how to create the output it is being asked to create.

We ought to be asking school to make something different. And the only way to do that is to go about it differently.

The simple way to make something different is to go about it in a whole new way. In other words, doing what we’re doing now and hoping we’ll get something else as an outcome is nuts.

Once we start to do schooling differently, we’ll start to get something different.

Over the last three years, Jeremy Gleick, a sophomore at UCLA, has devoted precisely an hour a day to learning something new and unassigned.

The rules are simple: it can’t be related to schoolwork, and reading a novel doesn’t count.

Since he’s started on this journey, he has read Steven Pinker and Stephen Hawking books, watched documentaries about ants and astrophysics, and taken courses in blacksmithing (in person) and card tricks (online). He has done this with rigor and merely had to sacrifice a little TV time to become smarter than most of his peers.