Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (72 page)

My first answer is, “so what?” It’s even easier for me to be dismissive since he’s talking about British history and I know not a thing about the Battle of Hastings.

The real question, though, in an always-on world, a world where I can look up what I need to know about the Battle of Hastings faster than I can type this, is, “how many of these kids leave school
caring
to know?”

The top-down, command-and-control, authoritarian, pedagogical approach to cramming facts into our kids is an unqualified failure.

When forced to comply, the smart kid plays along, the stupid one is punished, and neither of them produces much of value as a result.

To be as clear as possible here: In which situation does knowledge of the Boer War help society? And does it help because it means the student
was obedient and attentive enough to play along to get ahead (in other words, it’s a marker, a symptom of something else)? Or do we actually need the trivia?

Trivia? Yes, I think knowing the year that the Battle of Hastings was fought is trivia. On the other hand, understanding the sweep of history, being able to visualize the repeating cycles of conquest and failure, and having an innate understanding of the underlying economics of the world are essential insights for educated people to understand.

When access to information was limited, we needed to load students up with facts. Now, when we have no scarcity of facts or the access to them, we need to load them up with understanding.

If we’re looking for markers, we need better ones.

Those of us who have successfully navigated the industrial education system like it when people are well informed, when sentences are grammatically correct, and when our peers understand things like what electrons do and how the scientific method works.

Does the new economy demand that we give this up?

No. But applying ever more effort and rigor to ensure that every kid knows every fact is insane.

We’ve failed at that. We’ve failed miserably. We set out to teach everyone everything, en masse, with embarrassingly bad results. All because we built the system on a foundation of compliance.

What if we gave up on our failed effort to teach facts? What if we put 80% of that effort into making huge progress in teaching every kid to care, to set goals, to engage, to speak intelligently, to plan, to make good decisions, and to lead?

If there’s one classroom of beaten-down kids who scored well on their PSATs due to drill and practice, and another class of motivated dreamers, engaged in projects they care about and addicted to learning on a regular basis, which class are you going to bet on?

If we can give kids the foundation to dream, they’ll figure out the grammar and the history the minute it helps them reach their goals and make a difference.

Real learning happens in bursts, and often those bursts occur in places or situations that are out of the ordinary. Textbooks rarely teach us lessons we long remember. We learn about self-reliance when we get lost in the mall, we learn about public speaking when we have to stand up and give a speech.

In
Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, we discover that we have two brains—the primordial, hot-wired, instinctive brain and the more nuanced, mature, and rational brain. When we celebrate someone who is cerebral or thoughtful or just plain smart, what we’re really doing is marveling over how much he’s managed to use his rational brain. This is the person who doesn’t take the bait and get into a bar fight, the one who chooses the long-term productive path instead of the shortcut.

It turns out, though, that none of this happens if we haven’t also trained our instinctive brain to stand down. When we practice putting ourselves into situations, we give the rational brain a better chance to triumph. That’s why you’d like the doctor who sees you in the emergency room to have years of experience. Why performance in debates improves over time. And why a mom with three kids is surprisingly more calm than one with merely one.

Practice works because practice gives us a chance to relax enough to make smart choices.

A primary output of school should be to produce citizens who often choose the rational path. And that’s going to happen only if we’ve created enough situations for them to practice in.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astronomer and head of the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Natural History in New York, adds this one: “how to tell when someone else is full of it.”

I’d augment that with: “and how to tell when you are.”

The first reason is classic: it’s a new topic, and changing the curriculum is political, expensive, and time consuming. The bias is to leave it alone.

The second reason is related. Many teachers are more comfortable teaching areas in which they have significant experience and expertise, and computer programming doesn’t really line up for them in those areas.

But the third reason is the most important one, and gets to the heart of the argument: just about all the important things we need to teach in computer science can’t be taught by rote memorization, lectures, and tests. And school is organized around all three.

Computer programming is directed problem solving. If you solve the problem for the student by saying, “here we use this line of code, and here we use this one,” you will have done nothing at all to develop the deep thinking and arrangement skills that programmers use every day.

Instead, the process involves selling the student on the mission, providing access to resources, and then holding her responsible for an outcome that works. And repeat. And repeat.

Other topics that are just like computer programming:

Fine art

Selling

Presenting ideas

Creative writing

Product development

Law

Product management

Leadership

I don’t think it’s an accident that there are few traditional schools that teach these topics (in a moment, an aside about law schools).

These fields used to be left to the desire and persistence of the individual. If you wanted to excel in any of these areas, you were left to your own devices. You might, like Shepard Fairey, end up at Rhode Island
School of Design, but more commonly, you either found a mentor or figured it out as you went.

The apparent exception to the list above is law school. There are tons of law schools, probably too many, and they apparently churn out hundreds of thousands of lawyers on a regular basis.

What any lawyer will tell you, though, is that
law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer.

Law school is a three-year hazing process, a holding tank based on competitiveness and the absorption of irrelevant trivia, combined with high-pressure exams and social pressure.

The pedagogy of law school has nothing to do with being a lawyer, but everything to do with being surrounded by competitive individuals who use words as weapons and data as ammunition. This indoctrination is precisely what many lawyers benefit from.

(The ironic aside here is that law school provides precisely the sort of situation I wrote about earlier—it puts students into a place where they can develop their rational minds at the same time they learn to calm down and do the work, whatever the work happens to be.)

The method is clever: use the trope of school, the lectures and the tests, to create an environment where a likely by-product is that personalities are shaped and the culture of lawyering is fostered. In fact, they could replace half the classes with classes on totally different topics (Shakespeare, the history of magic) and produce precisely the same output.

Part of the make-believe academic sideshow is the role of the law reviews, publications that are produced by law schools and that feature academic treatises by law-school professors. Rather than acknowledging that law school is a vocational institution, top schools race to hire professors doing esoteric research. The $3.6 billion spent each year on law school tuition goes, in large part, to these professors.

According to a study done in 2005, 40% (!) of the law review articles in LexisNexis had never been cited (never, not even once) in a legal case or in other law review articles.

The problem is that this process is an expensive waste. Top law firms
have discovered that they have to take law school grads and train them for a year or more before they can do productive work—many clients refuse to pay for the efforts of first-year lawyers, and for good reason.

One more example of failing to ask, “what is school for?” and instead playing a competitive game with rules that make no sense.

One thing a student can’t possibly learn from a video lecture is that the teacher cares. Not just about the topic—that part is easy. No, the student can’t learn that the teacher cares about
him
. And being cared about, connected with, and pushed is the platform we need to do the emotional heavy lifting of committing to learn.

Learning is frightening for many because at any step along the way, you might fail. You might fail to get the next concept, or you might fail the next test. Easier, then, to emotionally opt out, to phone it in, to show up because you have to, because then failure isn’t up to you; it’s the system’s fault.

Every great teacher I have ever encountered is great because of her desire to communicate emotion, not (just) facts. A teacher wrote to me recently,

I teach first grade and while I have my mandated curriculum, I also teach my students how to think and not what to think. I tell them to question everything they will read and be told throughout the coming years.

I insist they are to find out their own answers. I insist they allow no one to homogenize who they are as individuals (the goal of compulsory education). I tell them their gifts and talents are given as a means to make a meaningful difference and create paradigm-changing shifts in our world, which are so desperately
needed. I dare them to be different and to lead, not follow. I teach them to speak out even when it’s not popular.

I teach them “college” words as they are far more capable than just learning “sat, mat, hat, cat, and rat.” Why can’t they learn words such as cogent, cognizant, oblivious, or retrograde just because they are 5 or 6? They do indeed use them correctly, which tells me they are immensely capable.

What’s clear to me is that teaching first graders words like cogent and retrograde isn’t the point. It’s not important that a six-year-old know that. What is important, vitally important, is that her teacher believes she could know it, ought to know it, and is capable of knowing it.

We’ve been spending a fortune in time and money trying to stop teachers from doing the one and only thing they ought to be doing: coaching. When a teacher sells the journey and offers support, the student will figure it out. That’s how we’re wired.

Tricky words indeed.

Where does one end and the other begin? Are you a lousy public speaker/runner/brainstormer because you’ve never been trained, or because there’s some mysterious thing missing from your DNA?

If you’re in the talent camp, then most achievement is preordained, and the only job of school or parents is to shore up the untalented while opening doors for the lucky few.

This is a dark and lonely job, one that’s appropriate for a pessimist masquerading as a realist.

Fortunately, most of us are of a different belief, willing to imagine that there are so many opportunities in our fast-moving culture that drive, when combined with background and belief, can overcome a lack of talent nine times out of ten.

If that’s true, our responsibility is to amplify drive, not use lack of talent as a cheap excuse for our failure to nurture dreams.

Let’s define dumb as being different from stupid.

Dumb means you don’t know what you’re supposed to know. Stupid means you know it but make bad choices.

Access to information has radically changed in just ten years. Kahn Academy, Wikipedia, a hundred million blogs, and a billion websites mean that if you’re interested enough, you can find the answer, wherever you are.

School, then, needs not to deliver information so much as to sell kids on wanting to find it.

Dumb used to be a by-product of lack of access, bad teachers, or poor parenting. Today, dumb is a choice, one that’s made by individuals who choose not to learn.

If you don’t know what you need to know, that’s fixable. But first you have to want to fix it.

Jean Schreiber wants kids in elementary school to spend more time playing with blocks and less time sitting at a desk and taking notes.

Is that okay with you?

Blocks for building.

Blocks for negotiating.

Blocks for pretending.

Blocks for modeling the real world.

Time spent on blocks takes time away from painstakingly learning to draw a 6, from memorizing the times tables, and from being able to remember the names of all 50 states.

Is that what school ought to be doing?

As a parent, you see what seven-year-olds in China are doing (trigonometry!) and you see the straight rows of silent students and rigor, and it’s easy to decide that there’s a race, and we’re losing.

We are losing, but what we’re losing is a race to produce the low-paid factory workers of tomorrow.

In New York, the Education Department just proposed a reading test
for all third-graders—a test that would last more than four hours over two days. Clearly, playing with blocks is not part of this requirement.

But go back to the original premise of this manifesto—that what we need is not to create obedient servants with a large bank of memorized data, but instead to build a generation of creative and motivated leaders—and suddenly, blocks make a lot of sense.