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TEDx Talks
Published: 2015-08-25
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rvhb9aoyeZs
this started a Nike Wesley when my kids were in middle school I got an email from the school saying we're having a session it's weak explaining to you what we're doing to teach your children important life skills and as a parent that's irresistible but that was the essence of the communication teach your kids important life skills if it had been more descriptive I wouldn't be here
today but because it was so concise and so big I spent a week saying what will they cover what impact should schools be doing to teach kids important skills that are used for life I started making my list and my list included things that were skills like invent a problem solving your communication or team worker figuring out complex situations or characteristics in character traits like determination
and perseverance and resources for this being able to stand up to failure being boulder appreciating the wonder in nature and human achievement or capabilities we all need exciting bowl goals for yourself learning how to learn being able to persevere through difficulties finding your passion and purpose in life and figuring out how you can make your world a better so I made that list I put on
a piece of paper but I left a lot of blank space in the paper because I knew I would hear way more than that and I wanted to take notes I wanted to learn from this session and I expected to be surprised and I was surprised so the session consisted of the initiative that they were on leaching was forty five minutes a month these middle school
kids would go to a presentation run by the gym teachers and they would pick the problem or the challenges the month that so if you didn't want kids to ever smoke we would show the most grisly gruesome videos of tar infested longs in that van stages of tongue and mouth cancer and some of that would be transferred or show transformational to our kids as I left
that session and it somehow felt vaguely dissatisfied and so when I came home I started to think about my kids in their education I always cared about their education but I think like most parents I'd really focused on two things I focused on how my kids were doing what grades they were getting and I focused on how much they were doing where they buckling down and
doing their homework but I never had stepped back and said what are they doing let alone how does it relate to life so I made a great big sheet and divided into two columns I said over here I'm gonna track things are doing in school that help prepare them for life and over here and get a track things that are irrelevant and I'm just gonna pay
attention and watches over matter days or weeks or months and see what pattern emerge I am a bit to my surprise the column on the right irrelevant column was full and then some in less than a week and when I say the names of things were on it you will immediately associate them with school and the reason is because that's the only place you ever use
them things like factoring polynomials are gerunds or Coulomb's law the left the column of what's preparing kids for life I was doing my very best to give things a benefit of the doubt but that column remains stubbornly empty but that wasn't what really concerns me what concerned me was that I ended up having to add a third column and that third column was things it would
jeopardize or impair a kid's prospects in life and I knew something about that because I spent my career in innovation and and as a career venture capitalist backing some of the top for profit but also social entrepreneurs people that wanna make this world better I knew two things with the utmost clarity one was that innovation sprinting forward in a way none of us can even imagine
every structured job in the economy if it hasn't disappeared already will disappear as a kid coming through education simply trained to follow instructions and jump through hoops our kids are gonna be marginalized or chronically unemployed and that's not ten kids and a hundred kids that's millions of kids but the second thing I knew is that this was a time of incredible opportunity and if you look
at the characteristics you see him every five year old visitor old creator totally comfortable with taking risk impaling if we can just preserve those characteristics it will be the best of time for young adults but my list of things that were going on in school that jeopardize kids prospects were all around that and that we were actively in schools scourging eliminating those types of characteristics and
traits and so that changed my life or my life in many ways stopped I stopped being a person and started to being a cause much to the chagrin of my my wife and kids and %HESITATION and I started traveling everywhere and meeting people and reading books I watched every education documentary I could find and in the process I learned so much and one of the things
I learned one of the things I thought I'd be discouraged about was the design of our schools because here I am staring at this thing that says kids need to be good it acts we're making good at something that's a relevant this is a big problem but our schools actually were thoughtfully designed by very far sighted people people that anticipated a world that was changing so
in eighteen ninety three the committee attend said the world is going to move from agriculture to manufacturing there will be millions of opportunities for young kids that can do the same task over and over efficiently and without error the same time Henry Ford does not need creative bold innovative assembly line workers so let's organize a school to promote efficiency and reaching execution of operations and was
discouraged creativity and that's a school system we changed to over the course of the low of about a twenty year period from eighteen ninety three to the early nineteen hundreds and it worked an American became the most important country on earth and we created a robust and strong middle class and we were the envy of the world we save the world in in World War two
but then what happened was fast forward isn't the same characteristics we would hope for from the committee of ten somehow didn't materialize in the twentieth century in by by the time we got to even the nineteen eighties it was clear our education model had run out of steam so there was a report done in nineteen eighty three about education called a nation at risk and that
report had this telling sentence it said if our education system had been imposed on us by a foreign country we were declared an act of war think about that an act of war what did our equipment in the committee of ten the philanthropist and policymakers and business people who can really influence education do did they step back and say we are making a transition from manufacturing
to innovation and just as in the last century we change our model we need to change it again that's not the church the path we took that's not the choice we made and so instead we said let's take the same obsolete system and make it better by doing more of it more intensely and let's testing measure more carefully and was not really give any thought to
how relevant it is to life it was just put the pressure on our schools to catch up with south Korean Singapore in the standardized test measures and the results I think you on though have been catastrophic you would think that being immersed in that for this period of time I would be incredibly discouraged but I wasn't because at the same time I was visiting schools they
were doing the most incredible things it's not that we don't know what we should be doing with their schools it's not that we haven't figured out how to prepare our kids for a very different world that we as adults grew up in we know that it's just that those are isolated pockets of great innovation practices so what I said is my contribution to this should be
how can I spread that message how can I share that vision of the schools that are schools of possibility and hope as sort of placement and percentile measurement on standardized tests and so the vehicle I chose to do it I am not by any stretch a filmmaker but I'm a believer in the power of film so I did a six month search I found a documentarian
that I think is the best in the country I supported him in sin and his team for two years the film across the country in all sorts of situations all demographics all geographies %HESITATION age groups and all types of schools public private charter I think capture this story show our audience what schools are capable of show our audience what students and teachers can do if we
trust them and let them engage and inspire and things that are authentic and that's film called most likely to succeed premiered in January at Sundance and since then we've been to more than a dozen major film festivals we've been in every important education conference we've had more than a thousand schools request that film because when you're there and I've been to fifteen the skewing aids now
the worst response of an audience when they see school situation federal mine with life preparation they are so enthusiastic and so committed and and people over and over again are saying this is what we need to do it so what I'm doing going forward is I actually am taking this film to all fifty states and so I called my wife last night she couldn't be here
but here's what I said is a very short phone call because I did between things I said Elizabeth Fargo is awesome we were coming back here as it were coming back here soon when I bring this film to community I can only do a small amount myself I can be here I can bring the film but I have to in the in the words of Blanche
dubois from three car named desire I have to rely on the kindness of strangers it's a what I'm asking this community to do and I'm asking in all fifty states is to find the people share this vision of what schools are capable of and pull together an audience includes teachers and parents and students but also include your communities your state's own a Pullman of the committee
of ten people that make the most important decisions about the future of your kids and with communicate to them this important message our country is the most innovative and determined on the face of the planet in a time that begs for those skills which educate towards string instead of chasing Shanghai in South Korea on standardized tests which change the center of the universe in education from
