by Alec Foege
Tulley took the bait, and sent back a proposal. Almost off the top of his head, he suggested a talk on Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do, for which he planned to provide numerous visual aids. He shortly got a response from Anderson, who informed Tulley that his proposal had been accepted. He still, however, had to pay the stiff conference fee of thousands of dollars (official speakers get a discount).
Tulley actually first spoke at the TED preconference on March 6, 2007, a day or two before big names like venture capitalist John Doerr, President Bill Clinton, and singer Paul Simon would deliver rousing talks to packed auditoriums. The idea was that he’d just go over a few quick entertaining ideas he had formulated while operating the Tinkering School summer program. He did the first talk in a small and only half-full room. It took a little over nine minutes. But in the two hours between the talks, word apparently got out, because he found himself moved to the largest room, and entered to a packed crowd. And that might have been the end of it, except for the coincidence that Tulley’s talk was chosen to be the first TED talk videotaped and posted online, and it soon went viral. He became an Internet sensation.
Tully tried to turn his idea into a book, but he found that traditional publishers were reluctant to take a chance on an untried writer proposing a book that would, among other things, suggest that people ought to let their kids play with knives, among other worrisome activities. Frustrated, Tulley decided to self-publish with the help of his wife, Julie, and the result, 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Child Do, appeared after three months of eighteen-hour days spent writing. It was a true tinkerer’s effort: Julie laid it out and designed it with the help of InDesign software. They made a deal with a print-on-demand publisher, an affiliate of Amazon.com. The price of the book was set at $25.95, because that was the lowest price they could sell it for in England without owing money on each copy. On the bright side, they earned $6 for every copy sold in the United States. The book sold 12,000 copies through Amazon, and by spring 2011, Penguin agreed to publish an expanded version of 50 Dangerous Things.
But Tulley’s goal in life is not to be a best-selling author or a highly compensated speaker. He believes the United States is squandering a national resource. He identifies it as “the creativity and innovative ability of generations of children.” Tulley believes that the average American education of today has a tendency to turn out more consumers than producers of ideas. It’s no coincidence, he posits, that the best memories most adults have of high school are either social events or sporting events.
A year or two after kids attend Tinkering School, Tulley often calls them up to assess their level of retention. He is continually amazed at how much former campers can recall after so much time has passed. “The detail with which they remember riding the rollercoaster or flying the hang glider that they built, or the sailboat, or the motorcycle that we made, or whatever it is, the minutiae they remember and the principles that are burned into their brains from those experiences, those are lasting, durable memories,” he says.
Tulley believes that school science classes should be competing with drama classes for students’ durable memory space. English class should be so full of adrenaline that we’re sifting football memories from English class memories. He thinks schools should measure children’s engagement with the material along with all the test scores and attendance records.
It’s worth mentioning here that Tulley has no formal training as an educator. “The things that I don’t know about pedagogy are in all the books that I haven’t read,” he quips. Rather, Tulley views his Tinkering School efforts as high-concept problem solving. Tulley has no children of his own, which perhaps gives him some distance from the issues that parents wrestle with and worry about. If anything, he sees his own interests more in line with those of kids, not intellectually, but in terms of what has the potential to engage him. He claims he could spend all day with a pile of sticks and twine, figuring out what he could make from them.
Tulley seems to be arguing that tinkering at its essence is innate, a preternatural drive to make new things from stuff that already exists. But something happens to children from the time they are in grade school until they become adults. Unfortunately, this something is sometimes called public education. Due to the trend toward quantifiable educational progress, many lower-quality school curriculums, and some higher-quality ones as well, are tilted toward how students perform on standardized tests.
Not surprisingly, Tulley expanded the Tinkering School’s mission by cofounding an actual private day school in San Francisco, called Brightworks, with another alternative educator, Bryan Welch. For the 2011–2012 school year, Brightworks enrolled twenty children in first grade through seventh grade at a tuition of $19,800 for the year (though at least a third received financial assistance). The initial student body was composed with gender balance and cultural diversity in mind; the program also is designed so that younger and older children work alongside each other at times. Tulley’s goal is to keep adding students each year and extending the curriculum through the twelfth grade, eventually achieving a total student population of eighty.
He shows me his notebook, which is filled with diagrams, pictograms, and a variety of arrows, wavy lines, and descriptions. In spots, these drawings look more like the plans for some kind of Rube Goldberg contraption instead of a new kind of learning experience.
Those drawings later became what is now known as the Brightworks Arc, a carefully rendered illustration on the school’s website that shows the three phases of learning each student passes through in the school’s program: exploration, expression, and exposition.
Tulley says one of the first inspirations for starting the school was behavior he witnessed at the Exploratorium, a science-oriented museum for kids in San Francisco. “If you just pick out an exhibit—it pretty much doesn’t matter which exhibit it is—and you just watch it for twenty minutes or an hour, you’ll see this recurring behavior where a child comes over and starts playing with it, and the parent comes up and starts reading the plaque on the wall and tells the kid, ‘Oh, push that button, here’s what we just saw, okay, let’s go.’” After forty-five seconds or so, the parent is pulling the kid to the next exhibit, regardless of the child’s engagement with what he or she is doing.
Tulley likens such an experience to the traditional school experience, where knowledge is meted out in forty-five-minute periods, and schools spend increasing amounts of money in an attempt to optimize those forty-five minutes to achieve the highest test results possible. He believes, however, that what is needed is a greater diversity of educational experiences rather than an excess of fine-tuning. He suggests that some kind of hybrid education, involving both traditional book learning and alternative, hands-on experiences may be the ultimate solution, since only around 7 percent of students are being served by the existing model.
In the 1970s, there was an explosion of alternative schools based on the free school and Sudbury school models, which eliminated grades, curricula, and traditional teacher-student hierarchies in the name of better learning. Tulley views those experiments as necessary steps in the evolution of pedagogy, but his school will take only certain elements from each. He admits his understanding of the historical framework of education is lacking.
For that, he relies on Bryan Welch, his Brightworks cofounder. Welch, who has a dual bachelor’s degree in education and journalism from Berkeley, runs a summer program called A Curious Summer, which takes an exploratory approach to discovery and learning with an emphasis on self-discovery. Tulley posits that Welch successfully eliminates what Tulley describes as the “dictatorial role” he takes at the Tinkering School in determining what project the children will work on. For summer 2011, A Curious Summer offered a freeform weeklong exploration of sound that encouraged kids to build their own musical instruments, learn music theory, and put together their own microphones and speakers.
In the hybrid model the two men came up with, they curate
a number of projects around a topic such as wind, power generation, nautical history, meteorology, or the arts. Then they take the students through an exploratory journey of the topic, during which each student naturally gravitates toward some aspect of it that interests him or her (Tulley and Welch did test runs over the previous years). Finally, the students pair up in groups of two to four to develop their own individual portfolios. As Tulley describes it, the school begins as something akin to a museum (the exploratory phase) and then transforms halfway through each project into a workshop (the tinkering phase). In this context, algebra becomes a skill needed to measure how much PVC pipe a student needs to complete a particular project. “The idea is to always contextualize those topics,” says Tulley.
If the topic of the day is wind, then the children start with activities such as flying kites, experimenting with wind tunnels, and building wind turbines (exploration). Then they move on to a project of their own making, which might be anything from building a sailboat or creating a work of art featuring tornados (expression). In the final phase, the students put together a detailed presentation and deliver it to an audience of their peers and teachers. They also create a portfolio of documents and objects that creates a record of what they have learned.
Despite the nonhierarchical approach to education, the school does not eschew adult supervision. The school has a six-to-one teacher-to-student ratio, and each student has his or her own mentor, who might be a collaborator on any given project. The school staff lunches with the students each day, encouraging conversation even during leisure time.
Thanks to California’s liberal school accreditation laws, Brightworks will be able to hand out diplomas, despite the fact that it will do little to prepare its students for the SATs. The school states up front to parents that if they expect their children to take the SATs, they can enroll in an afterschool SAT prep program. Tulley says the school administration has approached a few colleges and explained their curriculum, asking whether a student’s completed portfolio would be considered for admission, and received uniformly affirmative responses.
Tulley admits he has a lot riding on Brightworks. “I just refinanced my house,” he tells me. “Everything is on the line.”
Indeed, everything is on the line, and not just at Tulley’s new school. As this book was being completed, the national unemployment rate in the United States was hovering at around 8.2 percent, well above the level considered as “full employment” of 5 percent. But at the same time, small business owners and recruiters reported having difficulty filling existing jobs. Most claimed they couldn’t find enough workers with the technical skills the jobs required. Among the toughest positions to fill were those for software and information technology personnel, mechanics, and machine operators. Number one on the list, according to one survey, was engineers.
Only time will tell if America is on the road to recovering its tinkering spirit, but there is no doubt that more people than ever are devising new ways to rekindle the spark. The issue has even trickled down into popular culture via some unlikely sources.
I recently happened upon a graphic novel titled Tinkerers: An Original Tale of the New Future, written by the respected science fiction author David Brin, best known for his Uplift Universe series, and published by the Metals Service Center Institute, a trade association “that represents about 275 companies that make and distribute industrial metals,” in 2010.
Despite the obvious bias of the publisher, the book has its virtues. In a brightly rendered comic format, Brin cleverly envisions a not so distant future in which jetpacks and hover cars are commonplace but America’s infrastructure is crumbling. The evocative artwork, by Jan Feindt, expertly contrasts the glamorous technology that surrounds us with a declining society rotting at its core.
The protagonist, Danny Nakamura, and his high school class are nearly killed on graduation day, when an old bridge collapses. Nakamura subsequently goes on a journey to find out what went wrong in America. Some of the sage characters he meets along the way offer some possible explanations. “Americans are the world’s teenagers,” says one. “Her virtues and her faults were always those of adolescence . . . like our quick enthusiasm and easy boredom.” Another suggests that the United States triumphed in World War II not only due to its courage and productivity, but also due to its army of tinkerers, resourceful young men who grew up playing with cars and radios, who expertly maintained the machines needed to fight the noble war. In contrast, without a unified cause, today’s young men spend their days mastering video games instead.
Some other reasons floated for the envisioned American decline include the cult of individualism, an educational system that moved away from discipline and memorization just to make learning more interesting, banks run by MBAs who weren’t really bankers, and excessive military spending.
By the end, the bridge that collapsed at the beginning is rebuilt by small teams of separately trained experts who practiced their roles through simulations and communicated with each other throughout the process. “It took new methods of design, distributed-fabrication, webbed-integration, agile finance,” says Nakamura. “And yet . . . my quest had taught me the crucial ingredients were human: Pride in nation and community; love of progress, civilization; curiosity and craft; and a world whose damage can be healed by caring skill.”
Charmingly cheesy and a bit heavy-handed at points, Brin’s Tinkerers somehow captures a bit of the tone that the United States likely needs to adopt to get its tinkering groove back. After all, a strange combination of seriousness and frivolity has always served us well. We are the world’s teenagers, in more ways than we care to admit. But even the most brilliant teenager sometimes needs to take a break from the grind, and take a breath to contemplate his or her promising future.
CHAPTER 11
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON TINKERING
THIS BOOK HAS IDENTIFIED THE PROCESSES and thought patterns intrinsic to a uniquely American style of tinkering. It was born out of the idea that Americans were losing sight of a key trait that helped make us a great country in the first place. My hope is that the stories contained in these pages will inspire readers to think about how they might incorporate a tinkering mindset into their own lives, as well as their children’s.
I deliberately have avoided filling this book with prescriptions for educational reform or remedies for reordering America’s priorities and values, because I think such assessments tend to be wildly subjective and scolding. My hope is that this fairly orderly, if occasionally random, survey of America’s tinkering history, proudly dilettantish but equally passionate in its pursuit of something useful, will provide examples of how people might discover their inner tinkerer or support the tinkering spirit in someone they know.
I want to emphasize that reviving the American tinkering spirit does not simply mean graduating more science majors and engineers, as Dean Kamen suggests in Chapter 3. While there’s no doubt that much of the innovation occurring today is in the realm of technology, I believe that a society overly focused on acquiring specialized technical skills, or indeed specialized skills of any kind, loses the ability to think big. I worry that we have become a nation of specialists, the enemies of true tinkering.
This may be a function of the rising cost of higher education. As college tuitions have skyrocketed—at an average annual rate of around 8 percent, about twice the rate of inflation, meaning the cost of college doubles every nine years—educational experts have focused more and more on the absolute return on investment, rather than on the value of a well-rounded thinker who can figure out how to tinker based on a broad understanding of the world as a whole. If parents are going to be forking over a couple of hundred grand to educate their offspring, the logic goes, there should be a clear payoff, usually defined as a high-paying position in a rapidly growing industry.
Objecting to this perspective might strike some as cultural elitism. After all, who but the most privileged members of our society can afford to shell out hundr
eds of thousands of dollars with only the vaguest hope that their children will be able to fend for themselves in the increasingly rocky global economy? But the starkly practical approach to education may not be the guarantee for long-term success that it appears on the surface. While a 2007 study by NFI Research reported that more than half of the senior executives and managers surveyed said their organizations favored specialists over generalists, it also reported that generalists were favored in around a third of organizations, and 20 percent said their departments would be more effective with more generalists than specialists.
In other words, managers preferred their subordinates to be specialists but their colleagues to be generalists. “The irony of corporate America is that while generalists drive innovation and long-term results, specialists are most often rewarded at the vice president level and below,” explained one survey participant.
Meanwhile, scholarships and other forms of financial aid have put a classic liberal arts education within the reach of more Americans. But if the virtues of being a generalist are obscured by society’s so-called pragmatists, such opportunities are likely to be squandered at the expense of future tinkering. If your role in society is largely predetermined by the kind of education you have received and the career you’ve cleverly staked out, the likelihood of happening upon some new, unlikely combination of existing elements and thereby transforming an aspect of the way the world works is greatly reduced.
This focus on specialization also lacks that distinctly American belief that anything is possible if you put your mind and best effort behind it. A big part of the American tinkering spirit is about finding inspiration in the creative pocket that exists between the metronomic beats of business as usual. That American style of seeing possibility where others see nothing is why people like Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett have become contemporary folk heroes. In recent years, in apparent acknowledgment of this tendency, job recruiters have begun seeking what are termed “T-shaped individuals”—with the vertical bar referring to deep expertise in a specific discipline and the horizontal bar representing an ability to work with experts from other disciplines—who exhibit understanding in areas beyond their specialty.