Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (67 page)

There are two things I take away from this:

a.
This is a rare choice, which is quite disturbing. Someone actually choosing to become a polymath, signing himself up to get a little smarter on a new topic every single day.

b.
The resources available for this endeavor have increased by several orders of magnitude. Available resources and instruction have gone from scarce to abundant in less than a decade, and the only barrier
to learning for most young adults in the developed world is now merely the decision to learn.

My argument is that the entire schooling establishment can be organized around this new widely available resource.

There’s an economic argument to make about schools and the world of dreams. Small dreams are hurting us like never before. Small dreams represent an attitude of fear; they sabotage our judgment and they keep us from acquiring new skills, skills that are there if we’re willing to learn them.

There’s a societal argument to make as well. All of us are losing out because we’ve done such a good job of persuading our future generations not to dream. Think of the art we haven’t seen, the jobs that haven’t been created, and the productivity that hasn’t been imagined because generations have been persuaded not to dream big.

And there’s a moral argument, too. How dare we do this, on a large scale? How dare we tell people that they aren’t talented enough, musical enough, gifted enough, charismatic enough, or well-born enough to lead?

Industrial jobs no longer create new industrial jobs in our country. A surplus of obedient hourly workers leads to unemployment, not more factories.

On the other hand, creative jobs lead to more creative jobs. Self-starting, self-reliant, initiative-taking individuals often start new projects that need new workers. In my opinion, the now politicized role of “job creator” has nothing at all to do with tax cuts and everything to do with people who trained to have the guts to raise their hands and say, “I’m starting.”

An economy that’s stuck needs more inventors, scientists, explorers, and artists. Because those are the people who open doors for others.

Fairy tales tell us a lot about what people want. Girls want to be princesses, boys want to be heroes. And both girls and boys want to be chosen. They want to have the glass slipper fit, or the mighty gods from another planet give them a lantern that energizes their power ring.

In a monarchy or similarly authoritarian system, there was no way in the world you were going to accomplish much of anything unless you were picked. Picked by the chief or the local ruler or the priest or the nobleman in search of a wife.

It was the best you could hope for.

We’ve heard of Mozart because he was picked, first by Prince-elector Maximilian III of Bavaria, and then by a string of other powerful royalty. Michelangelo was picked by the Pope. Catherine of Aragon was picked by one man after another (with plenty of dowry politics involved) until she ended up with Henry VIII.

When life is short and brutish, and when class trumps everything, fairy-tale dreams are about all we can believe we are entitled to.

The Industrial Revolution created a different sort of outcome, a loosening of class-based restrictions and the creation of new careers and pathways.

Suddenly, folks like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford became the pickers. Now there were far more people who could pick you (and offer you a job), and thus the stakes were even higher because the odds were better. Not only were there more ways to be picked, but suddenly and amazingly, there was a chance that just about anyone could become powerful enough to move up the ladder.

Our fairy tales started to change.

When the economy hit its stride after World War II, it led to an explosion in dreams. Kids dreamed of walking on the moon or inventing a new kind of medical device. They dreamed of industry and science and politics and invention, and often, those dreams came true. It wasn’t surprising to get a chemistry set for your ninth birthday—and it was filled
not with straightforward recipes, but with tons of cool powders and potions that burst into flame or stank up the entire house.

A generation dreamed of writing a bestseller or inventing a new kind of car design or perfecting a dance move.

We look back on that generation with a bit of awe. Those kids could dream.

And then schools refocused on mass and scale, and the dreams faded. While these new heroes created generations of kids who wanted to disrupt the world as they did, they also sowed the seeds for the end of those dreams.

It turns out that industry scales. Little businesses turn into big ones. One McDonald’s turns into ten thousand. One scientist at Pfizer creates a pathway for one hundred or one thousand obedient assistants and sales reps.

Fifty years ago, businesses realized that they were facing two related problems:

They needed more workers, more well-trained, compliant, and yes, cheap workers willing to follow specific instructions …

and

They needed more customers. More well-trained, pliable, eager-to-consume customers watching TV regularly and waiting to buy what they had to sell.

Dreamers don’t help with either of these problems. Dreamers aren’t busy applying for jobs at minimum wage, they don’t eagerly buy the latest fashions, and they’re a pain in the ass to keep happy.

The solution sounds like it was invented at some secret meeting at the Skull and Bones, but I don’t think it was. Instead, it was the outcome of a hundred little decisions, the uncoordinated work of thousands of corporations and political lobbyists:

School is a factory, and the output of that factory is compliant workers who buy a lot of stuff.
These students are trained to dream small dreams.

What about the famous ones we hear about? Surely the successful people we read about have something special going on …

Majora Carter grew up in the 1960s in the South Bronx. She wasn’t supposed to have dreams; neither were her classmates. The economic impediments were too big; there wasn’t enough money to spend on schools, on support, on teachers who cared.

And yet Majora grew up to be, according to
Fast Company
, one of the hundred most creative people in business, a TED speaker, a community activist, and a successful consultant. Her fellow students are still waiting to get the call.

Dreamers don’t have special genes. They find circumstances that amplify their dreams. If the mass-processing of students we call school were good at creating the dreamers we revere, there’d be far more of them. In fact, many of the famous ones, the successful ones, and the essential ones are part of our economy despite the processing they received, not because of it.

The economy demands that we pick ourselves. School teaches us otherwise.

I’m arguing for a new set of fairy tales, a new expectation of powerful dreaming.

After all, willpower is the foundation of every realized dream.

Dreams fade away because we can’t tolerate the short-term pain necessary to get to our long-term goal. We find something easier, juicier, sexier, and more now, so we take it, leaving our dreams abandoned on the side of the road.

But is willpower an innate, genetic trait, something we have no say over?

It turns out that (good news) willpower can be taught. It can be taught by parents and by schools. Stanford researcher Kelly McGonigal has written about this, as has noted researcher Roy Baumeister.

If willpower can be taught, why don’t we teach it?

Simple: because industrialists don’t need employees with willpower, and marketers loathe consumers who have it.

Instead of teaching willpower, we expect kids to develop it on their own. Colleges and others have to sniff around guessing about who has
developed this skill—generally, it’s the students who have managed to accomplish something in high school, not just go along to get along. In other words, the ones who haven’t merely followed instructions.

Years ago, I sat in on a fifth-grade class ostensibly working on a math project.

Mary Everest Boole was a mathematician in the 1800s, the wife of the inventor of Boolean logic. One of her legacies was string art, a craft designed to teach math to students. The project took the nub of Mary’s idea and industrialized it into a make-work craft project.

My job was to bring the hammers, twenty-four of them, which I had bought for cheap at the local hardware store. The students were using little brass nails to create patterns on inexpensive pine boards—and then they were going to use string to interlace modulo-nine patterns on the nails, creating (ostensibly) both learning and art.

At the start of the class, the teacher gave the students instructions, including the stern advice that they needed to be sure that the nails went in quite firmly.

For the next half hour, I sat and listened to twenty-four students loudly driving nails. I’m not sure if more nails led to more learning, but it was certainly noisy. (One thousand nails, thirty strikes per nail—you get the idea.)

Then the teacher interrupted the class and called a student (ten years old) to the front of the room. “I said,” she intoned, raising her voice, “that all the nails had to be put in
firmly
.” She made him wiggle a few nails. They were loose.

I will never forget what happened next. She didn’t ask him to hammer the nails in a little tighter.

No.

She stood there, and with the entire class watching and with the little kid near tears, took each and every loose nail out of the board. A half an hour of solid (and loud) hammering, for nothing. She intentionally humiliated him, for one clear reason. The message was obvious: I am
in charge, and my instructions matter. You will conform and you will meet the quality standards or you will be punished.

If there’s a better way to steal the desire to dream, I’m not sure what it is.

Do parents mean well?

It’s about at this point in the discussion that parents get a bit squeamish. We all want the best for children—and many parents are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get the best. We will hire tutors, track down better schools, fret over report cards, go to parent-teacher conferences, and drive ourselves crazy worrying about homework or the kind of felt used to complete a school project.

But the sanctity of performance/testing/compliance-based schooling is rarely discussed and virtually never challenged.

It’s crazy to imagine a suburban school district having serious talks about abandoning state standards, rejecting the SAT, or challenging the admissions criteria at famous colleges (more about famous in a minute).

There’s a myth at work here, one that cannot and will not be seriously questioned. The myth says:

Great performance in school leads to happiness and success.

And the corollary:

Great parents have kids who produce great performance in school.

It doesn’t matter that neither of these is true. What matters is that finding a path that might be better is just too risky for someone who has only one chance to raise his kids properly.

The industrial model of school is organized around exposing students to ever-increasing amounts of stuff and then testing them on it.

Collecting dots.

Almost none of it is spent in teaching them the skills necessary to
connect
dots.

The magic of connecting dots is that once you learn the techniques, the dots can change but you’ll still be good at connecting them.

David Weinberger writes,

As knowledge becomes networked, the smartest person in the room isn’t the person standing at the front lecturing us, and isn’t the collective wisdom of those in the room. The smartest person in the room is the room itself: the network that joins the people and ideas in the room, and connects to those outside of it. It’s not that the network is becoming a conscious super-brain. Rather, knowledge is becoming inextricable from—literally unthinkable without—the network that enables it. Our task is to learn how to build smart rooms—that is, how to build networks that make us smarter, especially since, when done badly, networks can make us distressingly stupider.

This is revolutionary, of course. The notion that each of us can assemble a network (of people, of data sources, of experiences) that will make us either smart or stupid—that’s brand new and important.

What is the typical school doing to teach our students to become good at this?

A by-product of industrialization is depersonalization. Because no one is responsible for anything that we can see, because deniability is built into the process, it’s easy and tempting to emotionally check out, to go along to get along.

When the factory owner treats you like you’re easily replaceable, a natural response is to act the part.

It’s no surprise to read quotes like this (from
Wired
):

“This is something to commit to,” he says. He takes a break and gives me the tour, pointing out different people in the community, tells me
who they are and what they do for Occupy Boston. The community gives them something to care about, he explains. “That’s what a lot of this is. We’re rediscovering our self respect.”

At school, we have created a vacuum of self-respect, a desert with nothing other than grades or a sports team to believe in or commit to. The only way for a student to get respect inside the system of school is to earn temporary approval from a teacher he won’t likely see again any time soon. If that teacher is mercurial, petty, or inconsistent, the student is told to deal with it.