Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (70 page)

In a crowded market, it’s no surprise that people will choose someone who appears to offer more in return for our time and money. So admissions officers look for the talented, as do the people who do the hiring for corporations. Spotting the elite, the charismatic, and the obviously gifted might be a smart short-term strategy, but it punishes the rest of us, and society as a whole.

The opportunity for widespread education and skills improvement is far bigger than it has ever been before. When we can deliver lectures and lessons digitally, at scale, for virtually free, the only thing holding us back is the status quo (and our belief in the permanence of status).

School serves a real function when it activates a passion for lifelong learning, not when it establishes permanent boundaries for an elite class.

1. Grades are an illusion
   
2. Your passion and insight are reality
   
3. Your work is worth more than mere congruence to an answer key
   
4. Persistence in the face of a skeptical authority figure is a powerful ability
   
5. Fitting in is a short-term strategy, standing out pays off in the long run
   
6. If you care enough about the work to be criticized, you’ve learned enough for today
   

Teach kids how to lead

Help them learn how to solve interesting problems

Leadership is the most important trait for players in the connected revolution. Leadership involves initiative, and in the connected world, nothing happens until you step up and begin, until you start driving without a clear map.

And as the world changes ever faster, we don’t reward people who can slavishly follow yesterday’s instructions. All of the value to the individual (and to the society she belongs to) goes to the individual who can draw a new map, who can solve a problem that didn’t even exist yesterday.

Hence the question I ask every teacher who reads from her notes, every teacher who demands rote memorization, and every teacher who comes at schooling from a posture of power: are you delivering these two precious gifts to our children? Will the next generation know more facts than we do, or will it be equipped to connect with data, and turn that data into information and leadership and progress?

One theory is that if you force someone to learn math or writing or soccer, there’s a chance she will become passionate about it and then run with what she knows.

The other theory is that once someone becomes passionate about a goal, she will stop at nothing to learn what she needs to learn to accomplish it.

The question, then, is: Should we be teaching and encouraging and demanding passion (and then letting competence follow)? In other words, if we dream big enough, won’t the rest take care of itself?

I think that part of effective schooling is helping students calibrate their dreams. Big enough doesn’t mean too big—so big that your dream is a place to hide.

The student who dreams of playing in the NBA, starring in a television show, or winning the lottery is doing precisely the wrong sort of dreaming. These are dreams that have no stepwise progress associated with them, no reasonable path to impact, no unfair advantage to the extraordinarily well prepared.

School is at its best when it gives students the expectation that they will not only dream big, but dream dreams that they can work on every day until they accomplish them—not because they were chosen by a black-box process but because they worked hard enough to reach them.

Here’s an interesting question: When a good student gets a comment like that on a report card from a teacher in just one of his classes, who is at fault?

Does it matter if the student is six or sixteen?

If the teacher of the future has a job to do, isn’t addressing this problem part of it? Perhaps it’s
all
of it …

It’s human nature to avoid responsibility, to avoid putting ourselves in the path of blame so we can be singled out by the head of the village for punishment. And why not? That’s risky behavior, and it’s been bred out of us over millions of generations.

The challenge is that the connected economy demands people who won’t hide, and it punishes everyone else. Standing out and standing for something are the attributes of a leader, and initiative is now the only posture that generates results.

We’re clever, though, and our amygdala and primitive lizard brain see a way to use big dreams to
avoid
responsibility. If the dream is huge, we get applause from our peers and our teachers but are able to hide out because, of course, the dream is never going to come true, the auditions won’t pan out, the cameras won’t roll, the ball won’t be passed, and we’ll never be put on the spot.

School needs to put us on the spot. Again and again and again it needs to reward students for being willing to be singled out. Learning to survive those moments, and then feel compelled to experience them again—this is the only way to challenge the lizard.

The lights go out and it’s just the three of us

You me and all that stuff we’re so scared of

—Bruce Springsteen

The formula doesn’t work. It never has. And yet we act as if it does.

We act as if there are only two steps to school:

Get kids to behave

Fill them with facts and technique

Apparently, if you take enough of each, enough behavior and enough technique, then suddenly, as if springing from verdant soil, passion arrives.

I’m not seeing it.

I think that passion often arrives from success. Do something well, get feedback on it, and perhaps you’d like to do it again. Solve an interesting problem and you might get hooked.

But if it takes ten years for you to do math well, that’s too long to wait for passion.

We can agree that our culture and our economy would benefit from more builders, more people passionate about science and technology. So, how do we make more of them?

We need more brave artists, too, and some poets. We need leaders and people passionate enough about their cause to speak up and go through discomfort to accomplish something. Can these skills be taught or amplified?

In the connected age, reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results.

Reading leads to more reading. Writing leads to better writing. Better writing leads to a bigger audience and more value creation. And the process repeats.

Typical industrial schooling kills reading. Among Americans, the typical high school graduate reads no more than one book a year for fun, and a huge portion of the population reads zero. No books! For the rest of their lives, for 80 years, bookless.

When we associate reading with homework and tests, is it any wonder we avoid it?

But reading is the way we open doors. If our economy and our culture grows based on the exchange of ideas and on the interactions of the informed, it fails when we stop reading.

At the Harlem Village Academy, every student (we’re talking fifth graders and up) reads
fifty books a year
. If you want to teach kids to love being smart, you must teach them to love to read.

If the non-advantaged kids in Harlem can read fifty books a year, why can’t your kids? Why can’t you?

If every school board meeting and every conversation with a principal started with that simple question, imagine the progress we’d make as a culture. What would our world be like if we read a book a week, every week?

Writing is the second half of the equation. Writing is organized,
permanent talking, it is the brave way to express an idea. Talk comes with evasion and deniability and vagueness. Writing, though, leaves no room to wriggle. The effective writer in the connected revolution can see her ideas spread to a hundred or a million people. Writing (whether in public, now that everyone has a platform, or in private, within organizations) is the tool we use to spread ideas. Writing activates the most sophisticated part of our brains and forces us to organize our thoughts.

Teach a kid to write without fear and you have given her a powerful tool for the rest of her life. Teach a kid to write boring book reports and standard drivel and you’ve taken something precious away from a student who deserves better.

Consider the case of Katherine Bomkamp, a twenty-year-old who will never struggle to find a job, never struggle to make an impact.

She’s not a genius, nor is she gifted with celebrity looks or a prodigy’s piano skills. What she has is the desire to make things, to figure things out, and to make a difference.

In high school, she spent a fair amount of time with her dad at Walter Reed Army Hospital. Her father is disabled and he had to visit often for his treatment. While sitting in waiting rooms with wounded soldiers, Katherine learned a lot about phantom limb syndrome. Like many idealistic kids, she thought she’d try to help.

What makes this story noteworthy is that Katherine actually did something. She didn’t give up and she didn’t wait to get picked. Instead, she got to work. Entering her idea in a school science fair, Katherine spent months finding experts who could help make her idea a reality. This is a revolutionary notion—that there are experts just waiting to help. But, as she discovered, there
are
people waiting to help, waiting for someone interested in causing change to reach out to them. Some are there in person, while others are online. The facts are there, the vendors are there, the case studies are there, just waiting to be found.

It was the science fair and the support of those around her that gave her an opening to do something outside of the path that’s so clearly
marked. Katherine did what so many kids are capable of doing but aren’t expected to do.

A few years later, the Pain Free Socket is about to be patented and may very well become a life-changing device for thousands of amputees. Katherine’s life is already changed, though. She called the bluff of the system and didn’t wait. What she learned in high school is something that precious few of her peers learn: how to figure things out and make them happen.

That’s the key question in the story of Katherine Bomkamp and so many other kids who end up making a difference.

Did they reach their level of accomplishment and contribution
because
of what they are taught in school, or
despite
it?

That question ought to be asked daily, in every classroom and at every school board meeting. The answer is almost always
both
, but I wonder what happens to us if we amplify that positive side of that equation.

Or possibly both.

Public schools were the great leveler, the tool that would enable class to be left behind as a meritocracy took hold.

At schools for “higher”-class kids, though, at fancy boarding schools or rich suburban schools or at Yale, there’s less time spent on competence and more time spent dreaming. Kids come to school with both more competence (better reading and speech skills) and bigger dreams (because those dreams are inculcated at home). As a result, the segregation of school by class reinforces the cycle, dooming the lower classes to an endless game of competence catch-up, one that even if it’s won won’t lead to much because the economy spends little time seeking out the competent.

Give a kid a chance to dream, though, and the open access to resources
will help her find exactly what she needs to know to go far beyond competence.

The scarcity model of the industrial age teaches us that there are only a finite number of “good” jobs. Big companies have limited payrolls, of course, so there’s only one plant manager. Big universities have just one head of the English department. Big law firms have just one managing partner, and even the Supreme Court has only nine seats.

As we’ve seen, the ranking starts early, and if you (the thinking goes) don’t get into a good (oh, I mean famous) college, you’re doomed.

This is one of the reasons that college has become an expensive extension of high school. The goal is to get in (and possibly get out), but what happens while you’re there doesn’t matter much if the goal is merely to claim your slot.

When higher education was reserved for elite academics, there was a lot of learning for learning’s sake, deep dives into esoteric thought that occasionally led to breakthroughs. Once industrialized, though, college became yet another holding tank, though without the behavior boundaries we work so hard to enforce in high school.

In the post-industrial age of connection, though, the slotting and the scarcity are far less important. We care a great deal about what you’ve done, less about the one-word alumnus label you bought. Because we can see whom you know and what they think of you, because we can see how you’ve used the leverage the Internet has given you, because we can see if you actually are able to lead and actually are able to solve interesting problems—because of all these things, college means something new now.

For four hundred years, higher education in the U.S. has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to
millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn. Here’s how I’m looking at it.

1.
Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.