Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  That doesn’t mean you’re without resources. A hiker may not know what kind of weather lies in ahead, or what kind of terrain to expect, but she can start out with a general plan, be prepared with a backup plan, pack the right equipment, and arm herself with survival skills. Every step or misstep is provisional and correctable, a mini-lesson on the path to mastery.

  We used to think of higher education as the four years following secondary education. You put in your time, you pass your tests, and ta-da! You’re educated. They slap a diploma on your back and ship you off to work. Yet tomorrow an education will look less like a package and more like journey. It’s estimated that by 2025, the number of Americans over 60 will increase by 70%. This means occupational changes will become more commonplace, requiring new habits of lifelong learning.

  Brain scientists are finding that older minds can compete quite well with younger ones, albeit in different ways. Younger minds can retain information better and retrieve it more quickly, while older minds can solve problems better and put information in perspective. What the oldsters lack in quickness, they make up for in wisdom. This is good news for both ends of the spectrum, since the young and the old make excellent partners, each supplying what the other lacks.

  The trend toward multiple careers is not lost on what’s been called Generation Flux. GenFluxers are a psychographic group made up mostly—but not entirely—of young people who understand that the race goes not to the swift but to the adaptable. They embrace instability and revel in the challenge of new careers, new business models, and shifting assumptions. Robert Safian notes that the vast bulk of our institutions—educational, corporate, political—are not built for flux. “Few traditional career tactics train us for an era when the most important skill is the ability to acquire new skills.” GenFluxers are undeterred.

  The Robotic Age seems tailor-made for GenFlux. Jeremy Gleick is a sophomore at UCLA who majors in both neuropsychology and engineering. Recently, while his friends were out partying, he stayed back and logged the 1,000th hour of his self-study program. He’s been using the Internet to teach himself an eclectic range of subjects from alchemy to Zulu, from left brain to right brain, for no other reason than they interest him. Jeremy is not a nerd. He’s not socially challenged. He’s just on fire with curiosity. His spreadsheet shows 17 hours on art history, 39 on the Civil War, and 14 on weaponry. He’s taken up juggling, glass blowing, banjo, and mandolin, working on each in turn for one hour a night.

  Learning like this is liberating. It’s not part of a curriculum, and there’s no certificate, no graduation day. Just the satisfaction of following your bliss until you become the person you’re capable of being. When you learn like this, you defy everyone who tells you to be practical, to get with the program. As Nicholas Humphrey put it, once you harness your ambitions to this unique thing called me, you become the kind of person who aspires not just to be yourself but to make more of yourself—through learning, creativity, expression, influence, and love. You become the story you tell about yourself. Your story becomes your map.

  What makes us happiest is getting where we want to go. The quality of our attention shapes us, then we in turn shape the world. The ones who do it best, most beautifully, most lovingly, most imaginatively, are the crazy ones—the ones who think they can. As John Maxwell said in The Difference Maker, “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

  When you find the joy zone and stay in it, you embark on a journey to the center of yourself. You carry with you the five tools that define your humanness—feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning. You join a small party that set out 50,000 years ago from the caves of Africa, and is now on its way to the stars.

  We’re not human beings; we’re human becomings. We’re not the sum of our atoms; we’re the potential of our spirit, our vision, and our talent. We delight in feeling alive, in seeing what’s possible, in putting our mark on the universe.

  This hand made this drawing.

  A MODEST PROPOSAL

  I wrote Metaskills primarily for professionals already in the workplace—those of us whose education didn’t prepare us for the rigors of the Robotic Age. But what about the generations coming up? Shouldn’t these higher-order skills be built into their education? Possibly even the foundation for it? Anyone born after the year 2000 will face a much different world than we did, and will require a different kind of education. Tellingly, the need for transformation is coming at a time when the cost of traditional schooling is spiraling out of reach, causing students and parents to question the cost-benefit ratio. We’ve reached a point where disruptive innovation can trigger a sweeping change.

  In the commercial arena, when products get so fancy that their prices start to strain the pocketbook, not-so-fancy products and services with lower cost-structures can easily disrupt the marketplace. People adopt them—not because they’re better—but because they’re more immediate and affordable than the older alternative. Examples include shopping on Amazon, getting around town with a Zipcar, holding meetings on Skype, and making movies on an iPad. Over time, disruptive products get fancier and more expensive, making them ripe for the next round of disruption. There’s no reason to exclude education from this cycle of improvement.

  In 1729, Jonathan Swift wrote a satirical essay called “A Modest Proposal” in which he suggested that the solution to poverty and overpopulation in Ireland was for the Irish to eat their children: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London,” he said, “that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.” Good one. But by feeding our children to the factory, we did pretty much the same thing. We sacrificed our offspring to the gods of mass production.

  So to round out the book I’d like to offer an opposite proposal, laid out in seven steps.

  1. Shut down the factory

  I propose—modestly, of course—that we dismantle the educational factory and replace it with an educational garden. Like the best gardens, it should combine both organic and man-made components, be designed to serve the twin goals of beauty and function, and be open to the widest possible public.

  At a time when the Industrial Age is coming apart at the seams, school reformers have doubled down on the factory model, insisting on standardized courses, standardized testing, and standardized views of human resources. They’re busy producing graduates for standardized jobs that may not exist in a few years, and that offer little in the way of satisfaction, fulfillment, or joy. If we had set out to pry our children from their human natures, dampen their passion, and keep them from constructing a meaningful story for their lives, we couldn’t have designed a better system.

  “Why can’t Johnny and Susie read, write, and count?” is the mantra of reform, says Stephanie Marshall. “Why aren’t we at least equally troubled by why Johnny and Susie can’t think, can’t slow down, can’t sit still, can’t imagine, can’t create, and can’t play? Why aren’t we deeply saddened that they can’t dance, or paint, or draw, or make up a story? Why aren’t we worried that they can’t cope with frustration and conflict?”

  Every learner possesses a unique and vibrant constellation of unknowable learning potentials, she says. But all we worry about is what college our kids will get into. In 1972, according to a recent study, high-income families were spending five times as much on education as low-income families. It said that by 2007 the gap had grown to nine to one as spending by upper-end families doubled. The pattern of privileged families is “intensive cultivation,” it concluded, set against a background of extreme competition.

  In a recent article, “The Escalat
ing Arms Race for Top Colleges,” Jennifer Moses said, “My husband and I shelled out a small fortune over the past year for SAT and ACT tutoring for our 17-year-old twins, a son and a daughter. If we hadn’t, what if—God forbid—some other kid who went ahead and got the tutoring inched his or her SAT score up just enough to bump our kids out of the running?” This general perception of scarcity has only strengthened the business of the educational factories. Except now they’re disguised to look more like resorts than factories, with relaxed course loads, nonscholastic amenities like climbing walls and dining facilities, handsome buildings by famous architects, expansive sports complexes, and celebrity professors spread too thin, all of which adds to the cost but not the quality of education. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer students can afford them, and of those who can, many will be saddled with so much debt that they have to follow the money instead of their dreams. There will always be a market for luxury learning experiences. But we’ll need affordable and flexible alternatives if we hope to prepare society for the Robotic Age.

  In an educational garden, the gates are open to everyone. There’s a wide variety of learning options. New concepts are cultivated and tested every year. Special memberships and paid events are available for those who can afford them, while the basic entrance fees are kept to a minimum for those who can’t. An educational garden replaces replication with imagination, reductive thinking with holistic thinking, passive learning with hands-on learning, and unhealthy competition with joyful collaboration. A garden is not only more soul stirring than a factory, it costs much less to maintain—especially when the factory is all dolled up with inessential frills.

  2. Change the subjects

  Anatole France said, “Let our teaching be full of ideas. Hitherto it has been stuffed with only facts.” Facts are useful when they serve as fuel for the mind, but the problem is that the number of useful facts keeps growing. To accommodate them, schools keep reducing the depth of their teaching. Facts look like towns flashing past on a speeding train, and courses are souvenir decals on a suitcase. “Rome—isn’t that where we had the gelato?”

  Subjects like language, history, chemistry, geography, civics, biology, and algebra are chock full of factual information, so they give the impression of contributing to a thorough education. In reality they’re taught with too much detail and not enough depth. It’s a “speed grazing” strategy that leaves students with very little to show beyond a diploma. “In real life, I assure you,” said Fran Lebowitz, “there is no such thing as algebra.” Real life certainly demands some of this knowledge (including algebra), but rarely in the form or the proportions in which the subjects are taught. And by the time you need them, 95% of the actual facts are gone, lost in the mists of memory.

  With the exception of language and math basics, the subjects we now teach in school are the wrong subjects. The right subjects—the ones that will matter in the 21st century—are metaskills. Students today should be learning social intelligence, systemic logic, creative thinking, how to make things, how to learn. What we now think of as subjects—sociology, trigonometry, physics, art, psychology, and scores of others—should become “drill-downs” from the metaskills, specific disciplines designed to explore the high-order subjects. By the time of secondary education, the drill-downs should be as flexible as possible, so that students can follow their personal interests instead of learning disciplines en masse.

  Flexible pathways through the five metaskills would turn education into a strategic exercise. It would put students in charge of their own learning, allowing them to tap into their own interests and discover who they are. It would leverage emerging technologies, including new repositories of factual knowledge like Wikipedia, and social learning tools like those from Inkling and Pearson, which enable interactive, collaborative learning. It will free up time spent on short-term memorization so it can be invested in long-term pursuits, that leave deeper understanding in their wake.

  Educator Sheldon Rothblatt did a study of 19th-century Cambridge University that described the successful strategies the dons employed to keep classical studies dominant over the retrograde “useful studies.” They believed, not unlike the ancient Greeks, that any subject that could be turned to practical use or might benefit business did not deserve the imprimatur of the university. Of course, this ruled out science and technology, as well as the technical aspects of art. You could study these fields as an observer, but not truly engage in them. That would get your hands dirty.

  Refocusing education on metaskills means transforming the educational experience. It means balancing academic learning, or learning through analysis, with generative learning, or learning through synthesis. In other words, reintegrating the left and right sides of the brain. Happily, Cambridge is no longer focused on the left side alone. There’s a growing recognition within the university that students also need affective-emotional skills, cognitive-intellectual skills, aesthetic-artist skills, physical-manual skills, and personal-social skills.

  Changing the course of traditional education is no easy task. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard, once likened the difficulty of reforming a curriculum to the difficulty of moving a cemetery. But it’s possible if you begin at the edges, in the crevices, or at the bottom, where traditional education can’t reach.

  3. Flip the classroom

  Salman Khan may have accidentally started a revolution. In trying to teach his cousin a little math, he stumbled onto the biggest educational idea since the textbook.

  He began tutoring young Nadia with fairly good results. But when he moved out of town, his only option for continuing to teach her was through online videos. So he asked himself an odd question: “How can an automated cousin be better than a cousin?”

  The answer turned out to be the Khan Academy. Founded in 2009, the website now offers thousands of free 10-minute videos, spanning a wide range of educational subjects from math to history and science to English, to anyone who cares to access them. His bare-bones tutorials have been watched an average of 20,000 times each by high-school and middle-school students as a supplement to live teaching.

  But why did the Academy catch on in such a big way? Sure, it’s free, but since when did free education ever inspire such fanaticism? There are four good reasons for Khan’s success, all of them suggestive for the future of education.

  1. Sal is a charming presenter. He knows his stuff, and can infect students with his passion. He can also attract other knowledgeable presenters to his mission.

  2. The videos are accessible round the clock, not just during daylight hours, so students can learn whenever their schedule or energy permits.

  3. They can learn at their own pace, repeating lessons or parts of lessons as many times as needed.

  4. And teachers can direct their students to the Khan Academy to help them work on problem areas, or even build a course around the videos.

  This last benefit has triggered a phenomenon called “flipping the classroom.” With this approach students listen to the “lecture” on YouTube at night, freeing the teacher to help them with their “homework” in class the next day. With the old model, the classroom lecture was a waste of collaborative time; students sat in their seats quietly taking notes, straining to stay awake and up to speed during the monologue. In a flipped classroom, teaching time is given over to activities that allow individual mentoring, communal learning, and even physical movement around the classroom. The students who understand the material can also act as teaching assistants, gaining another level of experience instead of becoming bored and tuning out.

  The flipped classroom is not yet the standard, because the cemetery doesn’t easily move. But it’s getting traction in the crevices (students who are left behind), at the bottom (autodidacts who can’t afford tuition), and at the edges (schools that innovate).

  At first glance, this looks like the Robot Curve in action—teachers being replaced by videos. But it’s actually an opportunity for instructors to stop being “the sage on t
he stage” and start being flesh-and-blood mentors and coaches. It’s the point at which education becomes inspiration.

  Charismatic presenters like Khan have the additional opportunity of becoming “superteachers,” celebrated educators who can deliver lecture material on video with memorable performances. Think about video presenters like Kenneth Clark, Carl Sagan, James Burke, David Attenborough, Isabella Rossellini, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

  In the future we’re likely to see superteachers with their own courses, their own teaching assistants, and their own promotional campaigns. They might be syndicated across a number of institutions, and even offer certificates for completing their modules. It’s possible to imagine a professor on the faculty of a traditional university, and at the same time deriving income from videos and online courses. A world-famous instructor could only be an asset to a traditional institution.

  A final advantage of the flipped classroom is that, with thousands or even tens of thousands of learning modules online, helping a student to follow her special interests in pursuit of a metaskill can become a reality. A single teacher cannot have mastery over thousands of specialized skills, but he can have mastery as a guide, a facilitator, and an expert in personalized teaching.

  4. Stop talking, start making

  Harvard Law School introduced the “case method” of learning in 1870, designed to cultivate a student’s capacity to reason, and simultaneously elevate the practice of law to more than a craft. Unfortunately, this widely copied method teaches little about the quotidian work of being a lawyer. It’s unlikely that a class on contracts, for example, will offer students much experience in creating contracts. “What they taught us in law school,” said a recent graduate of George Washington University, “is how to graduate from law school.”