Ten Trends: Educating Children for a Profoundly Different Future

Presenter: Gary Marx, Center for Public Outreach, Vienna, VA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part Two

Gary Marx: Let’s look at the business sector for just a minute – a couple of extreme examples. One extreme example is beauty.com. This is a website that went online in November 1999. Four months later, in February of 2000, beauty.com was sold to drugstores.com for $42 million. Now you can say, haven’t you noticed, Gary, the NASDAQ has tanked. I’ll bet beauty.com doesn’t even exist anymore. Well, it does, and drugstores.com, is doing OK. I want you to think about the board of directors at drugstores.com when they were discussing what they had just purchased. What did they have laid out on the table? All they bought was a network and information, and they paid $42 million for it.

Now let’s take another extreme example – Microsoft, one of the biggest companies on the face of the earth, one of the biggest companies in America, and Bill Gates, the richest person in the world. I don’t know if you read Forbes Magazine. Every six months or so they list all the billionaires that they can identify in the world. Bill Gates leads the list. You know how much he’s worth personally? $40.7 billion. I do want to compliment the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the substantial contributions they’ve made to education. They’ve done some great work, and I appreciate it very much.

The interesting thing to me about Microsoft is that they really don’t own factories. They own copyrights, they own trademarks, they own patents, they own relationships with their employees, they own relationships with their customers, they own relationships with their suppliers – they own social and intellectual capital, and they’re one of the biggest companies in this country and in the world.

The Boeing 777 – how many of you have ridden on the Boeing 777? A lot of people in this room. That aircraft is 95 percent social and intellectual capital and five percent the stuff it’s made of. It has three on-board computers; it has two engines. And there are some bedrock American corporations that have almost lost it because they didn’t pay attention to the trends. They didn’t pay attention to the social and intellectual capital that should have been coming their way. McDonald’s is one of them. They were losing market share, and then they found out that people were moving toward healthier diets, so they had to change their menu. Maybe you’ve seen their new commercials on the air. They’re doing salads now, they’re doing all kinds of healthy foods.

Levi-Strauss, located right here in San Francisco. I picked up the Washington Post one day, and there was a story about Levi-Strauss laying off people by the tens of thousands. They’d lost touch with the trends. People were moving toward softer fabrics, and they’re still trying to catch up. Nike was losing market share. People were moving toward the brown shoe, the Timberland phenomenon. They’re starting to get their market share back. The message: We need to stay in touch with the future, in touch with the trends.

How do we run an entrepreneurial organization. There’s a little book that David Brooks wrote recently. Has anybody read Bobos in Paradise? Even if it makes you angry or if you have a good laugh, it’s interesting. He says that in the old organization the system was king, but in the new organization it’s relationships that matter most. Everything grows from relationships. Big companies are breaking themselves up into flexible teams. They’re creating what some experts are calling ensemble individualism.

I was at an exhibit over at the National Building Museum a while back. The exhibit was devoted to the evolution of the American office, the history of the American office and what the American office is about to become. They had a picture of one office building where about every six feet they had these coiled cords dangling from the ceiling, and all the desks were on wheels. So let’s just say-- this group right here in front--we’re working together as a team, right? And we finish our work, so I take my desk and I wheel it over here, and you have other teams you’re working on. We get another team together over here. I plug my computer and my AC into this dangling coiled cord coming down from the ceiling, and we’re off and running. Ensemble individualism.

I’m not suggesting for a minute that you dangle cords from the ceilings of every office of every classroom in your school system, but I think it’s an example of what may be coming down the pike in terms of working as individuals but getting people together in teams to generate even greater richness in our thinking as we get our work done. Odysseus of Greek mythology has become a mascot for this phenomenon. You see, Odysseus is an example of someone who could improvise his way through unexpected situations.

So what are some of the implications of this trend? I believe we need to capitalize on our own social and intellectual capital. What should be the home of intellectual capital in every community in our country? It’s the local school, right? We should be the home of intellectual capital. And I believe in many cases we are. How about the home of social capital? Where do we develop those first relationships that last us the rest of our lives? At school.

We need to get beyond the factory model, and we need to prepare our kids for the new economy, for existing and emerging careers in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors. I believe that a lot of our kids are going to be coming out of our schools, and they’re going to maybe work for a larger organization for a while. Then they’re going to spin off and become consultants. They’re going to become freelancers. And they’ll have a computer sort of like this one. They’ll connect with friends – wires, wireless, whatever you like-- in Beijing and in Kuala Lumpur and in Durban and in Berlin. They'll take on an important project, finish it, do very well financially, and move on to the next project. The same kind of thing could take place within your community or across a country.

So we need to prepare these kids with some management skills. They need to know how to manage their time, and they need to know how to manage a budget. I’m not necessarily for giving everybody an MBA in high school. But I think they need to at least know how to manage their time and manage a budget. They need to have some entrepreneurial skills. How do you take an idea to market, whether it’s in the for-profit or the nonprofit sector? And I think the education system needs to offer professional development that challenges habits and mindsets.

Now another of these trends: Education will shift from averages to individuals. I believe that standardization is going to push us in the direction of personalization, and here’s how I think it’s going to work. I want you to imagine for just a minute that your state has developed standards for education. That’s fairly safe, because just about all of our states have. Now I want you to also imagine that to make sure that the kids do well on those standards, we’ve developed a series of high-stakes tests. Imagine further, that if 50 percent of the kids in a school don’t do well on those high-stakes tests, that the school loses its accreditation. Now I want you to imagine another thing. My child has not done well on those high-stakes tests. What am I going to do? I’m going to show up at the schoolhouse door, I’m going to knock, and I’m going to say, "You can have your standards, you can have your high-stakes tests, but I want the kind of personal attention my child needs to reach or exceed those standards."

Now let’s imagine that 50 percent of the kids in the school don’t do well on those high-stakes tests. What’s going to happen then? One, the school loses its accreditation. Number two, property values fall through the basement four. Three, hundreds of people show up at the schoolhouse door, they knock, and they say, "You can have your standards and your high-stakes tests, but we want the kind of personal attention our children need to reach exceed those standards."

So I believe that standards and high-stakes testing will actually create a market for personalization, the kind of thing we’ve wanted to do for a long time. Let’s hope that’s the case, because if it creates a market, we hope the resources would follow. Some people will hear me say these things and they’ll remark, Gary, you must be against standards. Then they add, I’ll be you’re even in favor of lower standards. That’s the way people sometimes come at you.

I want you to know that I think standards are a good idea. I think we need standards. We need appropriate standards. But the world is moving in the direction of mass customization, and these are the people we’re dealing with in our communities, people who are almost accustomed now to mass customization. I can go into some shoe stores and buy a size eight shoe for this foot and a size eight and a half shoe for this foot.

We need to become standards critics. I didn’t say we should be critical of standards. I didn’t say we should become standard cynics. But we need to ask some hard questions about standards to make sure they’re appropriate.

If you’re going out to buy a car, you’re going to read up on cars. You want to be able to ask the right questions when you go out there and spend whatever you need to pay for an automobile. Here are some of the questions we need to be asking when we think about standards. One, do the standards focus on preparing students for the future? Or do they freeze the system and prepare students for the past? Is it possible that every year we could do a better and better job on those high-stakes tests and every year do a better and better job of preparing our kids for some time in the past?

Second, there’s a concern that some students might simply give up. They might be pushed out of the system. One way to increase average test scores is to push the kids out who aren’t doing well. And those scores will go up--the tyranny of the average.

Another way to raise test scores is to cut everything out of the curriculum that isn’t tested and doesn’t show up on the front page of the newspaper. That’s another way to raise the averages. Albert Einstein had something to say about that. Einstein said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Then there is a serious and growing concern that teachers and administrators might be driven from the field, that aspiring educators may be less likely to pursue a career in education because the requirements are there but the resources aren't. I’ve got to tell you, I’m running into this situation all over the country.

What are some of the implications of this trend? I believe the bottom line is that we need to personalize as a key to reaching and going beyond the standards. Many of you in your school systems are already trying to personalize education for the children. We need to prepare our students for the future, not freeze the system in the past. I think another thing that we need to beware of is that we should not simply wait for marching and say, "I’ll tell you what I’m going to do next year when I get my orders from the state capital or from Washington." We need to be leaders, not just compliant bureaucrats. So if we’re given No Child Left Behind and all its requirements, we need to build on that and not say, this is what they told us to do, and that’s all we’re going to do.

Then, if possible, we should try to create a framework for helping people quantify the value of a comprehensive education. I know that’s difficult to do, but we’re a quantifying society. How can you quantify the value of a comprehensive education and measure it against the cost of neglect? If we have fuller jails, if we have people who are frustrated, if we have people who are not performing to their greatest potential, if they aren't as productive as they could be, what's that going to cost us?

Let’s move on to another of these trends: The millennial generation will insist on solutions to accumulated problems and injustices. We’re moving from the silent generation, the baby boom generation, and generation X, toward the millennial generation. Generational experts, people like Bill Strauss and Neil Howe, tell us that, after studying generations over centuries, they have concluded that every fourth generation has a tendency to repeat itself. Four generations ago we had the G.I. generation, the people who went out and either on the home front or the battlefront, for the second time in the last century, saved the world for democracy. Four generations later, we have a group called the millennials. Some are calling them the new G.I. generation. These young people have been born beginning at about 1982. They’ll continue to be born, generational experts are telling us, through this year, and then a new generational group will kick in. It could be that the defining moment will be what happens in the Iraqi situation. Who knows what it’s going to be. We don’t know at this point, and it may not be precisely 2003.

But these are the millennials, the students you currently have in your schools, and they are committed to solving the problems of the world and dealing with the injustices. Of course, you can find exceptions to this, but these young people are already seeking battlegrounds. They hit the street for the first time during world economic conferences in places like Seattle, Washington; Washington, D.C.; Quebec City; Gothenburg; Genoa. They were there with other generations of people. But that’s where they had they’re voices heard for the first time. As you know, during the past few weeks, whether you agree with it or not, it’s a fact we had a bunch of kids who were skipping out of school because they wanted to demonstrate about the current international situation.

People who study these kids, who get under the skins, who really listen to them, tell us that they tend to be confident. We have a lot of parents of millennials in this room. Any of you have millennials as kids? Lots of you. Do they tend to be confident? They tend to be sociable. In some cases they’re a little concerned about the morality of some of the generations that have preceded them, so by some measure they seem to be a bit more concerned about moral issues. They’re street smart. They accept diversity. They’re optimistic. They think it's is possible to create a better world. They’re civic-minded. They think it’s possible to create a better community. And these kids have experienced the multicultural society.

These young people, whether they grow up in an all-white community, all-Hispanic community, all-black community, all-Asian community – whatever community they grow up in – are going to have to live and work and thrive in a multicultural society. They have experienced the new world order. Most of us grew up during the Cold War. Well, the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union came apart. Now, rather than seeing conflicts developing along political boundaries, we’re seeing conflicts develop along cultural and civilizational boundaries. Now we’re almost getting to the point that some of the political tensions along boundaries are flaring up again.

The millennials have seen this rise of violence and terrorism. As I said earlier, I was an administrator several years ago in the Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado. After the shootings at Columbine High School, which is in Jeffco, I was asked to come out, and I spent about a week advising their great staff on strategy for dealing with the aftermath of the shootings. There were about 15 people of us from outside the district who were there working with the staff. I believe the school shootings of the last several years will be among the generation-defining events for our millennials.

When that second aircraft flew into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, I believe that was a generation-defining event--when that plane burrowed it’s way into the Pentagon and another plowed into that field in Pennsylvania.

These millennials are also accustomed to manipulating their own media. When I was a kid we had radio. We took whatever it gave us. And then we got television. We had one channel and then three. We took whatever they gave us. Today, these kids, if they have cable, have anywhere from 60 to 120 channels. If they have broadband or a dish, they virtually have hundreds of channels. They can manipulate their own media. They can move things around. The idea of high-speed computers and satellite communication is no big deal to these kids. It’s as if it’s always been there.

Let’s talk about coming of age. Generations are largely defined by what happens to them when they are coming of age, between the ages of 16 and 24. Here are some generation-defining moments of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century: World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, Sputnik, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights movement, walking on the moon, Vietnam, fall of the Berlin Wall, disintegration of the Soviet Union, the advent of the Internet, school shootings, the 1990s economic boom, September 11, Enron-Andersen-WorldCom-Martha Stewart.

By the way, generation-defining events are generally events that involve people doing something to other people. They’re generally not natural disasters. Now if an asteroid should strike us at the moment that might be a generation-defining event – but they’re not generally tornadoes or earthquakes. They tend to be events or conditions that are initiated by people.

Now, let’s take a look at some of the implications of this trend. I believe we’ll need to develop our students' teamwork skills, their conflict-management skills. We need to teach these kids how to make change peacefully and democratically, because as they get a little older and move into positions of leadership at the national and international level, they’re going to be out there trying to solve the problems of the world and deal with the injustices. Unless they know how to make change peacefully and democratically, we could end up anywhere from Nirvana to Armageddon, because they will have very large weapons.

We need to set up opportunities for greater intergenerational communication, because as they’re trying to make these massive changes in the world, the millennials will be outnumbered by older generations. We talked about the importance of intergenerational communication for the system and for the children earlier. We need to build media literacy skills, because much of the information they’re going to use to make their decisions they’ll get off the Internet or whatever replaces it. They need to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, the truth from the fiction. Then, I believe if we can prove to these kids that we are mission-driven, that if they really want to make positive change in the world, they should become a teacher or administrator, we might be fortunate enough to attract some of these talented and energetic young people into careers in education as teachers or administrators.

Another of these trends: Continuous improvement and collaboration will replace quick fixes and defense of the status quo. Let’s dig into this for just a minute. I believe that we need to get into the habit of jumping the curve. You all know how this works. Most institutions, most organizations, start with an idea. I guess everybody would agree with that. (Illustration) And let’s say this is the idea right here. Then an organization or institution grows around that idea. It gets to the top of its game, and then unless something happens, it cycles out into oblivion. What’s inside this curve? It’s our collective social and intellectual capital. It’s our collective experience. We don’t want to lose that? We need to be constantly in the business of creating a future, so we need to build curves on top of the curves to take us into the future, whether we’re on our way up, at the top of our game, or on the way down.

Let’s say we’re on our way up. We build a curve on top of that curve, and then we build another curve on top of that curve to take us into the future. We don’t simply freeze the system. We’re constantly in the process of creating a future, which is basic to leadership. We need to get the mindset – and I don’t like the word mindset, because it connotes something static in a highly kinetic world – but we need to develop a mentality maybe. We need to get from a mentality of "getting the critics off our back and letting the world know how good we are" to a mentality of "no matter how good we are or think we are today, we’re going to become even better tomorrow."

In fact, if your community believes that you’re not satisfied. If your community believes that you’re committed to making the system even better tomorrow than it is today, that’s going to be a load off their shoulders. That’s what people are trying to tell us so very, very often when we end up defending the status quo or defending something that may not work as well as it could, or even defending the indefensible.

I looked for a business that exemplifies continuous improvement. I looked at several of them and settle on Kodak because they’ve just been enduring a massive bolt of lightning. They’re in the chemistry business, and doing very well all over the world, and then what happens? Here comes digital photography. Two paths crossed in the woods. Which did Kodak take? I think they wisely took both paths. Their stock goes up and down, but they had to be malleable enough that they could constantly improve and deal with a changing environment.

Continuous improvement in schools – If I were to ask you if you have continuous improvement going on in your school, hands would go up all over the place. And I know you are legitimately engaged in continuous improvement, but we aren’t there yet. We’ll know we’re there when I don’t have to hear the story about Rip Van Winkle anymore. You know how that story goes. Rip Van Winkle went to sleep 100 years ago. He woke up this morning. The only things he recognized were the schools. I hate that story! I really do. I hate that story with a passion, and I think we’ll know we have reached a state of continuous improvement when we don’t have to hear it anymore.

At that exhibit at the National Building Museum, here is the caption that was on the wall as I left the exhibit. In large type, the caption read, “Companies come and go with the lightning speed of a computer’s delete button.” I thought, could that apply to our school systems as well? The world is moving very, very quickly.

Just us kids in the room here, right? We can have a nice conversation with each other. We believe very strongly in the future, in our kids, and education. I want to talk about some concepts. One of them is this idea of creating a vacuum. Unmet demands for improvement, or perceived unmet demands for improvement, create a market niche for somebody else to fill. If the improvement isn’t there, or people don’t think it’s coming fast enough, somebody else will go into business and try to replace us.

Let me give you an example. Edward L. Bernays is the father of the public relations profession. He lived to be more than 100. He was Woodrow Wilson’s chief of the Office of War Information in World War I. One of his clients was the Great Caruso. Back in the 1920s, the booksellers of America came to Edward Bernays and said, we’re not selling many books. Can you help us sell more books? He said, I think I can. Did he go out an promote book sales? No, he didn’t do that. Eddie went out and had a low-cost bookshelf designed, had them manufactured by the thousands, and then put ads in all the major magazines and newspapers that said, “No proper home should be without a bookshelf.” People went out and they bought bookshelves like they were going out of style. They set them up in their houses, and guess what? They were empty. Book sales went through the roof! He had created a vacuum in homes all over the country. Unmet demands for improvement create a vacuum for somebody to fill.

Stretch that a little bit. For better or worse, improvements might be imposed. If people think improvements aren’t there or there are perceived unmet demands for improvements, then the state legislatures, the White House, the Congress, or somebody else might say, okay, here's how you will improve. That’s why we need to be in the constant process of creating a future, because if we don’t, somebody will create it for us. And that’s the reason that I’ve included here: "maintaining the initiative for renewal." I think you could, in some ways, compare the time we’re going through now to the Elizabethan era. Back then, you had an age of exploration. You had Francis Bacon, you had William Shakespeare, and it was a cinch the institutions in that society were going to change.

We’re living through this transition from an industrial age into a global knowledge/ information age. Either we create our own future, or somebody will create one for us. I’m sorry it’s that simple, but it is. And every day we need to earn the opportunity to serve. Anything that smacks of monopoly is not trusted today. Often a school system is the biggest institution in town. It has more employees, a larger physical plant, the largest budget in many communities, and people see us a large institution – and sometimes we act that way. We need to every day be out there letting people know that we’re trying to earn the opportunity to serve, because we live in an era of hostile takeovers, of mergers and acquisitions, of the three-month tradition. You’ve got a new reading program and you know it’s going to take three years to move the needle. After three months, somebody’s knocking on your door saying, the needle hasn’t moved, do we need to have somebody else take this over? Do we need to merge you with somebody?

PREVIOUS PART

NEXT PART