Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  A friend of mine, a writing professor at Stanford University, confided that he found his job deeply unsatisfying because his students couldn’t actually write. All they could do was argue the merits of other writers and postmodern philosophers. The principles of a well-constructed sentence eluded them.

  This is the legacy of academic education. An academic subject is one that teaches knowledge about knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge about knowledge. It doesn’t teach students how to create knowledge, which can only be accomplished by manipulating things, by getting your hands into them. The mistake that traditional education makes is thinking that knowledge ignites creativity. Surely it’s the other way around. Creativity, the process of experimenting with things, ignites knowledge.

  Piaget’s “stage theory” of child development didn’t help matters. It implicitly supported the bias toward academic superiority by suggesting that “sensorimotor intelligence” was important only during the first two years of life, and was later superseded by more intellectual ways of knowing. The job of educators, then, was to pry children from their reliance on intuition and their senses as soon as possible, and encourage them to become analysts and explainers. Today in our business schools, says Roger Martin, creativity is not merely ignored but actively disdained as frivolous. “Analytical thinking is presented as not just logically superior but morally superior.”

  It literally took an act of Congress to break academia’s tight grip on higher education in America. In 1862, after being vetoed by President James Buchanan, the Land Grant College Act was signed into law by his successor, Abraham Lincoln. It supported the heretical idea that agriculture and machinery skills were fit subjects for formal education. One educational journal said these were “schools where hayseeds and greasy mechanics were taught to hoe potatoes, pitch manure, and be dry-nurses to steam engines.” What happened to these pathetic excuses for education? They became the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, and the University of California campuses, among others.

  In a windowless classroom on the campus of Triton College, 16 girls from 11 to 15 years old are designing and constructing a cat feeder, a candy dispenser, and a music box using various pieces of foam board, fiberglass, metal, and PVC pipe. Antigone Sharris founded this all-girls program, which she calls Gadget Camp. “Not letting children learn the hands-on component of science is killing us as a nation,” she said. “You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.”

  Doreen Quinn, a treatment therapist for the New Haven Youth and Family Services in Vista, California, took on the thankless task of helping at-risk boys in gang-prone Hispanic neighborhoods, many of whom had severe emotional problems, learning disabilities, or a lack of English skills. She found it almost impossible to get through to them. On the brink of giving up, she had an epiphany: Boys learn better on their feet.

  She hurried down to Lowe’s and bought some wood, glue, nails, paint, and simple hand tools. She laid them out next to a plan to build a birdhouse. The boys were transfixed. They became fascinated with the problem of building their own structures, suddenly paying attention, cooperating, and asking detailed questions. Her conversations with them began to flow naturally, giving the therapeutic process a chance to unfold. Not only that, building a birdhouse, or anything else, requires skills such as reading (plans and instructions), math (measurements and geometry), economics (budgeting and buying), and interpersonal skills (cooperating and collaborating).

  Quinn’s success led New Haven to found a tuition-free public charter school for kids with learning challenges, called North County Trade Tech High School. Trade Tech now has 28,000 square feet of classroom and workshop spaces, and harbors a dream to expand into a community college, adding specialties such as auto-tech, the culinary arts, and sports and recreation hospitality.

  While most people assume trade school is the end of the educational line, Quinn has found that many of the kids go on to traditional colleges. Along with real-world technical training, they learn core academics, including math and English. A daily fixture of the curriculum is a 30-minute, campuswide period of “sustained silent reading” (no comics allowed), and students are required to write “reflections” about what they’ve learned or how they might solve a particular problem. She calls this kind of education “back-dooring.”

  But what if the back door is really the front door? What if project-based learning is superior to subject-based learning in the Robotic Age?

  Technology innovator Ray Kurzweil thinks it is. “The best way to learn is by doing your own projects,” he says. Project-based learning, also called problem-based learning, has become a hot topic. It was discussed with excitement at a string of European conferences in 2009, as part of the European Year of Creativity and Innovation. In China, a country long thought a bastion of non-innovation, educational reforms are underway to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style and replace it with problem-based learning.

  Problem- and project-based education is a dynamic process that reconnects students with their emotions, with their senses, with their concept of what’s possible in life. Instead of only taking in, they’re asked to give out, to contribute something new. Creative achievement requires an act of courage, which in turn builds character. It fosters hard work, integrity, self-control, honesty, and persistence, virtues that have been eroded by our culture of easy multiple choice.

  I once had a college instructor who would shout, “Shut up and design!” He knew that if your goal was to make something, there was no substitute for getting on with it.

  5. Engage the learning drive

  Why can’t Johnny and Susie sit still? Ken Robinson offers an interesting hypothesis. He noticed that attention-deficit disorder has been spreading in lockstep with standardized testing, showing up first in places where schooling is the most regimented, such as the eastern United States. He says in some ways ADHD is a “fake disease.” Not that there aren’t legitimate cases, of course, but that the cause of most hyperactivity and lack of focus is the nature of our schooling, not an outbreak of neurological difficiencies.

  He draws a contrast between two kinds of experiences: aesthetic and anaesthetic. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you’re in the moment, when you’re fully alive, when you’re resonating with the excitement of what you’re learning. An anaesthetic experience is one in which your senses are deadened. He believes we’re getting our kids through school by anaesthetizing them with Ritalin and other interventions. “We shouldn’t be putting them to sleep,” he says. “We should be waking them up to what they have inside themselves.”

  A special issue of Newsweek titled “The Creativity Crisis” blamed the decline of creativity, in part, on the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames instead of engaging in creative activities. That’s one way to look at it. The other way is that, given the state of creativity in schools, videogames seem like a blessed relief from alternating bouts of boredom and stress. Most students, if offered a choice between the fun of playing a videogame and the fun of designing one, would choose the latter. So why not create a videogame project for the classroom? Engage kids in real-world challenges such as concepting, game theory, planning, storyboarding, motion graphics, sound design, programming, writing, and teamwork.

  “It’s very important for people to continue to develop their feeling world” according to psychotherapist Anat Baniel. When a child has to ignore his kinesthetic and perceptual world to learn about things “out there,” he has to disassociate from himself to do it. As a result, an understanding of aesthetics never develops. To appreciate any kind of art or skillful achievement, you need to relive or “mirror” the making of it. If you’ve never played a sport, it’s hard to appreciate the physical and mental inputs that make it remarkable. If you’ve never played music, it’s hard to appreciate the intricately layered sounds or the tradition that gave birth to them. If you’ve never written a sto
ry, it’s hard to appreciate the rhythms, symbols, and structure of someone else’s story.

  A hands-on, minds-on project can make the difference between shallow learning and deep learning. In a typical textbook lesson, such as memorizing word pairs or historical events, most students can only recall an average of 10 percent of the material after 3 to 6 days. The other 90 percent goes away. In contrast, hands-on learning has a way of sticking around much longer, since it engages students at a deeper level, the level of emotion and personal interest.

  Shallow learning results from a reductionist use of rational drivers such as memorization, extrinsic rewards, objective truth, formulas, observation, reason, skepticism, and expertise. Deep learning comes from the addition of emotional drivers such as imagination, intrinsic rewards, experiential truth, aesthetics, intuition, passion, and wonder. When you mix these together, you can achieve a kind of spontaneous combustion—an explosion of questions and creative activity that makes traditional learning seem tame by comparison.

  A 2010 Gallup poll showed that, although students begin to form ideas about what they can and can’t achieve by age 7 or 8, only 42 percent of students between ages 10 to 18 say they’re energetically pursuing their goals. Only 35 percent believe they can find ways around obstacles to their goals. This doesn’t mean that they’re not learning. It just means that part of what they’re learning is that their dreams aren’t achievable. If the goal of education is self-confidence, 35 percent is a pretty dismal score.

  A reporter from NBC was doing a story on a fifth-grade class using the Khan Academy videos as course material. She noticed a fifth grader doing trigonometry, and sat down beside her. “Do you think this is fifth-grade math?” she asked. The little girl whispered conspiratorially: “No—I think it’s sixth-grade.” There’s nothing like believing you’re special to light a fire under your learning.

  Specialness, the feeling that you matter, is what creative projects bring out. They give you a chance to locate your passion, your joy, your personal source of energy. When you know your name will be connected to a creative work, your mind becomes magnetic to knowledge, attracting every grain of information that could possibly lead to a better result. It doesn’t matter whether the project is a birdhouse, a videogame, a trigonometry problem, a blog entry, a cartwheel, or a smile on the faces of an audience.

  6. Advance beyond degrees

  There’s nothing wrong with extrinsic rewards if they help you focus on what’s important. But if test scores, grades, credits, rankings, or degrees become ends in themselves, they divert valuable energy towards inauthentic goals. Real advancement can’t be measured in merit badges and gold stars.

  Interestingly, as the market value of a college degree rises, students aren’t the only ones trying to game the system. So are the educators, who are tempted to deliver less and charge more, secure in the knowledge that the credential, not the education, is what the marketplace values. While most educators would never consciously cut back on what they deliver, there’s nevertheless a subtle market pressure to lighten up on class time. The average number of hours college students spend on educational activities is about two per day. A third of students do less than five hours of studying per week and yet manage, on average, to earn Bs. I still remember my shock a few years ago when I complimented a friend on earning his MBA from Northwestern. He replied, “It’s nothing. It’s a check box.”

  This is the lingering effect of the Industrial Age on education. Getting a good test score has come to mean progress. Listening to a lecture has come to mean understanding. Finishing a course has come to mean proficiency. And getting a degree has come to mean expertise. Meanwhile, cheating has reached epidemic proportions.

  Remember Dr. Deming? The man who improved the quality of Japanese cars by measuring operations down to the tiniest detail? “Our educational system would be improved greatly by the abolishment of grading,” he said. “No one can enjoy his work if he will be ranked with others.” The idea of being ranked at the top of your class is out of sync with how learning works. Anyone at the top of his class, according to the principle of flow, is necessarily underchallenged. The proper place to be is somewhere in the middle, grappling with tasks that are neither too hard nor too easy.

  The long, slow slide to conformity seems to begin in K–12 (ages 6-17) with standardized textbooks. Kids learn that the answer is in the back of the book, there’s nothing important that hasn’t been written down, and the highest goal in life is to be correct. This is what educational psychologist Donald Treffinger referred to as “right-answer fixation.” Students who fear mistakes are the ones who avoid the dragon pit. They can’t abide failure. Yet real advancement is measured in mastery, not correctness. As you master a topic, a skill, or a discipline, you can feel your confidence grow. The feeling itself is the measurement.

  What does the route from student to master look like? More than anything, it looks like apprenticeship. For most of our history, children have learned skills from experienced workers a very early age. Apprenticing was schooling. But even today, the shortest path to well-honed, finely tuned skills in most disciplines is working alongside a master. Mastery can’t be reached without guidance and sustained focus. It can’t be assembled from thin, 50-minute classes spaced apart by days.

  Quest University in British Columbia has attacked this deficiency head-on. Instead of the usual curriculum of several subjects spread over 16 weeks, Quest uses the “block system.” Students take one course for four weeks straight, no interruptions, before moving on the next one. This means the students are together with their instructor every day for the duration of the course. Instead of juggling, they focus. Instead of grazing, they dive. Instead of piling up credits, they collect skills, knowledge, and experience.

  Quest's president, David Helfand, was a traditional educator who began to see cracks in the system. One day when he was teaching a class at Columbia, he asked the students why they weren’t more curious, why they didn’t ask more questions. The answers fell into three categories. Answer 1: “There’s so much to learn, and it’s all on Google anyway.” Answer 2: “This is a seminar; asking questions could be a sign of weakness.” Answer 3: “You have to understand, I’m paying for a degree, not an education.” Soon after, Quest University was born.

  I’m not suggesting we eliminate degrees, or the tests and textbooks that define them. I’m only suggesting that we make mastery more important than merit badges by giving students of a taste of authentic joy.

  7. Shape the future

  Today we find ourselves caught between two paradigms, the linear, reductionist past and the spiraling, multivalent future. The old world turned on the axis of knowledge and material goods. The new one will turn on the axis of creativity and social responsibility. To cross the gap we’ll need a generation of thinkers and makers who can reframe problems and design surprising, elegant solutions. We’ll need fearless, self-directed learners who embrace adventure. We’ll need teachers, mentors, and leaders who understand that mind shaping is world shaping—who give learners the tools they’ll need to continually reinvent their minds in response to future challenges.

  The cold rationality of the assembly line has denied us access to the most human part of ourselves. It made us believe that if a thing can’t be counted, weighed, measured, or memorized, it can’t be important. It caused us to narrow our experience of life, leaving little room for feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, or learning.

  There’s a theory called cognitive recapitulation that says children learn by retracing the steps of human evolution. As toddlers, we resemble nothing so much as monkeys, absorbed with climbing and clinging and touching. By six years old we’ve acquired the cognitive skills of Lucy, Australopithicus afarensis. One year later we’re passing through the world of early Homo erectus, and by eight we’re racing past the genius level for erectus, well on the way to Homo sapiens.

  In the 21st century it seems as if we’re straining towards a new stage of evolution. Our �
��fourth brain”—the shared, external brain we’re building in the technology sphere—is rebalancing the load so that our right brain can rejoin our left as an equal partner. It now seems possible, even necessary, to reconnect art with science, synthesis with analysis, magic with logic. By taking the gains of the Industrial Age and infusing them with the humanity already encoded in our genes, we can reclaim our humanness and create dazzling arrays of technological wonders. We can begin to lighten our step and lengthen our stride as we make way on once impossible problems such as sustainability, poverty, war, injustice, and ignorance. The Robotic Age, if we want it, can be more than a grainy blowup of the Industrial Age.

  How should our educational system accommodate the fact that the hand is not merely a metaphor for humanity, but the actual cause of it? How should we develop this lever, this launching pad, this wielder of tools and shaper of worlds?

  For our ancestors, the beautiful animals carved into bone, stone, and ivory, and the paintings in the caves of the Midi-Pyréneés, of the Dordogne, of Spain, and of Australia and Africa, are the remaining traces of a culture so profound that it lasted 20,000 years. These drawings were not just their art, but their history and religion and science. They rendered the world comprehensible, gave meaning to their lives, and expressed the heartbreaking beauty they saw all around them. The evolutionary relationship between brain and hand is written in our DNA. It’s living proof that we’re not only Home sapiens but Homo creatis.

  I make, says the hand on the wall, therefore I am.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS