Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (65 page)

One outgrowth of this analysis is that hourly workers are fundamentally different from salaried ones. If you are paid by the hour, the organization is saying to you, “I can buy your time an hour at a time, and replace you at any time.” Hourly workers were segregated, covered by different labor laws, and rarely, if ever, moved over to management.

School, no surprise, is focused on creating hourly workers, because that’s what the creators of school needed, in large numbers.

Think about the fact that school relentlessly downplays group work. It breaks tasks into the smallest possible measurable units. It does nothing to coordinate teaching across subjects. It often isolates teachers into departments. And most of all, it measures, relentlessly, at the individual level, and re-processes those who don’t meet the minimum performance standards.

Every one of those behaviors is a mirror of what happened in the factory of 1937.

Of course, business in the U.S. evolved over time to be less draconian than it was seventy years ago. Companies adopted a social contract (usually unstated). Union movements and public outcry led to the notion that if you were obedient and hardworking, your hourly gig would continue, probably until you retired, and then your pension would keep you comfortable.

In the last twenty years, though, under pressure from competition and shareholders, the hourly social contract has evaporated, and manufacturers and others that engage in factory work have gone back to a more pure form of Taylorism. No, Walmart and Target and Best Buy don’t bring “good jobs” to Brooklyn when they build a megamall. They bring hourly jobs with no advancement. How could there be? The pyramid is incredibly wide and not very tall, with thousands of hourly workers for every manager with significant decision-making ability.

Walmart has more than 2 million employees around the world, and perhaps a thousand people who set policy and do significant creative
work. Most of the others are hourly employees, easily replaced with little notice.

The bottom of our economy has gone back into the past, back into alignment with what school has perfected: taking advantage of people doing piecemeal labor.

This is not the future of our economy; it is merely the last well-lit path available to students who survive the traditional indoctrination process. If we churn out more workers like this, we will merely be fighting for more of the bottom of the pyramid, more of the world market’s share of bad jobs, cheaply executed.

There didn’t used to be one right way, one perfected method, one step-by-step approach to production.

But in the industrial age, scientific management is obvious when you think about it: record how long it takes to make something, change the way you do it, see if you can do it faster or better. Repeat.

Frederick Taylor was right—we could dramatically increase industrial productivity by measuring and systemizing the assembly line. His method became the standard for any assembly line that wanted to become more productive (and thus competitive).

Use your left hand, not your right, to pick this up. Turn up the lights. Lower the height of the counter. Process exactly six units per minute.

Scientific management changed the world as we knew it. And there’s no doubt it boosted productivity.

The rise of scientific management furthered the need for obedient and competent factory workers, individuals with enough skill and self-control to do precisely what they were told.

So it’s not a surprise that schools were enlisted to train future employees in just that—skill and self-control. Of course, it’s not self-control, really; it’s external control. The willingness (or tolerance) to accept external instruction and become compliant.

From there, from this position of wanting to manufacture compliant workers, it’s only a tiny step to scientific schooling.

Scientific schooling uses precisely the same techniques as scientific management. Measure (test) everyone. Often. Figure out which inputs are likely to create testable outputs. If an output isn’t easily testable, ignore it.

It would be a mistake to say that scientific education doesn’t work. It does work. It creates what we test.

Unfortunately, the things we desperately need (and the things that make us happy) aren’t the same things that are easy to test.

Hint: the old ones, the ones we imagine when we think about the placement office and the pension—the ones that school prepared us for—they’re gone.

In 1960, the top ten employers in the U.S. were GM, AT&T, Ford, GE, U.S. Steel, Sears, A&P, Esso, Bethlehem Steel, and IT&T. Eight of these (not so much Sears and A&P) offered substantial pay and a long-term career to hardworking people who actually made something. It was easy to see how the promises of advancement and a social contract could be kept, particularly for the “good student” who had demonstrated an ability and willingness to be part of the system.

Today, the top ten employers are Walmart, Kelly Services, IBM, UPS, McDonald’s, Yum (Taco Bell, KFC, et al), Target, Kroger, HP, and The Home Depot. Of these, only two (
two!
) offer a path similar to the one that the vast majority of major companies offered fifty years ago.

Burger flippers of the world, unite.

Here’s the alternative: What happens when there are fifty companies like Apple? What happens when there is an explosion in the number of new power technologies, new connection mechanisms, new medical approaches? The good jobs of the future aren’t going to involve working for giant companies on an assembly line. They all require individuals willing to chart their own path, whether or not they work for someone else.

The jobs of the future are in two categories: the downtrodden assemblers of cheap mass goods and the respected creators of the unexpected.

The increasing gap between those racing to the bottom and those
working toward the top is going to make the 99% divide seem like nostalgia.

Virtually every company that isn’t forced to be local is shifting gears so it doesn’t have to be local. Which means that the call center and the packing center and the data center and the assembly line are quickly moving to places where there are cheaper workers. And more compliant workers.

Is that going to be you or your kids or the students in your town?

The other route—the road to the top—is for the few who figure out how to be linchpins and artists. People who are hired because they’re totally worth it, because they offer insight and creativity and innovation that just can’t be found easily.
Scarce skills combined with even scarcer attitudes almost always lead to low unemployment and high wages.

An
artist
is someone who brings new thinking and generosity to his work, who does human work that changes another for the better. An artist invents a new kind of insurance policy, diagnoses a disease that someone else might have missed, or envisions a future that’s not here yet.

And a
linchpin
is the worker we can’t live without, the one we’d miss if she was gone. The linchpin brings enough gravity, energy, and forward motion to work that she makes things happen.

Sadly, most artists and most linchpins learn their skills and attitudes
despite
school, not because of it.

The future of our economy lies with the impatient. The linchpins and the artists and the scientists who will refuse to wait to be hired and will take things into their own hands, building their own value, producing outputs others will gladly pay for. Either they’ll do that on their own or someone will hire them and give them a platform to do it.

The only way out is going to be mapped by those able to dream.

The largest robotics competition in the world organizes hundreds of thousands of kids into a nationwide competition to build fighting robots and other technical fun.

Last year, more than 300,000 students participated, surrounded by
their peers and the 50,000 mentors and coaches who make the program possible. A recent university study of past participants found that FIRST participants in college were:

More than three times as likely to major specifically in engineering.

Roughly ten times as likely to have had an apprenticeship, internship, or co-op job in their freshman year.

Significantly more likely to achieve a postgraduate degree.

More than twice as likely to pursue a career in science and technology.

Nearly four times as likely to pursue a career specifically in engineering.

More than twice as likely to volunteer in their communities.

When you dream about building the best robot in the competition, you’ll find a way to get a lot done, and you’ll do it in a team. When you dream of making an impact, obstacles are a lot easier to overcome.

The magic of FIRST has nothing to do with teaching what a capacitor does, and everything to do with teamwork, dreams, and, most of all, expectations. FIRST is a movement for communicating and encouraging passion.

Those are the new replacements for obedience.

We sometimes (rarely) teach skill, but when it comes to judgment and attitude, we say to kids and their parents: you’re on your own.

Here’s what I want to explore: Can we teach people to care?

I know that we can teach them
not
to care; that’s pretty easy. But given the massive technological and economic changes we’re living through, do we have the opportunity to teach productive and effective caring? Can we teach kids to care enough about their dreams that they’ll care enough to develop the judgment, skill, and attitude to make them come true?

It’s not easy to find young Anglo kids in Cleveland or Topeka who crave tandoori chicken or shrimp vindaloo. And yet kids with almost the same DNA in Mumbai eat the stuff every day. It’s clearly not about genetics.

Perhaps households there approach the issue of food the way school teaches a new topic. First, kids are taught the history of Indian food, then they are instructed to memorize a number of recipes, and then there are tests. At some point, the pedagogy leads to a love of the food.

Of course not.

People around the world eat what they eat because of community standards and the way culture is inculcated into what they do. Expectations matter a great deal. When you have no real choice but to grow up doing something or eating something or singing something, then you do it.

If culture is sufficient to establish what we eat and how we speak and ten thousand other societal norms, why isn’t it able to teach us goal setting and passion and curiosity and the ability to persuade?

It can.

Teach the history of baseball, beginning with Abner Doubleday and the impact of cricket and imperialism. Have a test.

Starting with the Negro Leagues and the early barnstorming teams, assign students to memorize facts and figures about each player. Have a test.

Rank the class on who did well on the first two tests, and allow these students to memorize even more statistics about baseball players. Make sure to give equal time to players in Japan and the Dominican Republic. Send the students who didn’t do as well to spend time with a lesser teacher, but assign them similar work, just over a longer time frame. Have a test.

Sometime in the future, do a field trip and go to a baseball game. Make sure no one has a good time.

If there’s time, let kids throw a baseball around during recess.

Obviously, there are plenty of kids (and adults) who know far more about baseball than anyone could imagine knowing. And none of them learned it this way.

The industrialized, scalable, testable solution is almost never the best way to generate exceptional learning.

It used to be simple: the teacher was the cop, the lecturer, the source of answers, and the gatekeeper to resources. All rolled into one.

A teacher might be the person who is capable of delivering information. A teacher can be your best source of finding out how to do something or why something works.

A teacher can also serve to create a social contract or environment where people will change their posture, do their best work, and stretch in new directions. We’ve all been in environments where competition, social status, or the direct connection with another human being has changed us.

The Internet is making the role of content gatekeeper unimportant. Redundant. Even wasteful.

If there’s information that can be written down, widespread digital access now means that just about anyone can look it up. We don’t need a human being standing next to us to lecture us on how to find the square root of a number or sharpen an ax.

(Worth stopping for a second and reconsidering the revolutionary nature of that last sentence.)

What we
do
need is someone to persuade us that we
want
to learn those things, and someone to push us or encourage us or create a space where we want to learn to do them better.

If all the teacher is going to do is read her pre-written notes from a PowerPoint slide to a lecture hall of thirty or three hundred, perhaps she should stay home. Not only is this a horrible disrespect to the student, it’s a complete waste of the heart and soul of the talented teacher. Teaching is no longer about delivering facts that are unavailable in any other format.

Of course they should. They should have the freedom to not have to work two jobs, they should be aware enough of the changes in society to be focused on a new form of education, and they should have the skills and the confidence and the time to teach each child what he needs to know to succeed in a new age.

But they’re not and they don’t. And as a citizen, I’m not sure I want to trust a hundred million amateur teachers to do a world-class job of designing our future. Some parents (like mine) were just stunningly great at this task, serious and focused and generous while they relentlessly taught my sisters and me about what we could accomplish and how to go about it.