No Longer Widgets

In order to prepare children for the future, one needs to think about the future. No, I'm not thinking about warp drive and teleportation. Although, I hope my eldest son can solve the teleportation challenge, it would make walking home through the rain much easier on him. I'm thinking about the challenges and opportunities before him. For many of us, we were in elementary school and high school prior to the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Life was simple. There was us and there was them. Red countries and blue countries. Schools raced to prepare children for math and science. We needed people to out think, out prepare, and be ready to counter the Red Empire. Army and Navy recruiters waited for the next round to churn through their doors. It was a easily polarized world. And then the wall fell. Germans raced together. Families separated for a generation found each other. A wall that separated the world for nearly 28 years crumbled.

In the 26 years since, the world has changed in remarkable ways. A world once physically divided has become remarkably interconnected. A child in Illinois can video chat a child in Jaipur, India with only a momentary delay. No longer do we prepare children to blindly serve their army or nation but rather to prepare our world to become a better place.

It's interesting that the foundations of education and those who would reform education from the outside still see the structures and products within the frame of the Industrial Revolution and the Cold War. They see the factory model: curriculum as a deliverable, math and science learning widgets mastering content, and children as outcome measures comparable by a standardized metric. They see teachers, principals, and superintendents as cogs in a machine. A system that is either too expensive that it has become burdensome for the society or too ineffective in producing the math and science widgets that it needs to be outsourced to another less expensive vendor.

It is interesting that those who lead and those who would reform aren't observing our world and thinking about our future as many of those within the system. Our greatest strength as a society is our ability to innovate. We are no longer able to move thousands of workers from Kansas to Texas in a moment's notice. We aren't going to have enormous growth of inexpensive factory workers working two shifts at the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Our success is our ability to innovate. Whether it is the internet boom of the 90's, the growth of Intel, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, or Google. Our leadership in the world is our ability to create, innovate, to solve problems in unique ways and think of new challenges that no one even considers. "Designed in California" means something more than simply an Apple product. It means that while products can be built anywhere the ideas and engineering begin here.

In order to prepare children for a future that makes our world a better place. A future in which they are asked to create, innovate, and design answers for problems we haven't considered. In order to be ready for this world, we need to stop treating them as deliverable widgets and cultivate opportunities in which they create innovative solutions. The curriculum can't be the deliverable of the 60's, 70's, 80's, 90's, and 00's. It can't come out of a book in which we say all teachers must teach this and all students must learn this. Rather it needs to look like the experiences of an engineering class. A set of problems, challenges, and objectives that the students need to figure out. The teachers can no longer be widgets providing the same inputs to each child and expecting the same outputs. Rather they are sensei & Jedi masters: providing challenges for their pupils and expecting unique products that overcome the challenge. The teachers can no longer be factory workers putting together the same batch of 25 products a year to standardized specifications. Instead they must be doctors, diagnosing each child's strength and growth areas and providing regimens to help their patient improve their quality of life.

Our future is not fantasy land. It's not a world of teaching widgets producing learning widgets. The future doesn't need more of the same. It needs people who will consider ways to heal it, innovate within it, and make it a better place for all of that. In order to prepare our children for this world, we need to allow them to grow up in that world. So maybe this year, instead of every child writing the same five-page persuasive paper, maybe this year we hand them the challenge and say, "make a product that convinces me." The students aren't widgets and neither are we.

Making Widgets