Need
to find a job? Invent it
By
Thomas Friedman
Published in the bend Bulletin: April 02. 2013 4:00AM PST
When
Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says
he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes" — the education world and
the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them
jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young
People Who Will Change the World" is that our K-12 and college tracks are
not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in
the marketplace."
This
is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage,
middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the past
generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class
job today either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the
world or is made obsolete faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education,
argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready" but
“innovation ready" — ready to add value to whatever they do.
That
is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,"
he said via email, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected
device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know.
The capacity to innovate and skills like critical thinking, communication and
collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive
told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it
continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right
questions — and to take initiative.’"
My
generation had it easy. We got to “find" a job. But, more than ever, our
kids will have to “invent" a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s
easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, some will find their first job,
but, given the pace of change today, they will have to reinvent, re-engineer
and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to
advance in it.
“Every
young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course," Wagner
said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three
education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are
intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent and willing to take risks — will
learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new
opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly
important as many traditional careers disappear."
So
what should be the focus of education reform today?
“We
teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need,
and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is
over," said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the
less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement
going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a
century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory
schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st century
must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and
will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful
ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and
purpose."
What
does that mean for teachers and principals?
“Teachers,"
he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must
be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to
innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need
‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show
evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which
they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of
high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is
important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in
students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May.
We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a
series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And
schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master
teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the
new normal throughout the system."
Who
is doing it right?
“Finland
is one of the most innovative economies in the world," he said, “and it is
the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’ They
learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many
electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework and almost no
testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s
Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called
EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills. There
are also a growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of
Engineering, the MIT Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students
learn to innovate."
