new work. new world. new education. the three must meet. tom peters/ 09.16.2004
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New Work. New World. New Education. The
Three Must Meet.
Tom Peters/09.16.2004
All Slides Available at …
tompeters.com
1. Work Will Never Be the Same!
108 X 5vs.
8 X 1** 540 vs. 8 (-98.5%)
And Now the Equivalent …
White Collar Revolution!
“A bureaucrat is an expensive
microchip.”Dan Sullivan, consultant and
executive coach
2. Welcome to an Age of Self-
determination!
Anne Busquet/ American Express
Not: “Age of the Internet”
Is: “Age of Customer Control”
The control revolution. The potentially monumental shift in
control from institutions to individuals made possible by new technology such as the Internet.
Source: Introduction, The Control Revolution, Andrew Shapiro
“The Web enables total transparency. People with
access to relevant information are beginning to challenge any type of
authority. The stupid, loyal and humble customer, employee, patient
or citizen is dead.”
Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale, Funky Business
Message: We are on the
cusp of a “People’s [customer/ patient/ citizen/ etc.]
Revolution.”
“Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy!”
The Cluetrain Manifesto
“HR Employee Self-Service/
ESS”John Pask/IHRIM
B2E*
*Business to Employee (IHRIM.link)
“Systems supporting one-to-one employee relationships
will add competitive advantage.” “Employees
expect far more access and control over their own
information.”Source: IHRIM.link (2-3.200)
“Managing Benefits:
Let Workers Do It”
Source: Headline, Money & Medicine, New York Times (12.06.00); cited are specialist
companies such as eBenX and Vivius of Minneapolis
“Human resource management (HRM) systems will begin to look more like customer
relationship management (CRM) systems—where we must know as much about our people
(existing and future) as we do about our customers.”
“Applications in the future will be much more personalizable. Every user will have a customized way of working with their
information. There will be more of a self-learning and intuitive model than we have today.”
Source: IHRIM Journal (12.2000)
“A seismic shift is underway in healthcare. The Internet is
delivering vast knowledge and new choices to consumers – raising their
expectations and, in many cases, handing them the controls.
[Healthcare] consumers are driving radical, fundamental change.”
Deloitte Research, “Winning the Loyalty of the eHealth Consumer”
“We expect consumers to move into a position of dominance in the early
years of the new century.”
Dean Coddington, Elizabeth Fischer, Keith Moore & Richard Clarke, Beyond Managed Care
Corporate Resistance to “It”
“It all goes back to fear of losing control!”
The Cluetrain Manifesto
How Dare They!
“Surfing the net is new route to college: But counselors fear that some students will pick schools with little guidance”
Headline, p1A, USA Today, 10.03.00
3. We Take Charge II: Brand You
Rules!
“If there is nothing very special about
your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won’t get noticed, and that
increasingly means you won’t get paid much either.”
Michael Goldhaber, Wired
2010 “Demographics”:
By 2010, full-time workers will be in the
minoritySource: MIT study (28August2000)
New World of Work
< 1 in 10 F500#1: Manpower Inc.
Freelancers/I.C.: 16M-25MTemps: 3M (incl. CEOs & lawyers)
Microbusinesses: 12M-27MTotal: 31M-55M
Source: Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation
Taylorism to Tailorism: “Free
Agency is the real new economy!”
Source: Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation
“The fundamental unit of the new economy is not the corporation, but the individual. Tasks aren’t assigned and controlled through a stable chain of command but are carried out autonomously by
independent contractors - e-lancers - who join together in fluid and temporary networks to sell goods and services. When the job is done, the network dissolves and its members become independent again, circulating through the economy, seeking the next assignment.”
Thomas Malone and Robert Laubacher
Message: Distinct …
or
Extinct
“You are the storyteller of your
own life, and you can create your own legend or not.”
Isabel Allende
4. EduK80 (Education, K-80)
“My ancestors were printers in Amsterdam from 1510 or so until 1750, and during that entire time
they didn’t have to learn anything new.”
Peter Drucker, Business 2.0 (08.22.00)
“The average knowledge worker will outlive the average employing organization. This is the first time in history that’s happened. … So
the center of gravity of higher education is shifting from the education of the young to the
continuing education of adults.”
Peter Drucker, Business 2.0 (08.22.00)
“Knowledge becomes obsolete incredibly fast. The
continuing professional education of adults is the
No. 1 industry in the next 30 years … mostly on line.”
Peter Drucker,Business 2.0 (22August2000)
REQUISITE ATTITUDE2001: “You must realize that how you invest your human capital matters as much as how you invest your financial capital. Its rate of return
determines your future options. Take a job for what it teaches you, not for what it pays. Instead of a potential employer asking, ‘Where do you see yourself in 5 years?’
you’ll ask, ‘If I invest my mental assets with you for 5 years, how much will they
appreciate? How much will my portfolio of career options grow?’ ”
Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer, futureWEALTH
5. Why Does Business Abhor
Training?
26.3
3 Weeks in May
“Training” & Prep: 187“Work”: 41
(“Other”: 17)
1% vs.
367%
Divas do it. Violinists do it. Sprinters do it. Golfers do it.
Pilots do it. Soldiers do it. Surgeons do it. Cops do it.
Astronauts do it. Why don’t businesspeople do it
[very much]?
T/D > 1.0
Conclusion: “We” are not
serious!
HR Folks: YOU – not
“marketing” - “OWN” THE “BRAND PROMISE”!
(If you wish.)
Titles!
Manager HRIS to Manager Human Capital
Assets or Manager Employee Marketing*
*IHRIM.link (2-3.201)
6. Independence Rules (Redux)!
Beware Lurking HR Types … One size
NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period.
48 Players = 48 Projects =
48 different success measures
“Learn not to be
careful”
Photographer Diane Arbus to her students (Careful = The sidelines, per Harriet Rubin in The Princessa)
The NAESP …
Attributes of Those Who “Made” the 10th Grade History Book
–Committed!
–Determined to make a difference!
–Focused!
–Passionate!
– Irrational about their life’s project!
–Ahead of their time / Paradigm busters!
– Impatient! / Action Obsessed
Attributes of Those Who “Made” the 10th Grade
History Book –Made lots of people mad!
–Flouted the chain of command!
–Creative / Quirky / Peculiar! / Rebels! / Irreverent!
–Masters of improv / Thrive on chaos / Exploit chaos!
Attributes of Those Who “Made” the 10th Grade History Book
–Forgiveness > Permission
–Bone honest!
–Flawed as the dickens!
– “In touch” with their followers’ aspirations
–Damn good at what they do!
7. Losing the War to Bismarck
J. D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board
(1915): “In our dreams people yield themselves with perfect docility to our
molding hands. … The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a
perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“Schools were designed by Horace Mann, E.I. Thorndike, and others to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass
population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings
whose behavior can be predicted and controlled. To a very great extent, schools succeed in doing this. But in a society that is increasingly fragmented, in
which the only genuinely successful people are independent, self-reliant, and individualistic, the products of school and ‘schooling’
are irrelevant.”
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto
“My wife and I went to a [kindergarten] parent-teacher conference and were informed that our budding refrigerator artist, Christopher, would
be receiving a grade of Unsatisfactory in art. We were shocked. How could any child—let alone our child—receive a poor grade in art at such a young age? His teacher informed us that he had refused to color within the lines, which was a state requirement for demonstrating
‘grade-level motor skills.’ ”
Jordan Ayan, AHA!
“How many artists are there in the room? Would you please raise your hands. FIRST GRADE: En mass the children leapt from their seats, arms waving. Every child was an artist. SECOND GRADE: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. The hands were still. THIRD GRADE: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand, tentatively, self-consciously. By the time I
reached SIXTH GRADE, no more than one or two kids raised their hands, and then ever so slightly, betraying a fear of being
identified by the group as a ‘closet artist.’ The point is: Every school I visited was was participating
in the suppression of creative genius.”
Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace
“The main crisis in school today is irrelevance.”
Daniel Pink, Free Agent Nation
“Our education system is a second-rate, factory-style organization, pumping out
obsolete information in obsolete ways. [Schools] are simply not
connected to the future of the kids they’re responsible for.”
Alvin Toffler, Business 2.0 (09.00)
8. In Need of that “White Collar Revolution”
J. D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board
(1915): “In our dreams people yield themselves with perfect
docility to our molding hands. … The task is simple. We will organize
children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are
doing in an imperfect way.”John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Milwaukee: $6,951 per student. Central
administration: $3,481. Instruction: $1,647.
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto (Research reported in Education Update, Fall 1990)
9. An Unnatural Way to “Learn”
“Every time I pass a jailhouse or school, I
feel sorry for the people inside.”
Jimmy Breslin, 07.11.2001, on “summer school” in NYC [“If they haven’t learned in the winter, what are they
going to remember from days when they should be swimming?”]
“The time bomb in every
classroom is that students learn
exactly what they are taught.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“What [standardized tests] actually measure is the
tractability of the student, and this they do quite
accurately. Is it of value to know who is docile and who is not? You tell
me.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“Schoolteachers aren’t allowed to do what they think best for
each student. Harnessed to a collectivized regimen, they soon give up thinking seriously about students
as one-of-a-kind individuals, regardless of what they may wish were
true.”John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“The best evidence that our schools are set up to ‘school’ and not be usefully educationally lies in the look of the
rooms where we confine kids. Rooms with no clocks, no telephones, no fax
machines, no stamps, no envelopes, no maps, no directories, no private
space in which to think, no conference tables on which to confer.
Rooms in which there isn’t any real way to contact the outside world where life is going on.”
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto
“It is absurd and anti-life to be compelled to sit in confinement with people of exactly
the same age and social class. This cuts children off from the immense diversity of life and the synergy of variety. … It is absurd and anti-life to move
from cell to cell at the sound of a gong every day of your natural youth in an institution that allows you no privacy. … In centuries past, children and adolescents would spend their time in real work, real charity, real adventures, and in the search for mentors who might
teach them what they really wanted to learn.”
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto
“I discovered the brutally simple motivation behind the
development and imposition of all systematic instructional programs
and tests – a lack of trust that teachers can teach and that
children can learn.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“It is an inescapable reality that students learn at different rates in
different ways. That creates the need for a schedule of sensitivity
that only teachers close to the particular student can devise – not some theory-driven, central-office,
computer-managed schedule.”
Ted Sizer
Schools’ “Kafka-like rituals”: “enforce sensory deprivation on classes of children held in
featureless rooms … sort children into rigid categories by the use of fantastic measures such as
age-grading, or standardized test scores … train children to drop whatever they are occupied with and to move as a body from room to room at the sound of a bell, buzzer, horn, or klaxon … keep children under constant surveillance, depriving
them of private time and space …
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Kafka-like rituals (cont.): “assign children numbers constantly, feigning the ability to
discriminate qualities quantitatively … insist that every moment of time be filled with low-
level abstractions … forbid children their own discoveries, pretending to possess some vital secret to which children must surrender their
active learning time to acquire.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“[One factor contributing to widespread teacher dissatisfaction] is the extremely
shallow nature of intellectual enterprise in schools. Ideas are broken into fragments
called subjects, subjects into units, units into sequences, sequences into
lessons, lessons into homework, and all these prefabricated pieces make a
classroom teacherproof.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Ted Sizer, on the “logic” of high
schools: “If we spend more than a day on the Bill of Rights, we can’t get to
Grover Cleveland before Valentine’s Day.”
“We interrupt classes with public address system announcements,
utterly forgetting that Hamlet’s soliloquy may lose something from
the interjection of information about where the cheerleaders
should meet after school.”
Ted Sizer
“We parade adolescents before snippets of time. Any one teacher will usually see more than 10 students and
often more than 160 in a day. Such a system denies teachers the
chance to know many students well, to learn how a particular
student’s mind works.”Ted Sizer
“The myth is that learning can be guaranteed if instruction
is delivered systematically, one small piece at a time, with
frequent tests to ensure that students and teachers
stay on task.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“A substantial amount of testimony exists from highly regarded scientists like [Nobel laureate] Richard Feynman,
Albert Einstein, and many others, that scientific discovery is negatively
related to the procedures of school science classes.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Messenger: “The mind is a machine, but a virtual machine. A system of systems. …”Helen: “Perhaps it isn’t a system at all.”Messenger: “Oh, but it is. … If you’re a scientist, you have to start with that assumption.”Helen: “I suspect that’s why I dropped science at school as soon as they let me.”
Messenger: “No, you dropped it, I would guess, because it was doled out to you in spoonfuls of distilled boredom.”
David Lodge, Thinks …
But Are They Being Taught to Think?
From MIT & JHU: “Students who receive honor grades in college-level
physics are frequently unable to solve basic problems encountered in a form slightly different from the
one in which they have been formally instructed and tested.”
Howard Gardner, Unschooled Minds
10. Higgins Knew!
“Andrew Higgins , who built landing craft in WWII,
refused to hire graduates of engineering schools. He believed that they only teach you what you can’t do in engineering school. He
started off with 20 employees, and by the middle of the war had 30,000 working for him. He turned out 20,000
landing craft. D.D. Eisenhower told me, ‘Andrew Higgins won the war for us. He did it without
engineers.’ ”
Stephen Ambrose/Fast Company
11. Doing Stuff that Matters!
“Education, at best, is
ecstatic. At its best, its most
unfettered, the moment of learning is a moment of delight. This essential and obvious truth is
demonstrated for us every day by the baby and the preschool child. … When joy is absent, the effectiveness of the learning process falls and
falls until the human being is operating hesitantly, grudgingly, fearfully.”
George Leonard, Education and Ecstasy [1968]
“Children learn what makes sense to them; they learn through
the sense of things they want to understand.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
Per George Miller: Children as
“informavores,” who
“eat up new knowledge.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“During the first years of life, youngsters all over
the world master a breathtaking array of
competences with little formal tutelage.”
Howard Gardner, The Unschooled Mind
“The goal of the child is to develop, and he is intrinsically motivated
toward that goal with an intensity
unequalled in all of creation. … [Children] appeared immensely pleased,
peaceful and rested after the most strenuous concentration on tasks they had
freely chosen to do. All destructive behavior … had disappeared.”
Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach
“Her approach to children in the classroom could be summed up by one word—respect. She accorded them
the dignity, trust and patience that would be given to someone embarked on the
most serious of endeavors and who was, at the same time, endowed with the potential and desire to achieve his goal. … She was
constantly in a listening state.”
Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach
“He cannot stand still; he is impelled toward conquest. … The child seeks no assistance in his work. He must
accomplish it by himself. … The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it
engages the child’s entire personality.”
Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori: A Modern Approach
“ ‘Schooling’ takes place in an environment
controlled by others. … ‘Education’ describes efforts largely self-
initiated for the purpose of taking charge of your life wisely and living
in a world you understand. The educated state is a complex tapestry woven
of broad experience, grueling commitments, and substantial risk taking.”
A Different Kind of Teacher, John Taylor Gatto
“We underrate our brains and our intelligence. Formal education has become such a
complicated, self-conscious, and over-regulated activity that learning is widely regarded as
something difficult that the brain would rather not do. … Such a belief is probably well-
founded if the teachers are referring to their efforts to keep children moving through the
instructional sequences that are prescribed as ‘learning activities’ in school. … We are all capable of huge and unsuspected learning
accomplishments without effort.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“Each of us has a design problem to solve: to create from the raw material around us the curriculum for a good life. It isn’t easy, and it isn’t the same
for any two people.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Mary Foley, homeschooling mother of four, Cape Cod: “If we are not free to educate our children, liberty is an illusion. I do not have a curriculum. The state does not have the power to standardize children. My method
has been successful enough to produce a daughter who is a member of the National Honor Society and twin sons
who tested in the top one percent on a national placement test for two consecutive years. The
priorities of our curriculum are daydreaming, natural and social sciences, self-discipline,
respect of self and others, and making mistakes.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“I want to give you a yardstick, a gold standard, by which to measure good schooling. The Shelter Institute
in Bath, Maine, will teach you how to build a three thousand square-foot, multi-level Cape Cod home in
three weeks’ time, whatever your age. If you stay another week, it will show you how to make your own posts and beams; you’ll actually cut them out and set them up. You’ll learn wiring, plumbing, insulation, the
works. Twenty thousand people have learned to build a house there for about the cost of one month’s tuition in
public school.”
John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
“The most extraordinary result was the unanimity and conviction with which boys and
girls—aged 8 to 11—called for a broader curriculum, with much more science, history,
geography, history, art, craft, woodwork, electronics, cooking and technology. They
wanted, above all, more work which allowed them to think for themselves, to
experiment, to engage in first-hand observation.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“Learning is
never divorced from feelings.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
The Learner’s Manifesto
The brain is always learning.Learning does not require coercion.
Learning must be meaningful.Learning is incidental.
Learning is collaborative.The consequences of worthwhile learning
are obvious.Learning always involves feelings.
Learning must be free of risk.
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
James Coleman, 1974: “Develop in youth the capabilities for
engaging in intense concentrated involvement in
an activity.”Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Barbara Schneider,
Becoming Adult
“What we want to see is the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not
knowledge in pursuit of the child.” —George Bernard Shaw
“While not every child will develop interests as fascinating as Darwin’s, without the enthusiasm that
leads to intense, concentrated activity, a child will likely lack the perseverance needed to face the future
successfully. We may not know what jobs will be available to young people ten years from now. … But
to the extent that teenagers have had experiences that demand discipline, require the skillful use
of mind and body, and give them a sense of responsibility and involvement with useful
goals, we might expect the youth of today to be ready to face the challenges of tomorrow.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult
“Growing up to be a happy adult gets more and more difficult as occupational roles become
more vague and ephemeral. Young people can no longer count on a predictable future and cannot expect that a set of skills learned in
school will be sufficient to ensure a comfortable career. For this reason, we need to take a long look at the conditions that prepare youth for a changing, uncertain future.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi & Barbara Schneider, Becoming Adult
Gatto’s Lab School
ONE. Independent Study. A day out of the school building, chasing ONE BIG IDEA. TWO. Apprenticeship. THREE.
Community Service, a day a week. FOUR. Team up with parents, yours or someone else’s, for Family Teamwork
Curriculum. FIVE. Class work.
Jamal Watson, 13, from Children’s Express Quarterly; from John Taylor Gatto, A Different Kind of Teacher
Gardner’s MI7: Linguistic, Logical-mathematical,
Spatial, Musical, Bodily-kinesthetic,
Interpersonal, Intrapersonal.
“Actual content may not be the issue at all, since we are really trying to impart the idea that one can deal with new areas of knowledge if one
knows how to learn, how to find out about what is known, and how to abandon old ideas when
they are worn out. This means teaching ways of developing good questions rather than memorizing known answers, an idea that
traditional schools simply don’t cotton to at all, and that traditional testing methods are
unprepared to handle.”
Roger Schank, The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind
“Apprenticeships & Projects” – Howard
Gardner
EBF*to
EBI*** Education By Fiat
** Education By Interest
“From the media, we hear these great tearjerker stories of kids who succeeded despite the odds. But all of our
kids are instead facing the odds of an education system that is all wrong. The odds are against them
because the system works against them instead of with them. … I see it every day: kids who people have dismissed as ‘dumb in math’ or ‘uninterested in
science’ or ‘nonreaders’ doing incredible things in these exact same areas because they were (finally) allowed to start with something they were already
interested in. A 9th-grade kid who ‘hates science’ sees a movie about freezing people, then decides to read a college biology text on cryogenics, and then gives a presentation on it that blows your socks off.” —Dennis
Littky, The Big Picture
“When they tell the story of their project, they are irresistible to admissions officers!”
Dennis Littky
“If we are to configure an education for the world of tomorrow, we need to take the
lessons of the museum and the relationship of the apprenticeship
extremely seriously. … to think of the ways in which the strengths of a
museum atmosphere, of apprenticeship learning, and of
engaging in projects can pervade all educational environments.”
Howard Gardner, Unschooled Minds
“Questions, questions, questions. They disturb. They
provoke. They exhilarate. They humiliate. They make you feel a little bit like you’ve at least temporarily lost your marbles. So much so that at times I’m positive that the ground is shaking and shifting under our
feet. Welcome to Socrates Café.
Christopher Phillips, Socrates Cafe
12. It’s all About
Questions!
U.C. Ed Dean Walter Karp: “From the first grade to the twelfth, from one coast to the other,
instruction in America’s classrooms is almost
entirely dogmatic. Answers are ‘right’ and answers are
‘wrong,’ but mostly answers are short.”
Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
Richard Paul, Director, Center for Critical Thinking: “We need to shift the focus of learning from
simply teaching students to have the ‘right answer,’ to teaching
them the process by which educated people pursue
right answers.” Frank Smith, Insult to Intelligence
“Actual content may not be the issue at all, since we are really trying to impart the idea that one can deal with new areas of knowledge if one
knows how to learn, how to find out about what is known, and how to abandon old ideas when
they are worn out. This means teaching ways
of developing good questions rather than memorizing known answers ,
an idea that traditional schools simply don’t cotton to at all, and that traditional testing
methods are unprepared to handle.”
Roger Schank, The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind
TP/08.2001: The Three Most Important Letters …
WHY?
13. Tom’s Edu3M
Manifesto**Manifesto for Education in the 3rd Millennium
Education3MLearning is a normal state.Children are learnavores.
Prodigious feats of learning are common as dirt. [Watch an H.S. QB studying game film.]
We learn at different rates.We learn in different ways.
Boys and girls learn [very] differently.In a class of 25, there are 25 different trajectories.
Learning in 40-minutes blocks is bullshit.Learning for tests is utterly insane.
There are numerous rigorous evaluation schemes, of which testing is but one—and abnormal, by “real
world” standards.
Education3M
We learn most/fastest/most completely when we are passionate about what we are learning and it
matters to us. [Salience rules!] Think EBI/LBI: Education by Interest/Learning by
Internship.Classrooms are abnormal places.
We need changes of pace. [Japanese recesses between each class.]
International test scores are not correlated with hours-per-year in class.
Big classes are slightly problematic. Big schools suck. Period.
Education3M
“All this”—the right stuff—fits the NWW/New World of Work hand-in-glove. [NWW = Age of Creativity.]
U.S. schools circa 2001 are a vestige of the Prussian-Fordist model, more interested in shaping behavior than stoking the fires of lifelong learning.
Cutting art-music budgets is truly dumb.Learning is a matter of Intensity of Engagement, not elapsed time. [Aargh: 11 minutes on the Battle of Gettysburg.]
Teachers need enough space-time-flexibility to get to know kids as individuals.
Scientific discovery processes and the teaching of science are utterly at odds. [Exploration vs. spoon-feeding.]
“Reform”3M: Losing The War Against
Bismarck all Over Again!
Education3M
Our toughest “learning achievement”—mastering our native language—does not
require schools, or even competent parents. [It does require a desperate need-to-know.]
Great teachers are great learners, not imparters-of-knowledge.
Great teachers ask great questions—that launch kids on lifelong quests.
The world is not about “right” & “wrong” answers; it is about the pursuit of increasingly
sophisticated questions—just ask a ski instructor or neurosurgeon.
Education3M
Most schools spend most of their time setting up contexts in which kids learn not to like
particular subjects. [Evidence shows that such anti-learning sticks!]
Vigorous exploration is normal … until you are incarcerated in a school.
“Bite size” education-learning is neither education nor learning.
Learning takes place rapidly on the cheerleading squad, the football team, the school newspaper, the drama club, at the after-class job--just not in
the hyper-structured classroom.
Education3M
The “school reform” “movement” is a giant step … backwards … embracing the Prussian-Fordist paradigm with renewed vigor—at exactly the
wrong time.There are large numbers of superb schools, superb principals, superb teachers; sadly, they not only fail
to infect the [largely timid] rest, but are ordinarily supplanted by wusses & wimps.
Alas, the teaching profession does not ordinarily attract “cool dudes & dudettes.”
Schools of “education” should by and large have their charters revoked.
Education3M
“Education” must “develop in youth the capabilities for engaging in intense concentrated
involvement in an activity.” [James Coleman, 1974.] [Hint: It doesn’t.] [Hint: Understatement.]
Stability is dead; “education” must therefore “educate” for an unknowable, ambiguous,
changing future; thence, learning to learn & change is far more important than mastery of a
static body of “facts.” [Was the “War of the Roses” really over roses? (1) I don’t remember. (2) Not remembering has not been a handicap.]
Education3M
I never took a speech course.Hemingway couldn’t spell.
Etc.Etc.Etc.
14. Bringing Out the Best
My Education: People. (Damn few.) Mrs. Landers. Mrs. Gaver. Miss
Churchill. Mr. Chapin. Mr. Hooper. Prof. Liang. Prof. White.
Capt. Anderson. Gene. Allen. (Warren.) (Susan.)
My “educators’ ” secrets: They made me fall in love.
They helped me figure out who I was.
Grameen Bank/Bangladesh
“It’s not people who aren’t credit-worthy. It’s banks that aren’t
people worthy.”$2.3B to 2.3M [typical 1st loan: $15.]
98% recovery rate [94% to women!]
1/3rd out of poverty; 1/3rd up to non-poverty threshold
Muhammad Yunus, Banker to the Poor
“The Grameen loan is not simply cash. It
becomes a kind of ticket to self-discovery and
self-exploration.”
Muhammad Yunus
Why Don’t Most Biz Mgrs. Think This Way?
“Coaching is
winning players over.” *
Phil Jackson
*Not: “planning,” “implementing,” “clear communication,” “getting the org chart right.”
Insights from 80,000 managers:
“People don’t change much.“Don’t waste time trying to put in what
was left out.
“Try to draw out what was left in. “That is hard
enough.”Source: Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman, First, Break All the Rules:
What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
“Teaching is listening.
Learning is talking.” —Message painted on a Met
advisor’s truck by his students (from Dennis Littky, The Big Picture)
“It was much later that I realized Dad’s secret. He gained respect by giving it. He
talked and listened to the fourth-grade kids in Spring Valley who shined shoes the same way he talked and listened to a
bishop or a college president. He was seriously interested in who you were and what you had to say.”
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect
“It is impossible to claim that all good teachers use similar techniques: some lecture nonstop
and others speak very little; some stay close to their material and others loose the imagination; some teach with the carrot and others with the stick. But in every instance, good teachers share one trait: a strong sense of personal identity infuses their work. ‘Dr. A is really there when he teaches.’ ‘Mr. B has such enthusiasm for his subject.’ ‘You can tell
that this is really Prof. C’s life.’ ”
Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach
“One student said she could not describe her good teachers because
they differed so greatly, one from another. But she could describe her bad teachers because they were all
the same: ‘Their words float somewhere in front of their faces, like
the balloon speech in cartoons.’ ”
Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach
Leaders Do Not “Transform People”!
Instead leaders-mentors-teachers (1) provide a context which is marked by (2) access to a
luxuriant portfolio of meaningful opportunities (projects) which (3) allow people to fully express
their innate curiosity and (4) engage in a vigorous discovery voyage by which those people (5) go to-create places they (and their mentors-teachers-leaders) had never dreamed
existed. And then the leaders-mentors-teachers (6) applaud like hell, stage “photo-ops,” and
ring the church bells100 times to commemorate the bravery of their “followers’ ” explorations!
Explore!**Damn It!
Objections
Focus on elite students.
Caricature education “reformers.”
Underrate the # of “good” reformers.
Overrate schools’ & teachers’ capability for fixing themselves.
Underrate communities/ parents/ societal impact (“the schools we
deserve”).
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