The Robots Are Coming!

by Andres Oppenheimer

  THE FOCUS WILL BE ON LEARNING, NOT ON TEACHING

  A similar concept to that of the flipped schools, one that also emphasizes learning over teaching, is the “democratic education” model. It has existed for centuries but was developed more recently by Yaacov Hecht in a number of schools in Israel. There, it’s the children who decide what they want to study and how their development should be handled. In these schools, a child’s vote is equal to that of an adult, and they can use a majority vote to decide—within certain parameters, of course—school policies like how long recess should last or which disciplinary measures should be taken.

  The guiding principle of democratic education is that children learn much more when, instead of receiving lessons with materials dictated from above, they are asked every six months about what they want to be when they grow up. If the child says, “An architect,” the “moderator”—formerly known as the teacher—centers his or her math classes on examples from the field of architecture. At the end of the year, students will have developed the same skill sets and acquired the same knowledge as those at traditional schools, but they will also have learned leadership and teamwork, and honed their democratic instincts.

  None of this is anything new. As far back as the seventeenth century, John Locke had written in Some Thoughts Concerning Education that children shouldn’t be taught anything that seemed tedious. In his book Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described an imaginary student who only learned things that seemed useful to him. Later thinkers like John Dewey and Margaret Mead, among others, developed similar concepts. And more recently, Hecht created the Institute for Democratic Education in Tel Aviv, which ran a number of schools under that particular model. In 2010, with Hecht’s support, the Institute for Democratic Education in America—or IDEA—was founded. It now supervises some forty educational institutions across the United States. According to the institute’s directors, the centuries-old theory that children learn more when they participate in the development of their lessons is being tested and proven.

  A TEACHER’S PRIMARY MISSION: HELPING CHILDREN FIND THEIR PASSION

  At a Singularity University conference in Silicon Valley that I attended in 2017, a person in the audience asked Peter Diamandis—founder of the X Prize Foundation and coauthor of Abundance—to name the most important soft skills that educators should be teaching in schools. I liked the one Diamandis picked as the most important one.

  Diamandis, fifty-five, started his answer by saying that he had two young children who were about to enter kindergarten, and that after some careful research, he and his wife decided to choose a school based on three priorities. The first one, he said, was that it had to help children “find their passion.” Whatever that may be, it’s important for schools to help children be excited and enthusiastic about something, he added. Diamandis said his own devotion to space exploration and the search for habitable worlds in space was driven by his childhood passion. He also offered up the example of a friend of his, the billionaire Richard Garriott, whose father was an astronaut and who had grown up in a neighborhood filled with other astronauts and NASA astrophysicists. All his friends wanted to grow up to become astronauts like their parents, but Richard was passionate about video games. That was his calling. He told his parents that video games were what he wanted to do as a grown-up. So in high school, he started programming video games, which eventually made him hundreds of millions of dollars. So much money, in fact, that he was able to book a sightseeing trip to the Soyuz space station, thus becoming the first second-generation astronaut.

  “A lot of times in my life, I’ve done things to make my parents happy or to make my teachers happy, or because someone else was doing it and I felt that I had to do it too,” Diamandis said, getting back to his own situation. “But at the end of the day, doing anything big and bold in the world is hard. And if you don’t love it, then you’ll give up before you get there. So for me, for my children, the number one thing is passion. Can you help them find their passion? Whether it’s comics, Barbie dolls, whatever it may be. Find out what it is, and then drive them to learn.”

  Passion awakens interest and intellectual curiosity. It’s one of the best gifts that life can give you. “You’d be amazed at how many people don’t have a mission in life,” Diamandis has written. “A calling…something to jolt them out of bed every morning. The most valuable resource for humanity is the persistent and passionate human mind, so creating a future of passionate kids is essential.”

  Today’s schools should help children explore their passions, and the best way to do that is by exposing them to new and different things. “The key to finding passion is exposure,” Diamandis says. “Allowing kids to experience as many adventures, careers, and passionate adults as possible. Historically, this was limited by the reality of geography and cost, and implemented by having local moms and dads go to school and talk about their careers. They’ll say, ‘Hi, I’m Alan, Billy’s dad, and I’m an accountant. Accountants are people who…’ But in a world of YouTube and virtual reality, the ability for our children to explore 500 different possible careers or passions during their K–6 education becomes not only possible but compelling.” For example, schools should ask students to share their current passions with the class once a month, using videos or virtual reality devices, and explain why they like the topic they chose, he said.

  A TEACHER’S SECOND MISSION: PROMOTING CURIOSITY

  The second important soft skill that Diamandis said schools should be teaching is curiosity. As parents, we must “create a culture of questioning,” because that’s what leads to experimentation and discovery, he said. Considering that we all have access to Google’s search engine, it’s increasingly important to make sure our children don’t become lazy or uninterested. “In a world of Google, robots, and AI, raising a kid that is constantly asking questions and running what-if experiments can be extremely valuable,” he said. “It will be the quality of your questions that will be most important.” The futurist went on to say that he lives just a few blocks from his children’s kindergarten, and when he walks them to school, he asks them, “What questions do you have for me today?” And when he drops them off, he adds, “Make sure you ask good questions today.”

  “Coupled with curiosity is the process of experimentation and discovery,” he said. “The process of asking questions, creating and testing a hypothesis, and repeated experimentation until the truth is found. As I’ve studied the most successful entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, from Google and Amazon to Uber, their success is significantly due to their relentless use of experimentation to define their products and services. Curiosity is innate in children, and many times lost later in life. Arguably, it can be said that curiosity is responsible for all major scientific and technological advances—the desire of an individual to know the truth.” It’s no coincidence, then, that Albert Einstein—not the robot, but the real one—reportedly famously said that “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

  A TEACHER’S THIRD MISSION: TEACHING PERSISTENCE AND GRIT

  According to Diamandis, the third priority for schools should be teaching persistence and a tolerance for failure. In a world where technology is expanding exponentially, it’s increasingly important to have long-term goals and to never give up on them, he said. What I found most interesting about what he said on this topic was that it’s much more important to be an expert in a problem than to be an expert in a solution.

  “Now, if I said to you, ‘Become an expert in quantum physics or in gene editing,’ that’s what it is like today,” he explained. “I don’t think it’s about becoming an expert in any one thing, because that one thing is going to change massively at a rate of increasing exponential change. It’s actually better to become an expert in a problem. Like, for example, if you are the expert in why housing is a problem around the world, and you understand every culture around the world and what the issues are
in housing or food or energy as new technologies come online, you’re in a beautiful place to say, ‘Take this or that technology and plug it into the problem.’ ”

  SUCCESS IS OFTEN THE FINAL LINK IN A CHAIN OF FAILURES

  During that conference at Singularity University, Diamandis didn’t spend much time talking about the need to teach children to deal with failure—maybe because we were in Silicon Valley, where the vast majority of entrepreneurs are already fully aware of the fact that success is usually the final link in a long chain of failures. But in much of the rest of the world, especially in Asia and Latin America, it’s very important to develop a culture of social tolerance for individual failure. As I wrote in my book Innovate or Die!, one of the things that impressed me most in my first few trips to Silicon Valley was the number of young people who casually mentioned to me—without my having brought it up in the first place—that they had failed in a number of start-ups. In other parts of the world—and even in other parts of America, as Donald Trump exemplifies—the last thing a businessperson would do is admit a failure, and the fear of failure is one of the biggest obstacles to innovation.

  Nearly all the great innovators in human history failed many times before making their signature discoveries. Thomas Edison, who patented nearly 2,000 other inventions, including the gramophone and the camera, went through many thousands of failed attempts with lightbulb filaments before finally succeeding with the one that worked. According to his biographers, Edison said, “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

  Another story that’s taught at many graduate schools of business administration—though not as much in elementary schools, as it should be—is that of Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. According to some of his biographers, Bell offered to sell the patent to his invention for $100,000, but an executive at the Telegraph Company, a predecessor of today’s Western Union, rejected it for allegedly being “hardly more than a toy.” Another version of the same story says that a member of the Telegraph Company committee that rejected the proposal wondered, “Why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to the telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?”

  In much the same way, aviation pioneers Orville and Wilbur Wright made 163 failed attempts before completing their first successful powered flight. And according to an unconfirmed yet famous story, Henry Ford, who created the world’s first successful mass-produced car, called it the Model T because he had started with a Model A and had to reinvent it nineteen times before he came up with his final product.

  Shouldn’t schools be teaching children at a young age stories like these about the importance of not being intimidated by failure? As I’ve been told by some of the world’s leading innovators whom I have interviewed, these stories aren’t exceptions, they are the rule. Persistence in the face of failure is the key to most successful innovations. The stories of Edison, Bell, the Wright brothers, and Henry Ford before they became rich and famous should be taught in every classroom. And doing so is something that teachers can do much better than tablets, robots, or virtual reality.

  ETHICS AND EMPATHY CAN BE TAUGHT

  As we said at the beginning of this chapter, technology will be replacing or assisting teachers in “hard” subjects such as math, history, or geography, but it can’t easily make up for them when it comes to teaching students about ethical values. Flesh-and-blood educators will continue to be important for years to come as moral guides for our children. But can ethics be taught in schools in a way that’s not a series of boring lectures that put students to sleep? The answer is yes, it can.

  At Ad Astra, the school founded by Elon Musk, creator of Tesla cars and the SpaceX exploration corporation, teaching ethics is a top priority. At this ultra-exclusive school, which has only about thirty students, Diamandis says he once sat in on a class in which the teacher presented the students with the following question: “Imagine a small town on a lake, in which the majority of the town is employed by a single factory. But that factory has been polluting the lake and killing all the life. What do you do? Shutting down the factory would mean that everyone loses their jobs. On the other hand, keeping the factory open means the lake is destroyed and the lake dies.” According to Diamandis, these sorts of moral dilemmas should be constantly presented to children in all schools, not only to teach them about real dangers such as environmental pollution, but also to get them used to facing moral dilemmas starting at a young age. Teachers can bring up these sorts of situations, ask children to make decisions, and then change the variables, helping students to adapt to all sorts of situations, he said.

  Empathy, like ethics, can also be taught. In Denmark, public schools offer classes in empathy to students between the ages of six and sixteen, and the results have been excellent. Danish children must spend one hour of class time a week discussing something that affects them—whether it’s a problem between two students or a current global issue—and finding a solution. At the end of each of these sessions, everyone shares a cake that students take turns bringing to class. Several studies show that these empathy classes have helped among other things to reduce bullying. For all sorts of classes like these, the teachers—or rather, the moderators—will continue being much more effective than robots for many years to come.

  HIGH SCHOOLS MUST TEACH TEAMWORK

  Argentina’s Instituto Nacional de Educación Tecnológica (National Institute of Technological Education), or INET, surveyed 876 private companies in 2016 to learn what skills they wanted from incoming high school graduates. The response was almost unanimous: they wanted young people with soft skills like teamwork, a willingness to learn new things, the flexibility to adapt to changes, and a strong work ethic. What was also nearly unanimous was the fact that nearly every company that participated in the study said that it was very difficult to find high school graduates with these sorts of skills.

  According to Gabriel Sánchez Zinny, at the time head of INET, which oversees some 4,500 technological institutes throughout the country, the survey showed that 92 percent of the companies said they wanted high school graduates who were good team workers, followed closely by those who had other skills such as a strong work ethic and flexibility. “The employers told us, ‘We’re not interested in hearing from young candidates who can only show degrees in mechatronics or agrotechnics, because their outdated school programs often teach things that were true twenty-five years ago but were never updated.’ So instead they want people with soft skill sets that the companies can later update and upgrade.”

  So I asked Sánchez Zinny what high schools should do to catch up with the times and help reduce youth unemployment. Like so many other experts in the field, he told me that schools should be teaching skills like teamwork, and that countries should be promoting vocational programs the way Germany, Australia, and South Korea do. In several of these countries, the government either gives tax breaks to companies or pays them directly in exchange for internships for high school students who want on-the-job training in fields where there is a shortage of workers. That, he said, was the path forward.

  THE RETURN OF VOCATIONAL SCHOOLS

  In America, there is a growing movement to restore vocational and technical schooling. These high school and private-sector mentorship programs were created on a large scale after World War II, during the boom in the automotive and airplane industries when large companies needed growing numbers of mechanics and electricians. But these schools and mentorship programs started losing popularity with the expansion of white-collar jobs in the 1960s, when young people started preferring working in offices to working in factories. In 1963, Congress moved to approve the Vocational Education Act to subsidize vocational schools, but even that was in vain: vocational schools had gained a reputation as institutions of last resort for students with bad g
rades who couldn’t get into college. As a result, it was hard for these vocational schools to attract top-notch candidates.

  But all that could soon be changing, because America will need growing numbers of technicians to repair and maintain the robots that will replace many workers in manufacturing plants. In 2017, President Trump signed an executive order to “expand apprenticeships and vocational training to help all Americans find a rewarding career, earn a great living, and support themselves and their families and love going to work in the morning.”

  One of the examples cited by the U.S. government is that of Germany, where vocational schools have always been on the front lines of education. To this day, 55 percent of German students choose to attend vocational schools where they can take academic courses while at the same time participating in paid internships with various companies. When they graduate, students take an exam for one of the 350 available occupations, from electricians to nurses, and if they pass, they’re often hired by the same company for which they interned. That helps Germany maintain very low levels of youth unemployment—just 6.9 percent—and one of the most skilled labor forces in the world. South Korea, which also has a large number of vocational schools, is a similar case.

  SOUTH KOREA’S ROBOTICS SCHOOL