What if there were a basic literacy beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic that we missed, or that wasn't necessary until this moment in our history?
What if that new literacy were the organizing principle between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) and SEL (social, emotional learning)?
What if it could help the least among us leapfrog over the mainstream? What if it could help build collaborative, resilient, creative, & critical thinkers in an age of exponential change?
In this newly posted TEDtalk I begin to outline our thinking about this new literacy and share a few early experiments.
For more information check out LUMA Institute.
Post Script -- On a personal note, luck versus literacy.
In compiling this TEDTalk on how to innovate education I wandered down pathways in my memory that I had erased from my map of childhood, or just didn't want to revisit very often. I was trying to think about what helped me when I was young. I was thinking about how I could relate to the challenges the least among us face as they try to strive and learn in an education system that has stumbled badly.
I'll preface this by saying the next few paragraphs are a bit graphic. They are however nothing like what some kids face today. They are only small bits of an otherwise wondrous childhood growing up in an inner city neighborhood, attending a public school, in the 1970's.
While I'm not smiling in this picture (I wasn't happy with my haircut), I was lucky beyond measure.
In third grade there were 970 murders in my city.
By seventh, one of my classmates walks through a gangway a few blocks from my house (close to my school) and is shot dead for flashing the wrong gang sign in a senseless act that will be repeated countless times in alleys and streets in hallways and in homes across the country.
We had metal detectors at all the doors of our high school and city police officers at every entrance; fully loaded guns on their belts.
My next door neighbor's son (a friend I remember teaching to ride a unicycle to during sweltering summer days gone by) is stabbed through the back on the corner of our block by a drug addled maniac who roams the neighborhood one cold winter day, putting people in the hospital in a path of destruction only lately pieced together by family members sitting in lonely emergency room waiting areas.
My friend lives and winces and groans as we try to make him smile when he returns with stitches down his back and up his chest. His attitude positive, but changed forever.
A girl is raped in the community garden at the end of our street.
I am beaten occasionally by roaming bands of gargantuan teens (methinks at times they are the damned holier than thou parochial kids and their misaligned days off, looking for public school trash). Thankfully enough, most times they just knock the wind out of my sails and slow me down a bit as I run/limp/gasp homeward. I would see them later at Sunday service, halos firmly floating over their heads.
I don't want to paint some dark scene of inner city despair. These were isolated incidences spread across my youth. They were dark punctuations in a bright childhood.
We were living the American Dream. We laughed and played and were none the wiser. We didn't know any better and assumed that this was just the way the world worked.
I was lucky though, beyond my wildest imagination. Other classmates faced far more challenging times than I through the years. Some overdosing, others falling into selling drugs, others picking up the pieces of their family as they went through crushing divorces, others tending newborns as they took their SATs.
I was lucky, maybe Warren Buffett would quip that I won the "Ovarian Lottery." My mom was a scientist and school teacher, my dad a mechanic and maker and tinkerer of things great and small, the alleys were filled with raw materials just begging to be placed in my basement laboratory.
Sometimes those scraps from the alley became dangerous prototypes and I ended up with broken limbs, but I had teachers who encouraged me to unmake, remake, invent, and dream big dreams.
I was surrounded by amazing friends who watched out for me. Who protected me from my awkward stumbles. Who picked me up and poked fun when I had something or another blow up in my face. Who helped me figure out how to be literate in what I would find fluency in, later in life.
None of them--my family, my teachers, my friends--had the words, but what they helped me find was something called "Design."
I learned that rather than being a passive observer consuming all that was dished out, I could make. I could take that thing and fix it, take it apart and make it better. I could change things. Making, particularly making things to fix other people's challenges, to fix the way the world worked at least in some small way, to experiment and fail and try again, became my ticket out of the inner city.
Herb Simon, the Nobel winning Economist, once noted that design was "the systematic attempt to change the future." So in reflection I decided to frame my talk from that perspective. I (we at MAYA and LUMA Institute) think we can radically innovate education in a way that helps our least supported members of society leapfrog over the mainstream. Using a new literacy of human-centered design that is just as important in this century as reading, writing, and arithmetic was in the last century.
I want to note that the single most important thing we can do for education reform is find, grow, and reward great teachers. My sister now teaches math and science to a classroom packed with 45 kids in the same school system that I grew up in. The stories I hear break my heart but also make it sing. Make no mistakes, finding, growing, and rewarding great teachers has to be our first priority.
But.
Beyond teachers, we need to examine the basics that we are teaching and consider the requirements of the exponentially changing world our children will inherit. We need to help our teachers understand and embrace what will be, what business and society needs from our children moving forward.
I'm not sure these kids can all count on being as lucky as I was. I am sure they have incredible potential. But luck isn't a strategy to help them find it.
This post originally appeared at MAYA Design.
Rep. Jared Polis: Real Reforms for a Real Future for Our Kids
I would like to point out that the fundamentals we build upon change very slowly and radical change in the education process does not appear to be justified - it worked well in the past and is still doing so. Talking to a co-worker who is just graduating with his BS in Computer Engineering (so I have almost 40 years on him), I checked about some of his courses. They are essentially the same as the ones I took when I did my BS. The tools are better now, and new specialties have developed, but the underlying science and mathematics is unchanged. So I know what my daughter will be taking in 2 or 3 years as she starts her engineering education.It appears that my advice and guidance is still relevant (to a point).
Incremental improvement is clearly indicated. But the case for radical change seems to me to be much weaker.
I think more importantly you need to consider that you may not be the norm in the inner city and your life might not have been the same as someone in Harlem right now, where frankly they count the number of children born to figure out the prison cells to build in 20 years, thereby encouraging a conveyor belt from birth to prison. That is a phenomena Geoffrey Canada has documented and now, though they said change was hard, he has built a conveyor belt to college for 10,000 Harlem kids. And they are out-doing state testing averages. Read the book "Whatever it Takes" for a taste of his failures and successes during the first five years.
You doing three startups was based on a foundation of 200 years investment in culture, arts, etc. (which have all been pulled out from under most kids today...) and inertia will help us for a while but foundations being pulled out will at some point lead us all out to be a country that looks like Wile E. Coyote running in place off a cliff.
Having worked with cutting edge universities teaching computer science I can confirm they are teaching things from 20 years ago. The problem is that 20 years ago was a different time. They should be teaching biomimicry for computing, since Nature has been doing information and computing for 3 billion years and at a scale we are now reaching (trillions, like our body which has trillions of computing devices in the form of cells and neurons, etc.) and that 20 year old engineering (where computing was expensive and rare, memory and networking were expensive and rare, etc.) may not fit. In Nature computing, memory, networking, all cost effectively nothing.
Just to stir things up a bit more, here is my deeper dive into Nature and computing to fill out what I mean.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mickey-mcmanus/post_1985_b_854734.html
I guess I just want everyone to remember that there are more things in heaven and earth than what is dreamt of in their philosophy... as old William once said.
All that being said, thank you for commenting, it forces me to think deeper about what we can and should do!
My peers in the sciences and engineering seem to have led interesting and reasonable successful lives and my nieces and nephews seem to be doing OK even now, even in these difficult times.
How many consumers understand the meaning of the specifications?
But do the educators think that EVERYBODY should know how to do accounting on those netbooks. Double-entry accounting is 700 years old. The trouble is now people think marketing is everything and then they market junk and the economists ignore the depreciation of all of the junk.
http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1370,-1019-11714,00.html
I have never heard of ACCOUNTING literacy. Not even for economists..
But the saddest part of this article - 6 comments in 6+ hours. Perhaps one of the biggest issues our children face is whether the general public is even interested in improving education much less how to go about it. Certainly isn't being conveyed by the number of comments on this article. . .
Sadly, this is one area that is not getting enough attention in the realm of "educational issues," yet it is the biggest factor in why our schools are failing. It results in everything from plain old "disruptive" classrooms to issues of ethics, cheating, integrity...all the way to bullying and other school violence.
If we want our children to truly be "literate" in the full sense of the word, we have to address this issue and place as much priority on it as 'Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. Respect, Responsiblity, Reliability, Resourcefulness and Resilience are other 'Rs that are not being taught, and it impacts everything else.
For more on this, I invite you to visit: http://socialsmarts.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/education-finger-pointing-and-blame-placing-is-not-a-solution/
- Corinne Gregory
www.corinnegregory.com
Worst of all, schools will HAVE to teach it because they suffer the most from it. And, frankly, when much of the schools' attitudes to unruly kids is "well, they're just being kids," they have a responsibility to keep order and discipline, too. And it's not being done very well -- but there are two parts of the problem and we're not addressing that at all.
While I could get depressed, I'm bullish. Frankly we've learned from over 100 years of experiments about how things work. It's more about the political, social, cultural will to open our eyes.
Where do I sign up for your bootcamp?
http://www.luma-institute.com/workshops/public-workshops