Question Everything - Education Is Horked Part 3

This is Part 3 in my continuing series, Education Is Horked. Previously I wrote about my thesis on the state of US education and The Myth Of The Career. It is my hope to get people thinking about the tectonic shift happening under our feet and what part education plays in our ability to embrace the new world we find ourselves in.

What is the capitol of the state of Montana? Who is the 32nd president of the United States? Did you know the answer to either one without doing a web search? I didn't. But it took me about 3 seconds to find the answer to each question. In primary schools across the US, we spend valuable time in the classroom learning the facts about our country. This time is spent every day, in every classroom. Think about how much time is actually consumed nationwide on just these two things.

Now, take those two questions and ask them a different way. Give three reasons why the settling of the state of Montana is important to the fabric of the United States. Why was Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal so well received, even though it radically affected the reach of the Federal government into our personal lives?

The first approach teaches someone to look at facts and spit them back out. Is this an important skill, when literally any fact is less than three seconds away? Is asking "what" nearly as important as asking "why"? Kids want to know "why" about everything. Why do I have to do this? Why did that happen? And yet, in school, we spend a tremendous amount of time telling them just the facts.

Being able to contextualize data and discern it's true meaning. I would submit that there is no more valuable skill than this particular one, regardless of your occupation. In researching the two questions I posed above, I would probably find that Roosevelt was the 32nd President, and that Helena was the capitol of Montana. I would also have context about each piece of data. I would learn about the Great Depression, what a depression is, what might have caused it, poverty, war, the resiliency of the country, and the lasting effects of decisions like creating Social Security.

Maybe it's your opinion that a first grader cannot be expected to answer these kinds of questions, or that learning facts is important as a skill. And, you might be right. I am not an educator. What I do know is that the effect of the current methodology is seen in the high school students that I interact with every basketball season. Kids want to be told what to do in every situation. "If this happens, what do I do?" I inevitably answer this question with "What do you think you should do?" The blank stare I get back shows the lack of ability to take data in ( facts ) and apply it in different ways depending on the situation.

My point in all of this is that it's time to question everything about how we are educating our kids. Why do we ask our kids to memorize the presidents of the United States? Or the state capitols?

Is there a better way to teach the skills kids really need, while weaving facts into the discussion? Is there a better model for education than putting 30 kids in a room and trying to teach them all the same thing the same way? What would it look like to have radically different days in primary, middle and high school? What if your kids spent their days taking classes online instead of in a classroom? What if teachers were freelance educators, teaching the areas of their expertise to smaller, more targeted groups of students rather than larger classrooms?

I would love to hear what you think.

This is 40

Today was one of those days where each time you turn around something else seems really wrong. It's also one of those days where you are thankful for another day of health and opportunity.

In the small school where my daughter used to attend, the father of 2 young girls died from complications from a car accident, the mother of a fifth grader succumbed to lung cancer, and a 15 year-old I coached at a basketball camp last year was diagnosed with a rare liver disease.

I went for a long walk to try and make sense of it all tonight, and still can't. But, while out enjoying the fresh air, I came across this song on my iPod and felt it was appropriate for today.

This is for Emily, who tonight is at Duke Hospital awaiting a liver transplant. See you soon.

I Know Nothing About Textiles

That did not stop me from attending an event last Friday night here in Raleigh put on by, among others, Amy Quinn. I know Amy from CTK Raleigh. After attending the debut of their new textile design collective, The Common Seam, I was impressed by a number of things.

The first is that I clearly do not get out enough. The artists displaying their work on Friday night clearly know what they are talking about, and I for the most part clearly did not understand what they were talking about.

The second is that I think it's really cool that five up and coming designers in Raleigh, NC ( not a hotbed of design that I know of ) were willing to have a public unveiling of their idea. It takes some amount of chutzpah to lay your work out there for the public to comment on, criticize, and / or not understand.

The third is that this event seems to me to be a great metaphor for the litmus test of the ideas you are working on. Are you willing to put it out there and let it be praised, questioned, misunderstood and maligned by the general public simply because you think it's the right thing to do? If not, it's probably not worth doing.

I am looking forward to seeing what happens with The Common Seam, not because I understand what it means to change the way textiles are designed, but simply because someone I know took a risk and shared their passion with the rest of us. Best of luck to Amy and the crew.

TGIF - Quote Of The Week

I read this quote this morning. I know it's not an original idea, or pithy, or the next great thing to think about.

This is a kick in the groin ( in a good way ), courtesy of Seth Godin's blog.

Tim Cook at Apple: "This is the most focused company I know of, am aware of, or have any knowledge of... We say no to good ideas every day." Cook then pointed out to analysts that every single product the company makes would fit on the conference table in front of him. "And we had revenue last year of $40 billion."

Go and sin no more.

The Myth of The Career - Education Is Horked Part 2

This is Part 2 in my continuing series, Education Is Horked. You can find Part 1 here. It is my hope to get people thinking about the tectonic shift happening under our feet and what part education plays in our ability to embrace the new world we find ourselves in.

When I was in middle school, I knew what I wanted to do. I loved sports and had a passion for all things related to it. I could tell you everything happening in all of the sports, the most important stats about each player, and plastered my wall with pictures of all of my heroes. I became fascinated with sports broadcasting and used to sit in front of my TV with the sound turned down and, with the help of my next door neighbor, call the action in front of me and record it on my parents' tape recorder.

Fast forward five years to a movie theatre in Tulsa, OK. I was a sophomore in college, I was directionless, had no idea what I wanted to do, but I was watching the movie Wall Street. I had never one time thought about being a stockbroker or moving to New York to live that kind of life until I saw that movie. I walked out of the theatre that night knowing that I wanted to be the next Bud Fox. I changed my major the next year to finance and began a love affair with courses like economics and money and banking.

What do these two stories have in common? I chose neither sports journalism or finance as a career. I looked at a number of colleges specializing sports journalism, but the constant question I asked myself was "How will I get a job doing this?" I couldn't see the path. In college, I made a similar decision. Somewhere in the middle of my first senior year ( yes, there were two of them ), I switched to accounting as a major. Why? At the time, it was extremely difficult to land a job in high finance ( or so I perceived ), and accounting would land me that perfect job at the big accounting firm.

My story is not uncommon, I am guessing. At least not for my generation. We all had things we dreamed of doing, but we all had parents that had done the same thing for years and years. My father is a college professor. He has been for over 40 years. The people in the town I grew up in all did the same thing for year after year. Lots of them worked at factories, or at tree cutting companies, or other similar vocations. The message was clear, both at school and at home. Whatever you go to college for, that is what you will be doing. So, you need to pick something you can make a living at.

I blame myself for a good bit of my thinking. I should have had the vision to think bigger, to take the risks, to just do what I wanted to do and figure it out as I went. I also think that I was a product of my environment to some extent. I took the same classes as everyone else, regardless of what we were all good at. We all were required to take math, science, and history because that was what was offered. I remember one classmate was an exceptional carpenter. There was nothing he could not build. But, when it came to the rest of school, he was mocked by his teachers for not having the chops to write a good paper or solve a trig problem that was "so simple."

Here we are in 2010, and education remains largely unchanged in the last 50-75 years. We go to school for the same amount of time each day, we have the same classes ( or maybe even fewer because of budget cuts to the fine arts ), and we still learn more or less the same way. This is the case regardless of public or private school. How is it that possible? Nothing is the same as it was 50 years ago, and yet we still teach the same things. What is the driving force behind education today? It is, in my observation, teaching kids how to fit in. If you know the basic subjects, you will be able to find "a job." If you have a degree, you can start "your career." If you have a PhD, you can teach people how to do both of these things.

The myth of the "career" has ended. The chances of you doing the same thing for 40 years are none. A six-month spike in oil can put a whole city out of work. A country can become an economic powerhouse in ten years, and put entire industries out of work in another. In response to this environment, what has changed in education? How are we teaching kids that are in second or fourth grade to be able to adapt? Good question.

I am a varsity basketball coach for a small private school here in Raleigh. Some of the teams we play are in very rural, very poor areas of the state. I was talking to the coach of one of these teams before a game not too long ago and asked what had happened to their team. They had gone from a conference powerhouse to essentially a middle school team in the span of two years. His explanation was simple. The factories that once supported this town ( whether textiles or meat packing ) had all closed. There was, quite simply, nothing left for people to do. Therefore, people could not afford private school tuition anymore. As I sat there looking at the kids on the other team and listening to the coach, I was struck by the fact that there was a gym full of kids that had little or no chance to make it out of this small town. It was not because they were not intelligent enough, but simply because they are not being taught their way of life is dying and that they must start now ( regardless of their age ) to plan for something else.

It is our task as those raising the next generation to inspire and effect radical change. Never has it been easier to be an artist and have your work seen by millions. Never has a group of readers been more accessible for you to write for. Never has the research on how to grow your own food and become an organic farmer been more available. We must stop training our kids to think that the only professions available are doctors, lawyers and accountants.

Instead, let's raise the next generation as a deep, rich pool of entrepreneurs, musicians, artists, writers and philosophers. Let's teach them that helping to solve problems for people half way around the world is just as important as having a big house and a job. They will find a way to make a living at it, I promise. Do you think anyone told the guy in this video below that he could work at a public school and have his life's work be seen by millions, and in the process inspire a whole new generation of musicians? I doubt it.

If you could teach one subject to a group of kids once a week, what would it be? Got your answer? Good. Now find a way to do it. For me, it was coaching basketball. Share your knowledge. You have no idea how badly it's needed.

Education Is Horked - Part 1

From the Urban Dictionary:

Horked - To be out of whack, to be completely unworkable

I have been planning to write a series on the changing landscape of education for quite some time. It is perhaps the thing I think about more than any other as I raise my kids, as the decisions we make about how to educate them will have multi-generational effects, either positive or negative.

Some of the things I hope to cover in this series are my own observations, and some are certainly the observations of those whom I have spent time reading. There are those that are focused squarely on how technology can help to change the landscape ( see Startl's Design Boost as a for instance ). I tend to think of the "what" rather than the "how", as I believe you cannot solve them in reverse order, and I think the "what" is fundamentally broken.

It is my thesis that education as we have known it for the last 100 years is on the precipice of coming to an end. There are several reasons why I believe this:

• Classes and curriculum have remained largely unchanged in my lifetime, while the world around it has changed at a dizzying pace. High school students today take very much the same classes I did, with the exception of computer classes thrown in here and there. In some cases, the classes are even more limited with the cuts in the arts and other programs.
• Current curriculum in most every school, public or private, is a product of the industrial revolution. It is geared toward educating someone in order that they can find a "real job." This is not a new thought or idea, but after reading extensively on the subject, it is certainly true.
• The definition of a "real job" has changed radically in the last ten years. There are people making a living today doing things that would not have been possible up to now.
• The need for a college education ( in the traditional sense of going off for four years to find yourself and your career) will be no more within the upcoming ten to twenty years. It will be replaced with continuing education that refines and sharpens particular skills. People will be able to explore their passion more deeply and widely than at any time in history, and will not need the stamp of a traditional four-year degree in order to become "successful."
• The definition of success is going to change. Success will be more about living where you want, and doing the thing that matters most to you, rather than living in a suburb and commuting an hour each way to be a cog in a machine, get three weeks off a year, and live for the weekends. You simply will not be able to compete if that is your mindset.
• The cost of living the way we live today will become too expensive as oil and other natural resources become harder to produce.
• The ability to adapt and change quickly is not a part of the education establishment. Just as it is important at the individual level, so it is with the major societal institutions. Schools that cling to heavily entrenched ways of operation to protect the status quo will become obsolete.
• Education has become democratized. We have more power today to decide exactly how to educate our kids than any generation in history. There is virtually no limit to their ability to find and learn about things that interest them.
• Higher education in particular is undergoing seismic shifts as endowments fall, students opt for more affordable alternatives, and the price of spending four of your most productive years swilling beer and going crazy continues to climb. This cost is measured not only in tuition, but also in the opportunity cost of not getting into what you love sooner rather than later.

In future posts, I will be discussing where I think education is headed at each level, how I have chosen to proceed down the path of educating my kids, and hopefully foster some lively debate about how we change the thinking of what really matters in this most important field.

I also hope to have several influential thought leaders engage in the process as we go.

Is education something you think about? If so, what do you think about my thesis above?

Thinking Big, Staying Lean

I wrote a post a few days ago about being able to operate in a lean environment. I had written it on the heels of some really absurd things that had happened at my current place of work, where decisions that were made in the context of trying to ensure good quarterlies were going to put projects well behind schedule. I published it, then pulled it down because the spirit of the post was mostly negative. This post is intended to capture the positive points of my previous post, while removing some of the vitriol.

I have operated for a number of years in very lean environments ( in big company vernacular you would call this understaffed or underfunded ), and this has forever skewed my thinking toward being able to do more with less. The skills you learn in squeezing maximum value out of every resource you are in charge of are invaluable, regardless of the size of the company or organization you work for.

It has been interesting to see how different organizations fund different initiatives. In most smaller, more agile organizations, the process usually goes something like this:

• Someone has an idea for what needs to be done
• You iron out the particulars of what is required
• You get to work with the team you have, getting something out as quickly as possible
• You listen to the customers as they scream at you for what you got wrong
• You adjust ( hopefully in time to keep the customer interested in your product )
• Repeat

In larger organizations, it seems to go something like this:

• Someone has an idea for what needs to be done
• There are lots of meetings where all of the various "stakeholders" talk about why it won't work. Consensus must be achieved.
• You arrive at a set of watered down requirements that go half of the way toward what you really need to be offering
• There is jostling for the upcoming funding ( like people waiting for air drops of food during a famine )
• There is a big team spun up
• There is a date for delivery set sometime far in the future
• People are hired onto this new, big project team
• Lots of meetings ensue to get consensus from all of the egos on the big team
• Territories are established and marked clearly
• The project lurches forward, and is almost immediately off schedule
• Things are pulled out of the product to hit the delivery date
• People are let go from the team because of some financial target
• The project gets further off schedule
• The angel of death arrives to finish the project off

So, why do big companies operate this way when the smaller, more nimble organizations continue to move past them with newer ideas and products that are closer to the customer? It boils down to a few, basic principles:

• Smaller organizations do more with less, not because of the fear of a massive layoff, but because they can see their work making a difference.
• The fight for budget dollars at a big company makes you think like a bureaucrat. "If I miss out on my piece of this funding, I will be left behind. I should add staff just in case."
• Smaller teams ALWAYS out-perform larger teams. There is less blame-shifting, more ownership, and easier to measure results.
• The issues that ensue with having more people on the team ( time to hire, time to train, time for reviews, time to lay off when the cuts come ) take valuable inertia away from the core mission, which is to get something out the door.

I have seen big companies that do this differently, and the results speak for themselves. Google acts as an incubator for new ideas and projects. Ideas are brought forward, small teams are formed to get the product to market, and when the product is out, those team members can go and work on the next project that interests them. Team members are essentially applying for a position on products of interest. Success breeds success.

The problem with larger organizations is not in the vision or ingenuity of the people working there. Any successful organization has smart people working for it. It is almost entirely, at least in my observations, in the execution of an idea.

There is tremendous value in bringing the discipline of thinking big and acting lean to any organization. I would recommend reading the work of Eric Reis. He is doing excellent work in the area of applying Lean concepts to technology.

What have you observed in the organizations you have been a part of? Are there large organizations doing things the right way? If so, what makes them successful?