We need an Educational Revolution

I believe fundamentally that we make very poor use of our talents. Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. There are people who don't think they're really good at anything and others who don't enjoy what they do. They simply go through their lives getting on with it. They get no great pleasure from what they do. They endure it rather than enjoy it and wait for the weekend. But there are also people who love what they do and couldn't imagine doing anything else. In fact, on the contrary, I think it's still true of a minority of people.

I think there are many possible explanations for it. And high among them is education, because education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep. You have to go looking for them, they're not just lying around on the surface. You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.

 Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment and it's not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that's simply improving a broken model. What we need is not evolution, but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.

One of the real challenges is to innovate fundamentally in education. Innovation is hard because it means doing something that people don't find very easy, for the most part. It means challenging what we take for granted, things that we think are obvious. The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense; things that people think, "Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done."

I came across a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln, in December 1862 to the second annual meeting of Congress, he said, "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion, as our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Many of our ideas have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century, but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries. But our minds are still hypnotized by them, and we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them. Now, doing this is easier said than done.

But there are things we're enthralled to in education. Let me give you a couple of examples. One of them is the idea of linearity: that it starts here and you go through a track and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Life is not linear; it's organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting you to college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college. Certain sorts of college. I don't mean you shouldn't go to college, but not everybody needs to go and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.

To me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability. And at the heart of our challenges is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.

I think we have to recognize a couple of things here. One is that human talent is tremendously diverse. People have very different aptitudes. But it's not only about that. It's about passion, and what excites our spirit and our energy. The reason so many people are opting out of education is because it doesn't feed their spirit, it doesn't feed their energy or their passion.

I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.

When we look at reforming education and transforming it, it isn't like cloning a system. It's about customizing to your circumstances and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching. And doing that, I think, is the answer to the future because it's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.

I believe the extraordinary technological resources we have, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education. But we have to change from the industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow. That's where children experience life, Real life.