Stop stealing dreams (E)

0:01Good morning, boys and girls. Good morning, boys and girls. That was terrible. You've learned how to do that from a young age. You're supposed to say, good morning, Mr. Godin. So let's try again. Good morning, boys and girls. Good morning, Mr. Godin. Konnichiwa. It's Nick in Fukuoka, Japan, and this is a special archived episode of Akimbo.

0:29A few years ago in Brooklyn, I gave this talk exactly one time about the state of our education. It mattered to me then. It matters to me even more now. We are making decisions every day about time and money, about commitment, about debt, about our future plans, without bothering to ask a simple question. What is school for? Can we ask that question? Can we ask it before we get any further? Because I think if we ask that question, we'll discover some surprising answers. So here in its entirety is that talk I gave. Look forward to your questions for next week. Enjoy. Have you thought about what that's for?

1:26Have you thought about how for 100 or 150 years that was ingrained into the process of public education? Have you thought at all, as people on the cutting edge, as people who are interested in making school work again, about a very simple question. What is school for? I don't think we're answering that question. I don't even think we're asking that question. Everyone seems to think they know what school is for, but we're not going to make anything happen until we can all agree about how we got here and where we're going. So my goal today is to put that question into your head and help you think about it.

2:12First, we have to understand what school used to be for. There's a woman named Mary Yvette Buhl, and she came up with this notion, she was a mathematician in the late 1800s, that you could use string and nails and wood and make decorations, those things where the string goes back and forth, and there's math built into that. And that a teacher on the cutting edge of fifth graders might decide to use that idea of modulo nine and remainders and string going back and forth to teach an important lesson about math. So the memo went home to all the parents at my kids' public school, and it said, we need help with this.

2:49We need hammers. So I'm sort of unemployed. I showed up at school that day with a bag of hammers, a big bag of 18 hammers. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard 18 kids hitting nails with 18 hammers in a little room for 20 minutes, but I have. And I'm not going to do it for you because it's really hard to listen to. And what the teacher explained to the kids is, they must arrange the brads in this certain pattern, hammering, hammering, hammering, and make sure they're in there nice and firm. And so these kids are hammering, hammering, hammering, 20 minutes of zero education, just 20 minutes of hammering.

3:23And then the teacher walks over and she says to a boy, I told you to make sure that brads were all the way in. And one by one, she pulled them out and threw them on the floor, every single one, and put the board down. And that is what she believed school was for. School was about teaching obedience. Good morning, boys and girls. Starts the day with respect and obedience. Now we have to move on to Frederick J. Kelly. Some of you brought your own number two pencil for the quiz that's going to be part of today. The number two pencil is famous because Frederick J. Kelly made it famous. Back around World War I, we had a problem, which was this huge influx of students because we had expanded the school day to include high school.

4:17And there was this huge need to sort them all out. So he invented the standardized test, an abomination. And he gave it up 10 years later when the emergency was over. But because he gave it up, because he called it out, because he said the standardized test is too crude to be used, he was ostracized and lost his job as the president of a university because he dared to speak up against a system that was working. So let's try a little experiment here. I'd like everyone to go ahead and raise your right hand just as high as you possibly can. Now please raise it a little higher. Hmm, what's that about?

4:59My instructions were pretty clear, and yet you all held back. How come? You held back because you've been taught since you were three years old to hold a little bit back. Because if you do everything, if you put all out, then your parent or your teacher or your coach or your boss is going to ask for a little bit more, aren't they? And the reason they will is because we are products of the industrial age. The industrial age made us all rich. The industrial age brought productivity to the table. Productivity allows human beings working together with a boss and a manager to make more than they could ever make alone.

5:32Productivity makes us a car for$700 instead of$700 ,000 in 1920. But the thing about productivity and industrialism is this. The people who ran factories had two huge problems. Problem number one, they looked around and they said, we don't have enough workers. We don't have enough people who are willing to move off the farm and come to this dark building for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and do what they are told. If we could get more workers, we could pay them less. And if we could pay them less, we'd make more money. We need more workers. And so the KKK went to industrialists and said, you need to get those kids out of the factories, those people you're paying$3 a day, because they're taking our jobs.

6:20And so a deal was made. And the deal was universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow. We had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people. Because factories are based on interchangeable parts. If this piece is no good, put another piece in there.

7:03And org charts, those little boxes, are all designed to say, oh, we can fit Bob in there because Rachel didn't go to work today. And so we built school. That's what school was for. And the second thing industrialists were really worried about was that we weren't going to buy all the stuff they could make. That in 1880, 1890, people owned two pairs of shoes, one pair of jeans, that was it. You don't know anyone who owns one pair of jeans anymore, ever. What they needed to train us to do was buy stuff. They needed to train us to fit in. They needed to train us to become consumers. And so Horace Mann, who meant well, built the public school as we know it.

7:46And then he needed more teachers, right? Because you have more schools. So he built a school for teachers. You know what it's called? The normal school. He called it the normal school where they trained people to teach in the common school because he wanted you to be normal. And he wanted the class to be normal. And he wanted people to fit in. And then we came up with this. The textbook. Now, if you want to teach somebody how to become passionate about, I don't know, American history, why would you give them this? Do people walk into Barnes & Noble and say, I'm really interested in that latest gripping thing that's going to get me all engaged about the Civil War?

8:25Do you have one of those? Textbooks in stock? If you wanted to teach someone how to be a baseball fan, would you start by having them understand the history of baseball and who Abner Doubleday was and what barnstorming was and the influences of cricket and capitalism and the Negro Leagues? Would you do that? Would you say, okay, there's a test tomorrow. I want you to memorize the top 50 batters in order by batting average and then rank the people based on how they do on the test so the ones who do well get to memorize more baseball players. Is that how we would create baseball fans? Here's the key distinction.

9:04What people do, quite naturally, is if it's work, they try to figure out how to do less. and if it's art, we try to figure out how to do more. And when we put kids in the factory we call school, the thing we built to indoctrinate them into compliance, why are we surprised that the question is, will this be on the test? Someone who's making art doesn't say, can I do one less canvas this month? They don't say, can I write one less song this month? they don't say can I touch one less one fewer person this month it's art they want to do more of it but when it's work when it's your job when you're seven of course you want to do less of it so one of the things that I've done as a avocation is I when I meet people I take this out this is a great bargain online and it's filled with these blocks right you've probably seen blocks before.

10:08I'm going to dump it out. And I say, take four blocks and make them into something interesting. Now, it's an interesting question because you can use the letters or you can use the shapes. You can spell a word. You can put a profanity there. You can spell a word that means nothing. You can make the shape into a bridge. And people hate this because there's no right answer and there's a million wrong answers. They hate this because there's no dummy's guide to how to make something interesting out of blocks when you're 30 years old. And now we're at a crossroads. We're at a crossroads because as a culture we say only thing we care about, the only place we're willing to cross the street to go, the only thing we're willing to buy, the only person we're willing to vote for, the only stuff we're willing to talk about is interesting, is art, is new, will touch us, is valuable.

11:01And then we spend all of our money and all of our time teaching people not to do that. And so we're now at this crossroads because technology is here too. And the technology says, you know what? For the first time in history, we do not need a human being to stand next to us to teach us to do square roots. For the first time in history, we do not need a human being to teach us how to sharpen an axe because the internet connects us all. And so I want to share with you eight things that I think are going to change completely if we decide how we want to answer this question, or maybe even if we don't.

11:36One, as Sal Khan has pointed out, homework during the day, lectures at night. World-class lecturers lecturing on anything you want to learn to every single person in the world who's got an internet connection for free. And then all day, go and sit with a human being, a teacher, and ask your questions and do your work and explore face-to-face. It's stupid to have the same lecture being given handmade 10 ,000 times a day across the country when we can get one person to do it great for the people who want to hear it. Number two, open book, open note all the time. There is zero value in memorizing anything ever again.

12:18anything that is worth memorizing is worth looking up. So we shouldn't spend any time teaching people to memorize stuff. Number three, access to any course anywhere in the world anytime you want to take it. So this notion that we have to do things in a certain order, which is based on physical location and chronology, makes no sense. Number four, precise focused education instead of mass batch stuff. That's the way we make almost everything we buy now, right? It used to be you could have any color car you wanted as long as it was black so we could keep the assembly line going. But now they make 10 ,000 kinds of cars because they can.

12:55So we should make 10 ,000 kinds of education. No more multiple choice exams. Those were invented to make them easy to score, but computers are smarter than that. Measuring experience instead of test scores because experience is what we really care about. The end of compliance as an outcome. The resume is proof that you have complied for years and years and years with famous brand names, and it gets you your next job. It's worthless now. And cooperation instead of isolation. Why do we do anything where we ask people to do it all by themselves when then we put them in the real world and say, cooperate?

13:33Four more. Teacher's role transforms into coach. Lifelong learning with work happening earlier in your life. And really important, the death of the famous college. Not good college. We don't know what a good college is, but we know what a famous college is because someone ranked them as famous or because they have a football team that's famous. Why on earth are we paying extra? Why on earth are we working harder to comply and be obedient just so we can get a famous brand name that has no relevance to success or happiness put after our name? I want to show you one more device I have over here as I start to do this.

14:14This is called an Arduino, and it's a little bit like a Raspberry Pi. They're both electronic devices that cost$20 to$30 each. Raspberry Pi, which you can buy for$25, has on it the complete Linux operating system, a USB port, audio out, and a monitor. So if we take that cable and that keyboard and that monitor we already have in front of almost every kid in this country and hand them one of these, we can then say to them, go build something interesting and ask if you need help. Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to go do something interesting? Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to figure it out?

14:58And yet, every day we send kids to school and say, do not figure it out. Do not ask questions I do not know the answer to. Do not look it up. Do not vary from the curriculum. And better, better, better, better, better comply. Fit in. Be like your peers. Do what you're told because I must process you because everything in my evaluation is based on whether or not I processed you properly. So there are two myths I want to close with. The first one, and we've got to be really honest with ourselves about this. Myth one. Great performance in school leads to happiness and success. If that's not true, which should stop telling ourselves it is.

15:43And two, great parents have kids who produce great performance in school. If that's not true, we should stop telling ourselves it is. Are we asking our kids to collect dots or connect dots? Because we're really good at measuring how many dots they collect, how many facts they have memorized, how many boxes they have filled in. But we teach nothing about how to connect those dots. You cannot teach connecting dots in a dummies manual. You cannot teach connecting dots in a textbook. You can only do it by putting kids into a situation where they can fail. Grades are an illusion. Passion and insight are reality.

16:29Your work is more important than your congruence to an answer key. Persistence in the face of a skeptical authority figure is priceless, and yet we undermine it. Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results. If you care enough about your work to be willing to be criticized for it, then you have done a good day's work. So what now? What now? What should we do? Because we've been talking about it a whole lot. only one thing. Ask the question, what is school for? When they say this is our new textbook, the question is, is that going to help us with getting what school is for?

17:21When they say this is the new superintendent, we need to say yes, but is this superintendent going to help us do what we think school is for? And if you don't know what school is for, then have a conversation about it, because until we can agree what school is for, we're not going to get what we need. Thank you for the work you do. I appreciate it.

18:02Hi, this is Roberta Perry. My question is... And that completes my question. I love getting your questions. If you've got a question about this episode or just about anything else, visit akimbo.link, that's A-K-I-M-B-O dot L-I-N-K, and click the appropriate button. We really would love to hear from you. Thanks. Hi, Seth. It's Ido. Thank you so much for the All Right Reserved episode. Really insightful. A question here on intellectual property as a stimulus for creativity and innovation. Sometimes intellectual property set the borders of which the area we can operate. When we want to lead change outside of this area, we can either go through the IP or where we don't have the resources, we need to go around it.

18:57My thoughts, or I'm assuming that going around it can create new ways of doing things. So my question is, can intellectual property be viewed as a stimulus to find better way of doing things? Thank you, Seth. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said that the medium is the message. I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing. Sometimes the money determines who's playing, and the people who are playing determine what's going to get made next. So in industries where there are middlemen, A &R folks, agents, publicists, producers, publishers, retailers, that is what's going to get pushed to be made.

19:53So you're absolutely right. Most of the innovation that we see when leaps are made gets made in places where copyright law, patent law, hasn't yet figured out how to create an industry. So if we look at rap sampling music. I don't think there's anything wrong with it, especially the checks are very large. Or we look at the idea of ideas, conceptual business ideas that grew on the internet. if we look at how trademark has evolved. In each one of these cases, the innovation happened long before the law said that you could protect it, long before the law said you could make money from it. So if you desire to make change happen, you probably have to go around it.

20:46You have to find a medium that has not yet been exploited. Hey Seth, it's Ben from New York. I was intrigued by the recent episode about copyright and it's my question is maybe more posing a paradox because with copyright there is this corporate ability for greed and control at the same time for an individual producer or artist or maker of things, it does allow you survival. And I do agree that the best way to change the culture and share ideas is to make something you've made widely available. But at the same time, the concept of copyright does allow you to say to somebody, hey, I made this, you're giving it away for free.

21:37And in this digital age, where people expect to just click on something and have it, which is sort of like your bakery analogy except that people can now because of the anonymity and the ease of the digital platforms walk into a bakery grab a loaf of bread and walk out is how to allow ideas to spread in a wide and inexpensive or free way and still be able to to make a living at it without saying, here is a physical thing that you're taking from me, please pay me for it. And this is what I think copyright allows an individual or an artist or an entrepreneur like myself to use as leverage so that our stuff, like you mentioned, your audiobook being illegally uploaded to YouTube, keeping that sort of thing from happening.

22:34Anyway, thanks so much for the book, for the podcast, for the blog. It's been a great inspiration for me trying to find a way in this new age. Thanks. You're getting at something really powerful with this question, which is back to Tim O 'Reilly's comment that the enemy is not piracy, it's obscurity. that if you're a nascent artist, designer, writer, video producer, musician, does it pay to give your stuff away, to give it away, give it away, give it away, hoping that one day you'll get paid for your work? So the copyright laws are sort of secondary here in the sense that it's voluntary on your part, that as someone who is publishing your own work in a digital format, which means it doesn't cost you anything to give away one more copy, the question is, when does it end?

23:37Does it mean that everything that is digital will sooner or later be free? Well, we've seen 20 or 30 years of this unfolding, and here's what I think we've found. One, ideas that spread win. If your idea reaches more people, you do better than if it doesn't. And it turns out that ideas that are free usually spread further and faster than ideas that aren't. So radio, it was so powerful on radio that the record labels paid money, payola, bribes, to the radio stations to play the songs for free. Because they understood that being a hit, being popular, was the way for an artist to make money going forward.

24:33The thing is that doesn't pay the bills. So how is it that someone who creates digital items is ever going to get paid? Well, let me give you a couple ways that this could happen. The first one is the souvenir edition. The souvenir concrete limited edition of the thing you make so that the true fan, the super fan, will happily and eagerly pay for it. We keep seeing this thing happening. It's not going away. People want to pay for something that others can't have. They want to pay for something that gives them status. Number two is the idea that we can sell the specific. So we can go to people and say, yeah, if you want the traditional version of this song or this digital artifact, that's free.

25:26It's in the world because it's popular. but if you want it to be specific to you, if you want us to play it live for you, that, that's going to cost money. And we certainly see that in the world of consulting so that you could give away a 300-page or 200-page or 20-word big idea. Just give it away constantly. But if someone wants your specific advice, that, that's going to cost money. And the third way that I'm going to propose that we can charge for this work we do is that it can be now. That if you want it now, if you want it live, if you want it first, that costs money. People will wait in line because, again, they get status from going first.

26:17So that's not really the answer to your question. I'm not proposing that copyright go away. But I do think that individual creators have a huge unfair advantage over institutions that need to pay big bills. And that advantage is that we can give ideas away. A blog post a day. A podcast a week. We can give them away. Because the digital environment makes that a powerful way to spread our ideas. but then we can sell the other thing to people who want to pay for it. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.