I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
There are two messages contained in Jobs’s speech. The first is the importance of a liberal-arts education. To be sure, no one can be a creative programmer without knowing math or basic computing. And no one can be a creative engineer without knowing basic physics, nor can anyone invent a new drug without a background in biology and chemistry. Being grounded in the three R’s and in an intellectual discipline matters. But if, in our rush to get everyone a proper grounding in math and science, we throw out or shrink art, music, journalism, choir, band, film, physical education, dance—and calligraphy—as many public schools are being forced to do, we lose the very things that encourage collaboration and inspire creativity and mash-ups.
The other lesson of Jobs’s speech for teaching creativity is the importance of what Wagner calls “play” and “discovery.” These two are related in children from an early age. Jobs was indulging himself when he took that calligraphy course, just exploring things he never knew about before or never felt he had time to explore. He was “playing,” in the way educators use that word. “Every kid is an artist in kindergarten,” explains Wagner. “Play is a form of discovery, and it is how we begin to make sense of the world and discover our passions.” The problem with school today, Wagner argues, “is that it doesn’t respect play, passion, and purpose—and isolates those who won’t conform.” Because these attributes cannot be measured, they cannot be tested, so they are not really valued.
Marc Tucker heads the National Center for Education and the Economy. He says that some of the best school systems he has studied, such as Denmark’s, promote play with a purpose—but at a very high level. “I observed this in a technical high school in Denmark,” said Tucker, “where the class was divided into four or five teams and each was given the assignment to build a dogsled. They competed with one another. First, they had to decide: Do we optimize for speed, for going a long distance, or for carrying heavy loads? You had to announce your criteria in advance and lay out your plan, and then build to it.” While teams could decide their own work schedules, it was not just unstructured exploration. “It was supported exploration,” said Tucker. “What I mean is that you take a problem that others have worked on before and you work your own way toward solving it. It requires you to draw on but then extend your classroom knowledge, to search for the relevant information you need, to filter out what can and can’t be used to solve the problem, to learn how to be skeptical of some information, and ultimately to translate it all into a solution. At each stage you are supported by the faculty, so it is not totally unstructured.”
Tucker added, “I have seen lots of project-based curriculum in the U.S. but the substance is often so shallow. To make this work, it has to be built on a solid base of knowledge. You have to know some basic engineering to build a dogsled. If you don’t have that solid base of underlying skills, you will get nowhere.” The goal, Tucker said, is a classroom situation where students can explore and collaborate, “but it has to be against a set of high standards for the project” so that students cannot just turn in any piece of junk and call it creative.
When it is done seriously, Tucker concluded, “it gives young people confidence, and that is crucial. To be creative, people need to have the confidence that they can do it.” They also need the confidence to believe that “they can leave their moorings” and explore somewhere new outside their comfort zone.
The best companies already understand this. The adult version of “play” are programs that companies such as Google and 3M have instituted, in which employees are invited to spend 15 or 20 percent of their week working on projects that they devise, which are loosely connected to the company’s main mission but can lead in almost any direction. “It is permission to play on company time,” said Wagner. The programs have been a rich source of innovations for both companies. The website eWeek.com ran a piece (October 31, 2008) about Google’s “20 percent time rule, which allows programmers and other Google employees to spend one of their five work days per week working on something of their own design. These projects stay in-house for a while, but several have been spun off for use in the outside world … Gmail, Google News and Google Talk are among that number.”
The Good News
Fortunately, many American educators, at all levels, are aware of this challenge and are exploring unconventional ways to address it.
In 1981, Steve Mariotti had just left his job as an analyst with Ford Motor Company and moved to New York to start a new business when he got mugged jogging along the East River. Five teens jumped him, beat him up, and stole the $10 he was carrying. Afterward, he said, “I felt like if they had only asked for help, I would have given it to them.” The son of schoolteachers, Mariotti decided after the incident to quit his job and teach in an inner-city school. The transition was rocky. “On his first day at Brooklyn’s Boys and Girls High School,” People magazine reported (September 13, 2003), “troublemakers called him Mr. Manicotti. One pupil set another kid’s coat on fire. ‘I was terrified,’ he says. ‘The principal told me I was the worst teacher in the school … I realized the good kids were getting bullied and tormented by the few who were really bad,’ says Mariotti, who soon changed his teaching methods.”
In a departure from normal practice at that school he decided to teach something that his students wanted to learn—how to make money. Suddenly, said People, they were flocking to his new business class, “a mix of basic math, English, commercial skills and trips to places like a wholesale market.”
The experience eventually led Mariotti to establish, in 1987, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE), an organization that helps young people from low-income communities unlock their potential for entrepreneurial creativity by teaching them to start their own businesses, which keeps them in school as they are learning
how to do this.
Today more than 330,000 students in junior and senior high schools across America have taken part in a NFTE course or in its national competition for the best new business plan put together by a student age eleven to eighteen. Here is how it works. Once a school has affiliated with NFTE, explained Amy Rosen, the organization’s current president, “we hold NFTE University, where the teachers who will be implementing our program are trained to deliver our unique curriculum”—a mix of math, introductory accounting, entrepreneurship, and economics.
NFTE then provides the schools with its own specially designed textbook, now in its eleventh edition, which teaches the basics of entrepreneurship. The students participate either as a stand-alone course or as part of other courses, such as economics, which requires their mastering a certain level of math. Says Rosen, “You cannot figure out return on investment if you cannot multiply fractions.” The class starts with each student being given $25 to buy something to resell for a profit at a NFTE-sponsored school bazaar. “That’s how you learn the difference between gross and net profits,” said Rosen. Then every student has to design a business according to a defined template.
Throughout the year they work on developing a business plan for their own business, which they present and defend in the spring. If they choose, they can then enter local, city, state, and national competitions to become one of the national finalists. In 2010, President Obama met with the finalists, who were chosen from an original pool of 20,000 entrants. The overall winner, Nia Froome, a seventeen-year-old student from Valley Stream, New York, received the $10,000 grand prize for the business she started, Mamma Nia’s Vegan Bakery. Bosnian immigrants Zermina Velic and Belma Ahmetovic, from Hartford, took first runner-up for their computer services company, Beta Bytes, which they started to help fellow immigrants deal with their computer problems.
Many students drop out of school today because they can’t make a connection with their teachers or their curricula, noted Rosen. “What NFTE does is engage their brains in projects they feel are relevant and bring out that individual thing we all have,” she explained. “Remember, free enterprise is all based on individuality and people finding their own path to independence. And when you find a way for kids to engage their brains and combine it with a way for them to discover their individual interest, you have a winning combination.”
These students “have a lot of street smarts,” Rosen added. “Most of them are surviving in really challenging environments. So if you just give them the minimum amounts of information and show them the world beyond their communities, many of them are natural entrepreneurs. They see all kinds of opportunities. They see a way to make a living in this world in a whole different way.”
A documentary about NFTE entitled Ten9Eight was released in 2009, which is how we found out about the program. The three finalists that year were an immigrant’s son, who took a class from H&R Block and invented a company to do tax returns for high school and college students; a young woman who taught herself how to sew and designed custom-made dresses; and the winner, an African American boy who manufactured “socially meaningful” T-shirts. The young woman who started the clothing business “turned down an Ivy League college to attend Northwestern,” said Rosen, “because Northwestern promised her a single room so she could bring her sewing machine to school.”
Creative Crimson Tide
Many colleges attempt to teach creativity and critical thinking. One of the more novel programs for this purpose is the Creative Campus, initiated by the University of Alabama. Hank Lazer, the associate provost for academic affairs and the program’s executive director, explained to Tom that it all started by accident—by students looking for something extra. In 2005, the university was offering an honors seminar called “Art and Public Purpose,” about how public institutions can support the arts. At the end of the term the thirteen students, rather than write individual papers, banded together and “presented a long report and recommendations to the provost on how to broaden and deepen the exposure to the arts by Alabama students on and off campus, so students not majoring in the arts could be more artistically expressive,” said Lazer. “They thought it was important.” So did the university leadership, which had recently commissioned a study that found that some 70 percent of entering University of Alabama students had participated in a band, a choir, a yearbook staff, a newspaper, or something involving the arts, but only 19 percent did so while in college. “That was a disturbing statistic, coming at a time when ‘creativity’ was emerging as the new necessity for an educated person—and to get a job,” said Lazer.
The university leadership got the message, and in 2006 it initiated a program called Creative Campus, designed to nurture creativity among students by getting them to think about how to promote the arts in their community, on and off campus. The program was given its own prestigious home in Maxwell Hall, the university’s old observatory at the highest point of the original UA campus, and, more important, directly across the street from the football stadium! The university was encouraged to fund the program, said Lazer, after visits to the campus by Daniel Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, and Sir Ken Robinson, author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative, “who were touting creativity as the driving force for economic and community development.”
Creative Campus works this way: Each year forty to forty-five students are paid between $8 and $10 an hour for ten hours of work a week to come up with ideas that fuse and promote the arts and culture in ways that enrich student life and the artistic life of the surrounding community. They put together their own teams to develop project ideas and to collaborate in executing them. For instance, one project, Lazer explained, “involved Creative Campus interns pulling together a multifaceted partnership with the West Alabama Chamber of Commerce, the City of Tuscaloosa, the City of Northport, and Tuscaloosa County—and Robert McNulty’s Partners for Livable Communities—to develop a comprehensive cultural arts and economic development plan for the region.” The campaign was called “Culture Builds.” Another team put together the Druid City Arts Festival—which is held in downtown Tuscaloosa to highlight a range of local artists and bands, and is now in its second year. Yet another team created a program called Unbound Arts to present the artwork of people with disabilities.
Lazer says that “we are a deliberately unstable and organic group by design.” The purpose is to push students into thinking creatively and entrepreneurially about broadening exposure to the arts “in a way that will push every one of our students out of their comfort zone.” Interns not only have to learn about the area’s art and music scene in depth; they have to propose ideas for engaging it and then work through all the bureaucratic issues involved in staging a major event.
“A lot of the completion of a really creative task is boring,” Lazer said, which is why his program aims not only to foster imagination but also to teach execution. “Persistence trumps talent, but it is best to have both,” he says. “The students who want to organize an arts festival learn to work with the mayor and the city regulations that they need to negotiate. They learn that that is a big part of doing anything exciting.” The whole idea is to let students “play” in a structured way and with a purpose.
Besides thinking creatively and collaboratively, Lazer said, “we are teaching the students two things: self-confidence and resiliency, which is what gives you the ability to get through the failures. It takes you at least ten ideas to come up with the good one,” and then persistence squared to get that good one done. “We have one student,” Lazer added, “who is graduating in electrical engineering who just decided to take one year off to work on his band. His mom told us she is not upset by this detour, which is probably what it will prove to be, because of the self-confidence she has seen her son develop in the program. I suspect that in two or three years, when he is working for Apple or Google, his band experience will also serve him well.”
An Idealab
When you ask Bill Gross what it takes to be creative and a starter-upper, he doesn’t say math or liberal arts or collaboration. He says “courage.”
Gross knows start-ups and starter-uppers as well as anyone in America’s high-tech firmament, for the simple reason that his start-up business manufactures start-ups. Gross founded the Idealab in Pasadena, California, in 1996, describing it as an innovation laboratory that supports “groundbreaking companies whose products and services change the way people think, live, and work.” Working out of a big warehouse, Gross hosts and helps to fund half a dozen or more start-ups at a time under one roof. You can walk the halls of his office and find a budding solar company in one corner working next to a budding social-networking game company in another. After his college days at Caltech, Gross says, he was a “serial entrepreneur,” starting one company after another, until he realized that he was a “parallel entrepreneur” and became the incubator/partner for many start-ups at once. Gross’s Idealab has gotten about a hundred companies up and running since 1996. Among his recent winners was Picasa, a software download sold to Google that helps users organize, edit, and share photos.
“I look at the world and see something I don’t like and my immediate instinct is to say, How can I fix that? I don’t think I have better skill than other people to do that, but I have less fear than other people to go out and do it.” Gross argues that a big part of teaching the creative process at any level involves getting people to overcome their fear of failure and plunge ahead when they have an idea.
Who taught him that? “Failure,” says Gross. “We have had one hundred companies over the last twenty years and sixty have succeeded and forty failed, and the failures are where I learned everything. Everybody goes through life and sees things and says, ‘I wish that were this way.’” But most people stop there. The successful creators and entrepreneurs are the people who overcome that fear and act. The biggest barrier to creativity, argues Gross, is “lack of self-confidence.”
That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Page 18