Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (68 page)

The notion that humans want to commit to something is ancient and profound. And yet we work overtime to keep students from doing just that.

Here’s a note I got after a recent blog post used the word
bespoke
, a much better fit than the word
custom
would have been:

Bespoke? A word used only for sending people to the dictionary to discover how literate you are—a word they’ll use only for the same purpose. Right?

Andrew

Really?

My blog is hardly filled with words most educated citizens would have trouble understanding. And yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level. This relentless push for less (less intelligence, less culture, less effort) is one of the boogeymen facing anyone who would mess with the rote rigor of mass schooling.

“If we spend more time training inquisitive humans, we’ll have to give up on the basics, and that will mean nothing but uneducated dolts who don’t even know who Torquemada was.”

Not to mention all those missing apostrophes.

I’m worried too. But one thing is clear: the uneducated
already
don’t know who Torquemada was. The uneducated have already dumbed everything down to sound bites and YouTube clips. The industrial school
had several generations and billions of dollars to drill and practice us into game-show champions, and it has failed, miserably.

Cultural literacy is essential. A common store of knowledge is the only way to create community, to build and integrate a tribe of people interested in living together in harmony. But that store of knowledge will never be infinite, and what’s more important, we cannot drill and practice it into a population that has so many fascinating or easy diversions available as alternatives.

I’m concerned about fact ignorance and history ignorance and vocabulary ignorance.

I’m petrified, though, about attitude ignorance.

If we teach our students to be passionate, ethical, and inquisitive, I’m confident that the facts will follow. Instead of complaining that I’m using a seven-letter word when a six-letter one might be sufficient, the inquisitive reader thanks me for adding a new, better word to his lexicon. No need to memorize that word—it’s now, and forever, a mouse click away.

Here’s a simple example of the difference between pushing kids to memorize a technique and selling them on a process and an attitude:

The Bing search engine is owned by Microsoft—it’s their alternative to Google. In order to increase usage, they’ve built it into the home page that shows up in Microsoft Explorer, the Web browser built into Windows, the operating system installed on most PCs.

It turns out that one of the most popular items searched for on Bing throughout 2011 was the word “Google.”

Users type “Google” into Bing to get to Google so they can do a search (the very search they could have done in Bing, of course).

And then, when they get to Google, one of the most popular terms? Facebook.

They’re typing “Facebook” into Google to get to the social networking site, because they don’t know how to use the address bar at the top of the browser to type
www.facebook.com
, and they don’t know how to bookmark their favorite sites.

Clueless user:
Bing
>
“Google”
>
Google
>
“Facebook”
>
Facebook

Motivated user:
hit bookmark

Should you memorize this tip? Of course not. What’s missing is that millions of Americans, people possessing computers that would have cost a million dollars just ten years ago, are operating out of habit and fear and treating the computer like a magic box. They’re afraid to wonder if they can replace Bing with Google. Afraid to ask how to get rid of Internet Explorer and install Firefox. Too lazy to ask their colleagues if there’s a better way. They don’t look for tips or ways to break or open or fix or improve. They self-describe as Dummies and give up, not for lack of genetic smarts, but for lack of initiative and because of an abundance of fear.

They weren’t sold on a forward-leaning posture when it comes to technology, so they make no effort, acting out of fear instead of passion. For the rest of their lives.

That forward-leaning posture is teachable.

I know the feeling. You see the young mom feeding her infant a can of Sprite from a baby bottle. The blog reader who thinks
bespoke
is too difficult a word (and not worth looking up). The financially afraid who get tricked into losing their houses because they don’t understand simple arithmetic …

What about them?

How can we possibly argue about forcing students to memorize fewer facts when the world doesn’t even know who’s buried in Grant’s tomb, doesn’t know the difference between
write
and
right
, and can’t balance a checkbook. What about them?

For a really long time, I thought more drilling, more schooling, and more homework was the only way. That schools lacked rigor and were failing students by not pumping them with enough data.

Then I realized that all of the people in this parade have already been through school. They’ve received the best their community could afford, but it didn’t work because our effort was based on the wrong strategy.

The bad decisions we see every day aren’t the result of lack of data, or lack of access to data.

No, they’re the result of a schooling culture that is creating exactly what it set out to create.

Along the way, we teach students to be open to and trusting of marketing messages. Not only is the school day primarily about students accepting the messages marketed to them by the authority figures in the school, but the fashions, gadgets, and trends of teen culture (all delivered by marketers) are the glue that holds the place together. We mix obedience with marketing culture, why are we surprised at what we get?

School is successful … at the wrong thing.

I need to come back to this again, because deep down, the educated people reading this aren’t sure yet. The argument for rote, for primers, for drill and practice, and for grammar is made vivid within ten seconds of checking out YouTube. Here’s a sample comment:

NOW UV STARTED READIN DIS DUNT STOP THIS IS SO SCARY. SEND THIS OVER TO 5 VIDEOS IN 143 MINUTES WHEN UR DONE PRESS F6 AND UR CRUSHES NAME WILL APPEAR ON THE SCREEN IN BIG LETTERS. THIS IS SO SCARY? BECAUSE IT ACTUALLY WORKs

We’re all going down the drain. Too much profanity, no verb conjugation, incomplete thoughts, and poor analysis, everywhere you look, even among people running for president.

I don’t think the problem is lack of access to role models, or to Strunk & White, or to strict teachers.

I think the problem is that kids don’t care. Because they don’t have to. And if someone doesn’t care, all the drilling isn’t going to change a thing.

The way we save the written word, intellectual discourse, and reason is by training kids to care.

Only 3% of Americans can locate Greece on a map. (That’s not true,
but if it were, you wouldn’t be surprised, because we’re idiots about stuff like that.)

The question is: Will spending more time drilling kids on the map of the world solve this problem? Is our apathy about world affairs a function of a lack of exposure to the map in school?

Of course not.

No, the problem isn’t that we haven’t spent enough hours memorizing the map. The problem is that we don’t want to.

Teachers aren’t given the time or the resources or, most important, the expectation that they should sell students on
why
.

A kid who is into dinosaurs has no trouble discussing the allosaurus/brontosaurus controversy. A student interested in fixing up his dad’s old car will have no trouble understanding the mechanics of the carburetor. And the young Hillary Clintons among us, those who are fascinated by the world, understand quite clearly where Greece is.

If you’re running an institution based on compliance and obedience, you don’t reach for motivation as a tool. It feels soft, even liberal, to imagine that you have to sell people on making the effort to learn what’s on the agenda.

I’m not sure it matters how it feels to the teacher. What matters is that motivation is the only way to generate real learning, actual creativity, and the bias for action that is necessary for success.

OPEN BOOK, OPEN NOTE

Futurist Michio Kaku points out that soon, it will be easy for every student and worker to have contact lenses hooked up to the Internet.

One use will be that whatever you’re reading can be instantly searched online, and any questions that can be answered this way, will be answered this way. Already, there are simple plug-ins that allow you to search any word or phrase in the document you’re currently reading online.

Forget about futurists and contact lenses. This is something we can do right now, on any text on any screen on just about any computer.

What’s the point of testing someone’s ability to cram for a test if we’re never going to have to cram for anything ever again? If I can
find the answer in three seconds online, the skill of memorizing a fact for twelve hours (and then forgetting it) is not only useless, it’s insane.

In an open-book/open-note environment, the ability to synthesize complex ideas and to invent new concepts is far more useful than drill and practice. It might be harder (at first) to write tests, and it might be harder to grade them, but the goal of school isn’t to make the educational-industrial complex easy to run; it’s to create a better generation of workers and citizens.

Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very different vision of how school can work. He’s already raised millions of dollars from Bill Gates and others, and his site currently offers more than 2,600 video lectures that (for free) teach everything from Calculus to World History. To date, the lectures have been delivered almost a hundred million times.

None of the videos are as good as they will be in two years, just as Wikipedia, Google, and Amazon started as mere shadows of their current selves. But as each video is replaced by a better one, as others start competing to increase the quality, here’s what will happen:

There will be a free, universal library of courses in the cloud online, accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Every lecture, constantly improved, on every conceivable topic. This means that students will be able to find precisely the lecture they need, and to watch it at their own speed, reviewing it at will.

The next day at school, teachers can do what they want to do anyway—coach and help students in places they are stuck. In a school like this, the notion that every student will have to be in sync and watch the same (live!) lecture at the same time will become absurd. And for good reason.

The most visible symptom of the death of traditional schooling is going to be the rise of online video lectures. Not just online, but specific. Specific to a topic, to a problem, to a student’s status. With the long tail
of the Internet at our disposal, why settle for a generic lecture, the local lecture, the lecture that everyone else needs to see?

And most important, why settle for an amateur lecture, not very good, given by a teacher with a lot of other priorities? It’s a bit like requiring teachers to write their own textbooks.

Check out
Udacity.com
, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, who until recently, was a tenured professor at Stanford. His goal is to teach courses that have 200,000 simultaneous students. And why not?

He reports that in the last class he taught at Stanford, every single person in the class who got a perfect grade wasn’t in the classroom at all—all the A students were remote, some as remote as Afghanistan. Many of the students would watch a lecture twenty or more times because they were so focused on learning what he had to teach.

I’ve shared one example after another of what happens when we combine motivated students with specific and refined educational assets delivered digitally. It’s easy to see how it works for computer programmers and math students, for those that want to learn a craft or understand a novel (not for a grade, but because they actually care).

And yet, like all things associated with the ever-increasing yield of the networked economy, the examples are discounted. “Yes,” people said after Amazon sold a few books, “it works for specialty books, but it will never work for novels.” And then, after novels started selling a third or more of their copies online, the skeptics said it would never work for DVDs or MP3s or chocolate bars. But it did.

Just as online shopping scaled, an inexorable rise due to the efficiencies of the connections created by the ’Net, so will the digital delivery of information permeate every nook and cranny of what we learn.

What we can’t do, though, is digitize passion. We can’t force the student to want to poke around and discover new insights online. We can’t merely say, “here,” and presume the students will do the hard (and scary) work of getting over the hump and conquering their fears.

Without school to establish the foundation and push and pull our students, the biggest digital library in the world is useless.

Slader is a new website that further clarifies the future teaching process. Slader hired dozens of nerds, and together they solved every homework problem in hundreds of editions of dozens of math textbooks.

Want to see the answer to any math homework problem? It’s free.

Want to see it worked out? That’ll cost a few pennies.

It’s CliffsNotes for math (and soon, they’ll be doing English assignments as well).

This, it seems to me, is a ridiculous subterfuge when the efficient answer is obvious (though difficult to reach). Instead of playing cat and mouse with textbook publishers (who will quickly renumber the assignments and change numbers here and there in order to break Slader), why not interact directly with the teachers?