Stop stealing dreams - Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS

Seth Godin says, the school system was designed to make obedient compliant interchangeable people suited for factory workers and it doesn’t lead to success or happiness of students in the current world. It’s time to change.

Good morning, boys and girls.

Audience: (Murmur)

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.

Audience: Good morning, Mr. Godin.

Have you thought about
what that's for?

Have you thought about how,

for a hundred or
hundred and fifty years,

that was ingrained into
the process of public education?

And 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 gonna make anything happen
until we can all agree

about how we got here

and where we are going.

My goal today is to put
that question into your head

and help you think about it.

First we have to understand
what school used to be for.

There was a woman named
Mary Everest Boole

and she came up with this notion --

she was a mathematician
in the late 1800s --

that you can use string
and nails and wood

and make decorations, those things
with the string goes back and forth,

and there is math
built into that,

and that a teacher
on the cutting edge,

of fifth graders, might decide
to use that idea

modulo nine and remainders
and string going back and forth

to teach an important lesson
about math.

So that memo went home to all the parents
at my kids public school and said,

"We need help with this.
We need hammers."

So I am 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.

I’m not gonna 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.

And then the teacher walks over
and she says to a boy,

"I told you to make sure
the 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 I have to move on
to Frederick J. Kelly.

Some of you brought your own
number 2 pencil for the quiz

that is going to be part of today.

The number 2 pencil is famous
because Frederick J. Kelly made it famous.

Back around World War I
we had a problem,

which was that there was
this huge influx of students

'cause we'd expanded the school date
to include high school

and there was this huge need
to sort them all out.

So he invented the standardized test

and an abomination.

And he gave it up ten 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 possibly you can.

Now please raise it a little higher.

Hmm. What's that about?!

(Laughter)

My instructions were pretty clear and yet
you all held back. How come?

You held back because
you've been taught

since you were 3 years old
to hold a little bit back

because if you do everything,
if you put all out

than your parents or your teacher
or your coach or your boss

is gonna ask for little bit more,
aren't they? (Laughter)

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 allowes human beings
working together with a boss or a manager

to make more than
they could ever make alone.

Productivity makes us a car for 700 dollars
instead of 700 000 dollars 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 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, 6 days a week

and do what they are told.

If we can get more workers,
we could pay them less.

And if we can 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 dollars a day,

'cause they're taking our jobs."
And so a deal was made.

And the deal was
universal public education

whose sole intent was
not to train the scholars of tomorrow.

We have 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.

And org charts, those little boxes are
all designed to say,

"Oh, we can fit Bob in there
'cause Rachel didn't show 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.

And then, he needed
more teachers, right?

Because you have more schools
so he built a school for teachers.

Do you know what it's called?
The normal school.

He called it the normal school

where they train people
to teach in the common school

because he wanted you
to be normal,

and 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?

(Laughter)

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.

Do 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,

who Abner Doubleday was,
what barnstorming was,

the influences of cricket and capitalism
and the Negro leagues?

Would you do that?

Would you say,
"OK, 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 that do well get to memorize
more baseball players?

Is that how we would create
baseball fans?

Here is the key distinction.

What 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 is 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 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 an application is

when I meet people, I take this out.

There's a great bargain online.

And it's filled with
these blocks, right?

You've probably seen blocks before.

I'm gonna dump them out of it.

And I say, "Take four blocks and
make them into something interesting."

Now it's an interesting question.

Because you can use the letters
and you can use the shapes

you can spell the 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 Dummies Guide to

how to make something interesting out of blocks
when you are 30 years old.

And now, we are at a crossroads.

We're at a crossroads because as a culture
we say the only thing we care about,

the only place we are willing
to cross the street to go,

the only thing we are willing to buy,

the only person we are willing
to vote for,

the only stuff we are willing
to talk about

is interesting,

is art,

is new,

will touch us,

is valuable.

And 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 ax

because the Internet connects us all.

And so I want to share with you 8 things
that I think are gonna change completely

if we decide how we want answer
to this question,

or maybe even if we don't.

One, 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.

Anything 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 of car
you wanted as long as it's black.

So we could keep
the assembly line going.

But now they make
ten thousand kinds of cars

because they can.

So we should make
ten thousand 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

and then we put them in the real world
and say, "Cooperate."

Four 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 is famous.

Why on earth are we paying extra,

why on earth are we working harder
to comply and be obedient?

Just so we 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 --

This is called an Arduino.

It's a little bit like 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 would we want to teach our kids
to figure it out?

And yet, everyday 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 gotta be really honest
with ourselves about this.

Myth one: great performance in school
leads to happiness and success.

If that's not true,
we should stop telling ourselves it is.

And 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.

Your 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?"

When 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.

(Applause)