And yet tonight the PBS NewsHour is trumpeting a story about whether schools should continue teaching sex ed.
We’re like the frog in the pot, not even noticing that the water all around us is nearing its boiling point.
Also, I hate to say I told you so, but . . .
Imagine students around the world being given daily opportunities to see the world through the eyes of another — or to travel back in time, or to fly to the moon.
Does the value of this tool outweigh any potential costs in the ways in which it further blurs the line separating mind from machine? Is it sharpening us in the right direction?
It may seem crazy to seed an idea that is intended to put you out of business – yet that’s exactly what Dayton Department Stores did back in 1960 with Target. And, the more I think about it, that’s exactly what every school in America should be doing right now.
To understand why, the Target story is a helpful analogy. Over the first six decades of its existence, Dayton had gradually grown and expanded throughout the Midwest to become a profitable player in the department store world. By 1960, that world – and that sort of consumer behavior – showed no signs of letting up in the short- or even the medium-term. Yet somebody at Dayton nonetheless saw an arc at the edges of the retail landscape that augured big changes ahead: mass-market discount shopping.
Consequently, in what was seen as a risky move at the time, in 1961 Dayton announced its plan to open a very different sort of store, one that combined the best and most familiar aspects of the traditional department store experience with unprecedentedly low prices. And, not for nothing, they decided to name it Target because, as a company spokesman put it at the time, just “as a marksman’s goal is to hit the center bulls-eye, the new store would do much the same in terms of retail goods, services, commitment to the community, price, value and overall experience.”
I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story.
So what does this have to do with public education? More than you might think.
For our purposes, America’s schools today might as well be a chain of Dayton’s Department Stores. They’ve been, on the whole, successful for a long time, and despite changes on the horizon, a lot of them are likely to remain successful doing what they’ve always done for the short- and maybe even the medium-term.
Once again, however, there’s an arc at the edges of the landscape. In this case, it’s the fundamental reordering of our relationship to content knowledge, which has always been the central currency of schooling. It’s the accelerating push towards a merger of the carbon-based and silicon-based beings, via wearable technology, big data, and universal access to the Internet. And it’s an awareness, on the part of those who see the arc, that these early-stage pushes towards greater personalization, a more porous boundary between school life and home life, and a more urgent need to make learning more relevant, vigorous, and hands-on, are all trends that will eventually become the norm and not the exception.
Just as Dayton seeded Target, then, as an experiment that might eventually provide the on-ramp to a new sort of market reality – and, in so doing, put the parent organization out of business – so too must schools today proactively seed their own forward-looking experiments that might, eventually, overtake the more traditional approach that all of us have taught and learned in for more than a century.
Indeed, what American public education needs now is a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.
Of course, many of these Trojan Horses are already in place. Anywhere that radically new approaches to teaching and learning are taking place – whether it’s a single school, a single initiative within a school, or a single state’s experimental approach to evaluation – you’ll find people who are betting on the theory that once others can see that a new approach yields actual success, they’re more likely to consider changing their own approach.
As educators Chris Lehmann and Zac Chase write in their forthcoming book, Building School 2.0, “For most people, change is loss. Until they can see that change (and loss) as a sign of increased success, people will shy away from the prospect of the new.”
This was, in effect, the bet Dayton made with its first Target store. They realized the best way to prepare for the future was not by abruptly closing its current stores, but by seeding experiments that understood where the bend in the landscape was likely to take them – and knowing that over the long-term, the exception would become the norm.
I believe this is where we are headed in public education. The days of AP classes, letter grades, and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.
But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store.
The implications for today’s schools are clear: if you are not proactively seeding your own experimental forays into a new way of helping kids learn – and doing so with the understanding that those experiments may one day overtake everything else that you do – then your community is likely standing flat-footed in the face of the biggest changes in education in more than a century.
Like it or not, in order to reimagine education, we may need to make ourselves the target.
Whenever I want to get a feel for the national mood, I look to Hollywood – and the films it thinks we’ll pay to see. In the post-911 malaise, there was the dystopian world of The Dark Knight. In the era of extended male adolescence, there’s just about anything from Judd Apatow. And now, in the shadow of the Technological Singularity, there are a slew of movies about humankind’s desire to transcend the biological limits of body and brain.
What’s the Singularity, you say? That’s the moment when the whole game board changes – the moment when artificial intelligence purportedly pulls even with, and then rapidly exceeds (or merges with) human intelligence. Hollywood’s best effort to portray it thus far is Spike Jonze’s Her, the unsettling story of a man who falls in love with his operating system, which also happens to be the first artificially intelligent OS (think Siri with a personality, and a conscience, and Scarlett Johansson’s voice). But there are others: Lucy, the film about a woman (curiously, also Scarlett Johansson) who begins to use 100% of her brain’s capacity; Transcendence, in which Johnny Depp plays a dying scientist who gives the Grim Reaper the slip by uploading his mind to the mainframe; and then, starting October 10, there’s Automata, a story about the moment man-made robots acquire a consciousness separate from their creators.
Not coincidentally, that film is set in 2044 – the year most tekkies predict the Singularity will occur. If this sounds too far-fetched for you to take seriously, consider that the person most associated with the theory, Ray Kurzweil, is not some crackpot scribbling manifestos from a cabin in Montana, but the Director of Engineering at Google – a company that has been buying up all of the most advanced robotics companies in the world over the past several months. And if that isn’t enough to get your attention, consider that the people who will be charged with making sense of this brave new world – young adults like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Her – are not some abstract future version of humanity: they’re today’s Kindergartners.
Knowing just how much the world of tomorrow will differ for the kids of today, it’s curious that so many of our most passionate contemporary debates about school reform – from high-stakes testing to the achievement gap to the growing controversy around the Common Core – are about content knowledge. This fixation is a remnant of our Industrial-era model of schooling, in which the undisputed objective was to cram as much information as possible into the minds of schoolchildren.
By 2044, however – actually, a lot sooner than that – people will have near-instant access to the totality of human wisdom. What, then, should the schools of the future be designed to do? And how will they help today’s five-year-old navigate a world of unprecedented technological, ecological and ontological promise and peril?
There are a lot of possible answers, but here’s one that seems simple enough: start focusing less on what we want kids to know, and more on who we want them to become. And the good news is that lots of communities are already doing this – not by designing futuristic curricula or teaching kids how to build a better robot, but by recognizing that content is merely the means by which we reach a new endgoal, which is a set of skills and dispositions that can guide young people through life, and equip them to solve problems we can’t even conceive of.
At the Mission Hill School in Boston, educators have decided four characteristics matter more than anything else: forethought, perseverance, production, and reflection. At the MC2 School in New Hampshire, there are eighteen habits to work towards, from critical thinking to self-direction. At the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, it’s just five – inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection; and at Indianapolis’s Spring Mill Elementary, it’s a set of twelve that includes traits like empathy, integrity, and cooperation. I could go on.
What these schools demonstrate is that every school doesn’t need to aspire to a single, universal set of skills and dispositions; just that that every school needs to decide for itself, of all the characteristics the ideal graduate of our school could embody, which ones must they embody – and how will we know if we’ve been successful?
The latest research about how people learn affirms the value of this priority shift. As Paul Tough writes in How Children Succeed, “what matters most in a child’s development is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.” Cal State University’s Arthur Costa makes a similar point in Learning & Leading with Habits of Mind: “We are interested in enhancing the ways students produce knowledge rather than how they merely reproduce it,” he writes. “The critical attribute of intelligent human beings is not only having information, but also knowing how to act on it.”
That’s right. And that’s the sort of mindset I’d like my five-year-old son to have at his disposal, whether he’s navigating his way through middle school, or making sense of a not-too-distant future we are only beginning to imagine – with Hollywood’s help.
(This article originally appeared in the Washington Post.)
Educators and school reformers — ignore at (y)our peril.
(And crazy to think that this talk was from 2005!)
I can’t believe it took as long as it did for me to first hear about Ray Kurziwell’s idea of the Singularity — the moment when humankind and machines merge, forevermore. Then I started to watch those creepy DARPA videos about their latest research, and then I went and saw Spike Jonze’s remarkable film, Her.
If you’re late to the game, you may want to start with this Guardian story about Kurziwell, and about the future of artificial intelligence. You might as well also go see Her. And just to underscore the legitimacy of these seemingly far-fetched stories, consider that Kurziwell is now the director of engineering for Google.
Tick. Tock.
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