Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (74 page)

There seems to be a cultural bias against getting better at things that matter. School has left such a bad taste that if what we need to do to improve feels like reading a book, attending a lecture, or taking a test, many of us tend to avoid it.

Consider how easy (and helpful) it would be to get better at:

Giving a presentation

Handling a negotiation

Writing marketing copy

Shaking hands

Dressing for a meeting

Making love

Analyzing statistics

Hiring people

Dealing with authority figures

Verbal self-defense

Handling emotionally difficult situations

And yet … most of us wing it. We make the same mistakes that many who came before us did, and we shy away from the hard (but incredibly useful) work of getting better at the things that matter.

Not because we don’t want to get better. Because we’re afraid that it will be like school, which doesn’t make us better but merely punishes us until we comply.

Thousands of caring and committed parents are taking their kids out of the industrial system of schooling and daring to educate them themselves. It takes guts and time and talent to take this on and to create an environment that’s consistently challenging and focused enough to deliver on the potential our kids are bringing to the world.

There are several problems, though—reasons for us to be concerned about masses of parents doing this solo:

The learning curve. Without experience, new teachers are inevitably going to make the same mistakes, mistakes that are easily avoided the tenth time around … which most home educators will never get to.

The time commitment. The cost of one parent per student is huge—and halving it for two kids is not nearly enough. Most families can’t afford this, and few people have the patience to pull it off.

Providing a different refuge from fear. This is the biggest one, the largest concern of all. If the goal of the process is to create a level of fearlessness, to create a free-range environment filled with exploration and all the failure that entails, most parents just don’t have the guts to pull this off. It’s one thing for a caring and trained professional to put your kids through a sometimes harrowing process; it’s quite another to do it yourself.

How old is the Earth?

What’s the right price to pay for this car?

Improv

How to do something no one has ever done before

Design and build a small house

Advanced software interface design

This is an issue very much aligned with the one we’re dealing with here. The very forces that are upending our need for school are at work at libraries as well. Here’s my most retweeted blog post ever:

What Is a Public Library For?

First, how we got here:

Before Gutenberg, a book cost about as much as a small house. As a result, only kings and bishops could afford to own a book of their own.

This situation naturally led to the creation of shared books, of libraries where scholars (everyone else was too busy not starving) could come to read books that they didn’t have to own.
The library as warehouse for books worth sharing.

Only after that did we invent the librarian.

The librarian isn’t a clerk who happens to work at a library. A librarian is a data hound, a guide, a sherpa, and a teacher. The librarian is the interface between reams of data and the untrained but motivated user.

After Gutenberg, books got a lot cheaper. More individuals built their own collections. At the same time, though, the number of titles exploded, and the demand for libraries did as well. We definitely needed a warehouse to store all this bounty, and more than ever we needed a librarian to help us find what we needed.
The library is a house for the librarian.

Industrialists (particularly Andrew Carnegie) funded the modern American library. The idea was that in a pre-electronic media age, the working man needed to be both entertained and slightly educated. Work all day and become a more civilized member of society by reading at night.

And your kids? Your kids need a place with shared encyclopedias and plenty of fun books, hopefully inculcating a lifelong love of reading, because reading makes all of us more thoughtful, better informed, and more productive members of a civil society.

Which was all great, until now.

Want to watch a movie? Netflix is a better librarian, with a better library, than any library in the country. The Netflix librarian knows about every movie, knows what you’ve seen and what you’re likely to want to see. If the goal is to connect viewers with movies, Netflix wins.

This goes further than a mere sideline that most librarians resented anyway. Wikipedia and the huge data banks of information have basically eliminated the library as the best resource for
anyone doing amateur research (grade school, middle school, even undergrad). Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don’t schlep to the library to use an out-of-date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won’t unless coerced.

They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

When kids go to the mall instead of the library, it’s not that the mall won; it’s that the library lost.

And then we need to consider the rise of the Kindle. An ebook costs about $1.60 in 1962 dollars. A thousand ebooks can fit on one device, easily. Easy to store, easy to sort, easy to hand to your neighbor. Five years from now, electronic readers will be as expensive as Gillette razors, and ebooks will cost less than the blades.

Librarians who are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending the library-as-warehouse concept, as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher, and impresario.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resources are knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books.
Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information. (Please don’t say I’m anti-book! I think through my actions and career choices, I’ve demonstrated my pro-book chops. I’m not saying I
want
paper to go away, I’m merely describing what’s inevitably occurring.) We all love the vision of the underprivileged kid bootstrapping himself out of poverty with books, but now (most of the time), the insight and leverage are going to come from being fast and smart with online resources, not from hiding in the stacks.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and to coordinate and invent projects
worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring to bear domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information.

The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user-serviceable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility or blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many Web terminals that there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight—it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are a thousand things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission:
take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community, and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.

If there’s a part of the educational system that should be easier to fix, it’s higher education. We’ve seen really significant changes in the physical plant, the marketing, and the structure of many universities, usually in response to student demand.

University presidents are responsive to application rates, donations, and football attendance—they understand that their seven-figure salaries are often a reflection of how the world of alumni, parents, and
students feel about them. Unlike local high schools, colleges compete. They compete for students, for professors, and for funding.

Colleges have an opportunity to dramatically shift what it means to be educated, but they won’t be able to do this while acting as a finishing school for those who have a high-school diploma. College can’t merely be high school but louder.

So, that said, here are some thoughts from a former adjunct professor, an alum, and a parent of future college students (no football here, sorry).

Spend time around suburban teenagers and their parents, and pretty soon the discussion will head inexorably to the notion of going to a “good college.”

Harvard, of course, is a good college. So is Yale. Add to the list schools like Notre Dame and Middlebury.

How do we know that these schools are good?

If you asked me if a Mercedes is a good car compared to, say, a Buick, by most measures we could agree that the answer is yes. Not because of fame or advertising, but because of the experience of actually driving the car, the durability, the safety—many of the things we buy a car for.

The people who are picking the college, though, the parents and the students about to invest four years and nearly a quarter of a million dollars—what are they basing this choice on? Do they have any data at all about the long-term happiness of graduates?

These schools aren’t necessarily good. What they are is
famous
.

Loren Pope, former education editor at the
New York Times
, points out that colleges like Hiram and Hope and Eckerd are actually
better
schools, unless the goal is to find a brand name that will impress the folks at the country club. His breakthrough book,
Colleges that Change Lives
, combines rigorous research with a passion for unmasking the extraordinary overselling of famous colleges.

If college is supposed to be just like high school but with more parties, a famous college is precisely what parents should seek. If we view the purpose of college as a stepping stone, one that helps you jump the
line while looking for a good job, then a famous college is the way to go. The line for those good jobs is long, and a significant benefit of a famous college is more than superstition—associating with that fame may get you a better first job.

A famous college might not deliver an education that’s transformative to the student, but if that’s not what you’re looking for, you might as well purchase a valuable brand name that the alumnus can use for the rest of his life.

But is that all you’re getting? If the sorting mechanism of college is all that’s on offer, the four years spent there are radically overpriced.

It turns out that students who apply to Harvard and get in but don’t go are just as successful and at least as happy throughout their lives as the ones who do attend. Try to imagine any other branded investment of that size that delivers as little.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both dropped out of college (one more famous than the other). It turned out that getting in was sufficient to give them a credibility boost.

Famous colleges are part of the labeling and ranking system but have virtually nothing to do with the education imparted or the long-term impact of the education received. If you need the label to accomplish your goals, go get the label. Either way, we ought to hold colleges to a much higher standard when it comes to transformative education.

For starters, though, start using the word
famous
when your instinct is to say
good
.

Here’s the essential truth: the only reported correlation between the SAT scores of a seventeen-year-old student and the success or happiness of that student when he’s thirty is a double counting of how the brand name of a famous college helped him get a better job early on. Double count? Sure. Because normalizing for the fame of the college in the short run, lousy SAT scores lead to just as much (if not more) life happiness, income, leadership ability, etc.

The circular reasoning, of course, is that the fame of college determines the number of students who apply, which determines the
“selectivity” (carefully put in quotes), which raises the typical SAT score of incoming students.

Kiplinger
, normally a reality-based magazine, ranked the fifty “best” private universities in the USA. The criteria were: admissions rate, freshman and graduating senior retention rate, and students per faculty member.

As we’ve seen, the admissions rate is nothing but a measure of how famous the college is, how good it is at getting applications. That’s the key reason that so many middle-level (there’s that ranking again) colleges spend a fortune on high school outreach. They do direct-mail campaigns to boost applications, which boosts their statistics, which boost their ratings, which lead to more applications because they are now famous.