Transcript of my Catalyst Week Talk (2013, Las Vegas)
Here's the video:
Transcript:
Thank you so much. This is such a happy town. It's a great place to be.
I would like nothing better than to catalyze a beautiful brainstorming session with you about building a platform to learn on.
And by platform I don't mean software and stuff. I mean an entire environment where anybody of any age could learn things, where they would just be turbocharged. They would be catapulted through the atmosphere because they'd be so happy doing it. It would pay off so well.
But I feel like we're stuck. We're stuck inside a box and this box is really hard to see. So what I'd like to do is invite you to walk outside the box and look around at it. And what I'm going to try to do is take us outside the box a little bit.
I'll start with my not-that-distinguished educational career of 18 years, which I would say was mostly characterized by luck and privilege. This is me when I was eight years old, in third grade in Lima, Peru. I had the luck of being raised for the first twelve years of my life down in South America: ten years in Lima, two years in Buenos Aires. I had the luck of growing up learning several languages. I speak English, Spanish, and German natively. I had the privilege of being a white male in an upper-middle-class expat family living a really nice lifestyle down there.
But I started looking back at these pictures and I realized I don't remember who this is. I don't know who my third-grade teacher was. I don't remember who my fourth-grade teacher was. I don't remember any of that stuff. And that led me to reflect—and I'd like you to join me for a second in reflecting on your entire learning career. Look back on all—if it was 10 years long, 18, 20 years, however many advanced degrees you've done. Think back to how many people did you have? Like Antonio was telling us yesterday about Mrs. Hirschman. How many Mrs. Hirschmans did you have in your life? Make a count and say it out loud once you've kind of gone through. Give me a number. Once you've thought through. Three, two, five, seven, six, five. Awesome.
The numbers I usually hear if I ask this question are between three and five, which immediately makes me ask the question: really? Only three to five? I was there for 18 years, and my number is five. What happened? Couldn't we cough up something a little better than that? More people being more significant in our lives. Why are we in this particular situation?
Let's go a little deeper. Let's settle into the question. I want you to put yourself back to when you were five years old. Think about yourself at five, right? Before you went to school. Think about all the things that you learned by the time you were five. You learned to speak probably a language, maybe a couple of languages. You learned to stand, walk, run, run the bases, learn the rules of many games, learn how to bend the rules or innovate on the rules, learn how to cheat, learn how to blame your sister for something. You learned family dynamics, social dynamics—all sorts of intriguing things. Children are really completely wired to absorb and learn and be astute this way. And note how you learned: you learned completely naturally. You learned socially. You learned by example. You watched people, you hung out, you skinned your knees—the whole thing, right?
Then we put you in a place that's a little more modern than this. Let me ask you, what about this situation looks normal? I'm trying to pull you out of the box a little bit. What looks normal here? And ignore the fact that all these children have their arms sort of behind their backs—that's definitely abnormal. But what about this looks normal? Well, we've divided them up into rows and columns. By the luck of the draw, they're sitting there within a 12-month range of each other. They're supposed to all learn together. By the luck of math, depending on how many teachers they had in the classroom size, they're divided up into a number, and we're going to teach them the same thing at the same time in the same way and hope they learn. And if you listened to Casey Qua yesterday, you'd be like, "Ooh, I can imagine a lot of people may not fit really well in that system, and it may not in fact develop a lot of really great students."
Why do we have this? Now, I've heard a lot of speeches that begin with this example of if you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and dropped them in a modern hospital, they wouldn't know what to do. They wouldn't know about bacteria and infection, all the gear and gizmos, or HIPAA rules. They wouldn't know anything, right? But if you took a teacher from a thousand years ago and dropped them in a modern classroom, they'd feel right at home because it's so backward. We haven't changed anything. This little example is wrong. It's wrong. A thousand years ago, we had very tiny classrooms. We had informal learning. We had children who had duties who were out in the field doing things, who had duties at home, responsibilities. They were part of communities. This thing is a really modern invention.
I want to tell you a little bit more about it. It happened roughly around the time the Industrial Revolution hit. So what did we do? We borrowed this thing and kind of emulated it. We industrialized an education system that had actually created pretty smart people before that in very informal and casual ways, but we wanted to sort of make sure everybody did it. This happened at this interesting time between the US Civil War and World War I. Back in 1860, 90% of us were farmers. We were raising cows, raising corn, raising tomatoes, whatever. And then this declined pretty quickly to the point where, by 1930—at the beginning of the Great Depression—only 21% of us were farmers anymore. The number today is at one and a half percent. So all these people left farming. What did they do?
Well, the Industrial Revolution really wanted factory workers, and factory work wasn't the coolest thing, especially in old factories. So we kind of had to train people to be minimally capable there, but we also wanted them to make enough money to become consumers. And I'll flag the word "consumers" because that word is the start of my journey to the point that I've gotten to. And we did all this, we put on the engineering hat. We said, "Okay, we need efficiency and scale because there's so many people we have to teach, and there's just not a lot of money." And we did this also kind of out of this notion of fairness. Maybe that's a way to make it compulsory, so everybody must learn. It's fair that everybody gets roughly the same sort of education. And maybe you think this is okay, and maybe you look at the results today and you think, "Well, our system's doing kind of alright." But I don't think so.
My head was blown open back around 1991–92 when a friend of mine sent me an essay by this guy. His name is John Taylor Gatto. He's a retired New York high school teacher, still alive, a little grumpy. And the essay was called "The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher." I'm going to sort of channel it a little bit for you. And he said, "Look, pretend I gave you a poetry assignment in class and you're busy writing and you're really excited and the words are pouring out of your fingers. You're creating something you really like, you're in the flow, and then the bell rings." We're not going to say anything, but what does everybody know is going to happen right now? We know you're going to put down that pen and you're going to walk over to math class. What did we just teach you? By the way, every hour, for a dozen years, maybe longer. What did we just teach you? We just taught you that the giant metronome that runs this place is more important than your flow, your passion, your desire to do something, your curiosity. Later, we're going to ask you to have grit and focus and determination and really stick to something, but we're only ever going to give you twenty-five minutes in class. That's one lesson of the hidden curriculum of school, and that's what Gatto was exposing.
He said, "Nominally I'm your teacher, but let me tell you what I'm really teaching you." Another one is, "You can never be left alone anywhere. You will have no privacy." Another one is, "You're going to be evaluated by people outside this room who will never meet you, don't care about you, and have developed these little standardized tests that your whole career depends on." And we're never going to ask these people who know whether you're the goof-off or the smart kid and who know whether you collaborate or not. We're just not going to ask them, right?
This has given us what I call the modern OCD. We are obedient, compliant, and dependent. We have adult children. We have a system that is designed to give us adult children. All right? And I want to just call out for a second: there are a tremendous number of well-intentioned people in the system. There are a tremendous number of people who are inventing terrific things, people are experimenting with new projects that I have great hope for, and yet the system itself is genetically flawed.
But it gets a little worse. Because we've designed the system for mistrust, we've turned a lot of things that are abundant into scarcities. You could learn math conceivably from anybody at any cash register or anybody who's sitting down doing sums, but no, no, no—you have to learn from a PhD teacher who got qualified and went to the right college and isn't being paid enough and is sitting in front of you. Maybe you like them, maybe you don't, but that's how you're going to learn math. And then we're going to give you worksheets to do afterward that have no bearing to anything in real life. There's tons of scarcities I can just keep going on. If you're curious, if you're genuinely curious, you're a troublemaker. "What do you mean you want to learn about geography? We're in math class right now."
And then we stripped away, we snipped away a whole bunch of things. Like in the modern compulsory education system, I'm no longer responsible for learning; I'm responsible for showing up on time. I'm responsible for understanding my role, my place in the whole system. I'm responsible for regurgitating whatever they want me to do on the test, but not really for being actively curious and learning. They took away the relationships I need to learn things. I can't go outside and connect with humans to go learn the stuff that's in the world. And they took away meaning. We're performing inside of these schools that are little petri dishes that increasingly resemble penitentiaries because things have gotten really bad in school, between bullying and SWAT teams and Columbine and who knows what. That's what has happened, and I'm stereotyping a bit, but I don't think I'm stretching it that far.
So why do we build systems using coercion? Partly because we don't trust people. And the big aha that I got, the coin that dropped in my head, is that this isn't just true of education; it's true of every sector. The entertainment business protects their goodies against us because they don't trust us to do something with them and take them apart and remix them and share them properly and still somehow get artists paid. The food system is this way; the governance system is this way. The reason Obama and Romney needed a lot of money from us was to feed the TV system and show us ads.
This is a bit of a glum place. But I think now we've stepped far enough outside the box that we can look around. And I'd like to use the five W's of journalism—the who, what, when, where, why, and how—to just brainstorm for a little bit about what could you do if you actually trusted people? The question I like to ask is: what if we trusted you? And the "we" and the "you" is kind of ambiguous—it's all of us. The "we" is us. We're kind of complicit. We didn't create it, but we're in it. We could do a lot better. And I want to think about how we could do better.
So let's start with "who." The who that's kind of obvious is: okay, so who's going to teach us? Well, there's probably a big market for more tutors and coaches, but then there are real humans with real jobs in the world—many, many of them—who would love to spend some time showing you what they do. So we're ignoring that resource. That's an abundance. But then the really interesting question is: who should you learn with? Right now, that's determined by random lotto. You land in a class with people who were born in the same 12 months, which is nuts. What about finding people who are in the same stage of learning how to mix drinks for an evening, and that's your cohort? Or how to speak colloquial Mandarin Chinese, and it takes you five, six, seven, or ten years, and that's your cohort? Some cohorts work, some don't—you explore. So that's interesting for the "who." We also need mentors—we need available people who are pretty wise. Like, I really want to know about the history of coffee, and the mentor would say, "Well, here's a couple of good books and you might want to go look over here." So mentors are really useful, and mentors get us over toward the "what."
But the "what" that really matters to me is: how do I preserve curiosity in children? They're born with it. We stamp it out. We socialize it out of them. How do we help them remember they have agency, permission to do things? How do we help them remember that they can go change the world when the system is busy reinforcing that they shouldn't, can't, won't? I'm going to leave the rest of the "what" for "why," because "why" is really big and really important.
"When" might be obvious to you: "when" is like, well, anytime. I could do math right now, except it'd be inconvenient for you. But you could learn anything any place. But then you start thinking, well, maybe a learner of any age needs to learn to manage their time and do life balance kinds of things. And then you start looking at brain science and thinking there's this thing called the reinforcement schedule. Our memories decay at a certain rate. Why don't we use things to help us learn at the right moment so that we learn better, faster, deeper, etc.?
"Where"? You can learn any place in the world. There's ecotourism, right? There's a pretty big and growing industry about ecology tourism. Why is there no edutourism? I'll tell you why: the children are all captives in schools. It's really hard. It's like the parents are worried that if they miss this week, their children will be set back and they'll never get into Harvard and they'll marry somebody ugly and it'll be awful. That doesn't have to happen quite that way. If luckily people are experimenting with new things, then the "why" is really the big thing. If you break out of the box and you start seeing that the world is a little messed up, and if you are with me so far down this little journey that the educational system is kind of messed up, and if you heard me say that this applies to every sector of society, maybe we have a chance to fix those things. Maybe if you fix them with real people doing real work on real problems, good things come out the other end. So the "why" is really, really huge.
And we need to enable that with a lot of "how." The "how" is beautiful. We've heard from a series of really nice apprenticeship programs and a variety of other things here that there are new ways—which are really old ways—of learning that sound so unusual. They sound like they're really exotic. You're going to step out and not go to college? Really? We were doing that for centuries, millennia! That's how people always learned: guilds, apprenticeships, whatever else it might be. There's also tough software and tools that can help, but don't get too hung up on the software. Khan Academy has basically done a whole bunch of programs you can go watch. Well, behind the curtain in Khan Academy is a whole bunch of rating, and experts get to see who's stuck where. Why don't the kids get to see that? Why don't people learning get to see the stuff behind the curtain? Be a little suspicious of some of the software, in particular if it's all locked up and doesn't work openly, because the "how" is that we can build the curriculum with each other. It can be openly available. Don't need to have big companies that sell us $250 textbooks. Don't need to have everything locked away. That's part of the problem from a different industry.
If you'd like to play a little more on this, there are a couple different ways. One is, just a year ago I did a talk, a TEDx talk in Copenhagen, called "What If We Trusted You," so you can watch that on YouTube. A second one is—and I could do a day-long talk on this—I use a piece of software called TheBrain, which was developed 15 years ago. I've been filling this brain for 15 years. You can go see it at jerrysbrain.com, and everything I mentioned here is in there. Third, I'm writing a book called What If We Trusted You, which I think of as a seed bomb thrown into cyberspace. So I'm going to plant this thing out in this nice environment where we can share and collaborate and see where it goes.
I'll close with one of my favorite quotes from Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure, but just ain't so." Thank you very much.