Home Alone
While the connection between education and economic growth has never been tighter, we don’t want our young people to be educated just so that they can be better workers. We want all citizens to be better educated so they can be, well, better citizens. “We want kids to think critically, to read, to create, but not simply because those things will get them jobs and money,” said Susan Engel, the Williams College teaching expert, “but because a society made up of such people will be a better society. People will make more informed decisions, invent things that help the world rather than harm it, and at least some of the time, put the interests of others ahead of self-interest.”
No question: Education should focus on the whole person—should aim to produce better citizens, not just better test takers. About this, Engel is surely right. If our schools teach American children what it means to be an American citizen, they—and America—will have a much better chance of passing on the American formula for greatness to future generations.
But we simply cannot escape the fact that we as a society have some catching up to do in education generally. When you are trying to catch up, you have to work harder, focus on the fundamentals, and get everyone to pitch in. Give us a country where everyone feels that he or she has a real stake in improving education—where parents are focused on their children’s homework, where neighbors care about the quality of their local schools, where politicians demand that their schools be measured against the standards of our peers, where businesses insist that their schools be among the best in the world, and where students understand just how competitive the world is—and we promise you the best teachers will become even be better, the average ones will improve, and the worst ones will truly stick out.
One of the most wrongheaded movies we can imagine came out in late 2010. It was called Race to Nowhere, and its theme was that suburban American students are under too much pressure. They have to juggle homework, soccer, Facebook, wrestling practice, the school play, the prom, SAT prep, and Advanced Placement exams. Some would call that stress. We would call it misplaced priorities.
Stress? Stress is what you’ll feel when you can’t understand the thick Chinese accent of your first boss out of college—in the only job you are offered.
That will be stress.
SEVEN
Average Is Over
We have a bone to pick with the writers of the movie The Social Network. We take exception to the way they depicted Lawrence Summers, who was the president of Harvard at the time in which the movie is set. At one point, two Harvard students, the twin brothers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, go to Summers complaining that a fellow student, Mark Zuckerberg, has stolen their idea for something called “the Facebook.” Summers hears the twins’ tale of woe without a shred of sympathy, then tosses them out with this piece of advice: “Yes, everyone at Harvard is inventing something. Harvard undergraduates believe that inventing a job is better than finding one, so I’ll suggest again that the two of you come up with a new, new project.”
That line is supposed to make Summers look arrogant, unsympathetic, condescending, and clueless. In fact, his point describes perfectly what “better” education should aspire to achieve: ingenuity, creativity, and the inspiration to bring something “extra” to whatever the student winds up doing in the world.
Woody Allen’s dictum that “90 percent of life is just showing up” is no longer true. Just showing up for work will not cut it anymore. Now it is about showing off—not strutting or calling attention to yourself but doing things with an excellence that deserves attention.
America’s economic future will depend on how well we are able to get our whole country to resemble Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon, “Where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Average is officially over.
In a hyper-connected world where so many talented non-Americans and smart machines that can do above-average work are now easily available to virtually every employer, what was “average” work ten years ago is below average today and will be further below average ten years from now. Think of the world as one big classroom being graded on a curve. Well, that curve is steadily rising as more brainpower and computing power and robotic power enters the classroom. As a result, everyone needs to raise his or her game just to stay in place, let alone get ahead of other workers. What was an average performance in the past will not earn an average grade, an average wage, or a middle-class standard of living.
Say you’re applying to college next year and you’d like to go to a small liberal arts college in central Iowa—say, for instance, Grinnell College. Well, at Grinnell, with 1,600 students in rural Iowa, “nearly one of every 10 applicants being considered for the class of 2015 is from China,” The New York Times reported (February 11, 2011). “Dozens of other American colleges and universities are seeing a surge in applications from students in China … following a 30 percent increase last year in the number of Chinese studying in the United States … [But this] has created a problem for admissions officers. At Grinnell, for example, how do they choose perhaps 15 students from the more than 200 applicants from China? … Consider, for example, that half of Grinnell’s applicants from China this year have perfect scores of 800 on the math portion of the SAT, making the performance of one largely indistinguishable from another.”
This is just one small reason that whatever your “extra” is—inventing a new product, reinventing an old product, or reinventing yourself to do a routine task in a new and better way—you need to fine-tune it, hone and promote it, to become a creative creator or creative server and keep your job from being outsourced, automated, digitized, or treated as an interchangeable commodity.
Everyone’s “extra” can and will be different. For some it literally will be starting a company to make people’s lives more comfortable, educated, entertained, productive, healthy, or secure. And the good news is that in the hyper-connected world, that has never been easier. If you have just the spark of a new idea today, you can get a company in Taiwan to design it; you can get Alibaba in China to find you a low-cost Chinese manufacturer to make it; you can get Amazon.com to do your delivery and fulfillment and provide technology services from its cloud; you can find a bookkeeper on Craigslist to do your accounting and an artist on Freelancer.com to do your logo. All you need is that first spark of extra imagination or creativity.
In Wired magazine (January 25, 2010), the technology writer Chris Anderson eloquently explained what the hyper-connecting of the world is doing for anyone with an itch to start something:
Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world. This story is about the next 10 years. Transformative change happens when industries democratize, when they’re ripped from the sole domain of companies, governments, and other institutions and handed over to regular folks. The Internet democratized publishing, broadcasting, and communications, and the consequence was a massive increase in the range of both participation and participants in everything digital—the long tail of bits. Now the same is happening to manufacturing … The tools of factory production, from electronics assembly to 3-D printing, are now available to individuals, in batches as small as a single unit. Anybody with an idea and a little expertise can set assembly lines in China into motion with nothing more than some keystrokes on their laptop. A few days later, a prototype will be at their door, and once it all checks out, they can push a few more buttons and be in full production, making hundreds, thousands, or more. They can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously. Today, micro-factories make everything from cars to bike components to bespoke furniture in any design you can imagine. The collec
tive potential of a million garage tinkerers is about to be unleashed on the global markets, as ideas go straight into production, no financing or tooling required. “Three guys with laptops” used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too. “Hardware is becoming much more like software,” as MIT professor Eric von Hippel puts it … We’ve seen this picture before: It’s what happens just before monolithic industries fragment in the face of countless small entrants, from the music industry to newspapers. Lower the barriers to entry and the crowd pours in.
But some people are not risk takers—not resilient or entrepreneurial enough to start a new company from scratch. That’s okay. In that case, though, they need to re-create themselves within their existing company or line of work by taking a routine creator job or routine server job and turning it into something special for which people will want to pay extra.
For some that will be providing something sophisticated that a creative creator would do—designing a building, writing an innovative legal brief, inventing a new business, composing an ad, redoing a kitchen, or writing an iPad application. But for many others it will mean becoming a creative server and bringing a special passion or human touch to a job in a way that truly enriches the experience for the person paying for it. We all know that when we see it. You see it when you visit a parent in a nursing home and watch as that one health-care worker sits patiently with your father and engages him in a way that so clearly brightens his day that you say to yourself, “I am speaking to the manager. I will pay extra just to have her be on duty with Dad every day.” You see it when you are waited on by a salesperson in the men’s suit department or the women’s shoe department who is so engaging, so up on the latest fashions and able to make you look your best, that you’ll come back and ask for that person by name. You see it in that trainer or Pilates instructor who seems to know exactly how to teach each exercise properly—the one everyone is standing in line for, even though he charges more than his colleagues. And you see it on Southwest Airlines, where they manage to take an economy airline seat and give it something extra. Southwest pilots, stewards, and stewardesses try to bring a little humor and a personal touch to everything they do.
The point of this chapter, and the whole education section, is this: For decades there has been a struggle between the American economy’s desire to constantly increase productivity and the desire to maintain blue-collar jobs. We watched as more and more machines and cheaper and cheaper foreign workers replaced American manual laborers. We compensated for this loss of blue-collar jobs by creating white-collar jobs. But how do we compensate for the loss of white-collar jobs, which are increasingly under threat in the hyper-connected world? We do it by inventing new kinds of white-collar jobs. But that requires more start-ups and better education and more investment in research and development to push out the boundaries of science and technology. Today, the Chinese can generate growth just by educating their people enough to do the jobs now done in rich countries. For us to grow, we have to educate people to do jobs that don’t yet exist, which means we have to invent them and train people to do them at the same time. That is harder, and it is why we need everyone to aspire to be a creative creator or creative server.
There are three mind-sets that are helpful in thinking about how to be a creative creator or creative server: think like an immigrant, think like an artisan, think like a waitress.
Every American worker today should think of himself as a new immigrant. What does it mean to think like an immigrant? It means approaching the world with the view that nothing is owed you, nothing is given, you have to make it on your own. There is no “legacy” slot waiting for you at Harvard or the family firm or anywhere else. You have to go out and earn or create your place in the world. And you have to pay very close attention to the world you are living in. As with immigrants throughout history, Americans now find themselves in new and in many ways unfamiliar circumstances. In important ways, in this hyper-connected world of the twenty-first century we are all immigrants.
Everyone should also think like an artisan, argues Lawrence Katz, the Harvard labor economist. “Artisan” was the term used before the advent of mass manufacturing to describe people who made things or provided services with a distinctive touch and flair in which they took personal pride. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, this included just about everyone: the shoemaker, the doctor, the dressmaker, the saddler. Artisans gave a personal touch to whatever they did, and they often carved their initials into their work. It’s a good mind-set to have for whatever job you are doing: Would you want to put your initials on it when it’s done?
Finally, it would not hurt for all of us at times to think like a waiter or waitress. In late August 2010, Tom was in his hometown of Minneapolis, having breakfast with his friend Ken Greer at the Perkins pancake house. Ken ordered three buttermilk pancakes and fruit. When the waitress came back with the breakfast plates, she put them down in front of each of them, and as she put Ken’s plate down she simply said, “I gave you extra fruit.” “We gave her a 50 percent tip for that,” Tom recalled. That waitress didn’t control much in her work environment, but she did control the fruit ladle and her way of trying to do that little extra thing was to give Ken extra fruit. In many ways, we all need to think like that waitress and ask: What is it about how I do my job that is going to differentiate me? More than ever now, we are all waiters and waitresses trying to do that something extra that a machine, a computer, a robot, or a foreign worker.
This kind of “extra” is what “better” education has to achieve and to inspire. For the last 235 years, America expanded and upgraded its educational system again and again in line with advances in technology. When we were an agrarian society, that meant introducing universal primary education; as we became an industrial society, that meant promoting universal high school education; as we became a knowledge economy, that meant at least aspiring to universal postsecondary education. Now the hyper-connected world is demanding another leap. Mark Rosenberg, the president of Florida International University, which has 42,000 students, summed up what it is: “It is imperative that we become much better in educating students not just to take good jobs but to create good jobs.” The countries that educate and enable their workers to do that the best will surely thrive the most.
Indeed, as globalization and the IT revolution continue to merge, expand, and advance, the more they will destroy the old categories of “developed” and “developing” countries. Going forward, we are convinced, the world increasingly will be divided between high-imagination-enabling countries, which encourage and enable the imagination and extras of their people, and low-imagination-enabling countries, which suppress or simply fail to develop their peoples’ creative capacities and abilities to spark new ideas, start up new industries, and nurture their own “extra.” America has been the world’s leading high-imagination-enabling country and now it needs to become a hyper-high-imagination-enabling society. That is the only way we can hope to have companies that are increasingly productive and many workers with jobs that pay decent salaries.
The big question for American educators, though, is how one actually goes about teaching “extra.” The three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—we know how to teach and test. Teaching “extra,” though, requires both teaching and inspiring creativity. There is no one way to do this, and the different attempts to teach creativity and “extra” are among the most exciting experiments in education today. But we know it can be done because people are already doing it.
The Three C’s
Tony Wagner, the Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard and author of The Global Achievement Gap and Learning to Innovate, Innovating to Learn, has a good definition of a “better” education. It is one that teaches what Wagner calls the “the three C’s”—“critical thinking, effective oral and written communication, and collaboration.”
Thinking critically, Wagner says, involves asking
the right questions—rather than memorizing the right answers. Communication and collaboration involve defining objectives and then working with others to bring them about. A person needs all three C’s to become a creative creator or a creative server.
“If you cannot communicate, you cannot collaborate,” explains Wagner, “and if you cannot collaborate, you will be less creative.” There is a myth, he says, that the most creative and innovative people do their best work alone. “That is simply not true from what I see in the workplace and from talking to highly innovative people. Innovation today is almost always done in teams that are multinational, multilingual, and even virtual.” In such teams, he argues, “to work effectively you have to communicate effectively.”
But how can we nurture that first C—creative and critical thinking—in a classroom setting? It is not easy to define creativity with any precision, let alone measure it or teach it. Nonetheless, because the merger of globalization and the IT revolution is putting every job under pressure, because well-paying jobs will more and more require a measure of creativity, and because the burden of preparing Americans for the workforce falls so heavily on our schools, the schools must find ways to inspire the three C’s while teaching the three R’s.
Here we offer a few examples of what strike us as successful efforts to do so. We begin with Steve Jobs and his often cited 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. Jobs attended Reed College, in Oregon, for one semester, and then dropped out, but that brief experience left its mark.
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 17