Out of Our Minds. Robinson Ken

trying to solve. The problems they face are immediate and there are some immediate things they can do to tackle them, but the long-term solutions lie upstream in the education system.

      I’ve worked with national education systems, with school districts, principals, teachers and students from kindergarten to university and beyond, including community colleges and adult education associations. I’ve directed national research projects, taught in universities and trained teachers. I also work now with every type of business, including Fortune 500 companies, major banks and insurance houses, design companies, media corporations, information technology organizations, and with retail, manufacturing, engineering and service companies. I’ve worked with cultural centers in the arts and the sciences; with museums, orchestras, and with dance and theater companies and community arts organizations. My work has taken me to Europe, North America, South America, the Middle East and Asia. I know first hand that the education, business and the cultural sectors face many common challenges. Some are compounded by the fact that they have so little contact with each other.

      When I talk with business leaders, they complain that education isn’t producing the people they urgently need: people who are literate, numerate, who can analyze information and ideas; who can generate new ideas and implement them; who can communicate clearly and work well with other people. They want education to provide such people and complain that it does not. When I work with educators they complain that the culture of standardization and testing, which politicians usually impose in the interests of the economy, is stifling the creativity of teachers and students alike. They want to provide a more balanced and dynamic form of education that makes proper use of their own creative energies. Too often they feel they can’t do any of this because of political pressures of conformity and the disaffection of students who suffer under the same malaise. Meanwhile, parents lie awake at night worrying about the quality of their children’s education. They assume that education will help their children to find work and become economically independent. They also want education to help young people to identify their unique talents and to lead a life that has meaning and purpose. This is what young people want for themselves. The best future for all of us lies in deeper forms of understanding and collaboration between all of these groups.

      ONLY CONNECT: EDUCATION, BUSINESS AND CULTURE

      Education is not always a good word to use socially. If I’m at a party and tell someone I work in education, I can see the blood drain from their face. “Why me?” they’re thinking, “Trapped with an educator on my one night out all week.” If I ask them about their education, or about their children’s schooling, they pin me to the wall. Education is one of those topics that run deep with people, like religion, politics and money. It should. The quality of education affects all of us: it is vital to our own fulfillment, to our children’s futures and to long-term global development. It stamps us with an impression of ourselves that is hard to remove.

      Some of the most eminent people did not do well at school. No matter how successful they’ve become, they often worry that they are not as clever as they seem. They include teachers, university professors, vice-chancellors, business people, musicians, writers, artists, architects and many others. Many succeeded despite their education not because of it. Of course, many people loved their time in education and have done well by it. What of all those who did not? Given the changes that are now engulfing us, governments everywhere are pouring vast resources into education reform. This is good, but it is not good enough. The challenge is not to reform education but transform it.

      As the technological and economic revolution gathers pace, education systems throughout the world are being reformed. Most countries have a dual strategy. The first is to increase access to education, and especially higher education. The demand for educational qualifications grows annually; education and training are now among the world’s largest businesses. The second strategy is to raise standards. Educational standards should be high and it is obviously a good idea to raise them. There is not much point in lowering them. But standards of what? Educating more people and to a much higher standard is vital, but they have to be educated differently.

      Education is not an impartial process of developing people’s natural abilities and it never was. Systems of mass education are built on two pillars. The first is economic: they have been shaped by specific assumptions about labor markets, some of which are now out of date. The second is intellectual: they have been shaped by particular ideas about academic intelligence, which often disregard other abilities that are just as important, especially for creativity and innovation.

      Before the middle of the nineteenth century, relatively few people had a formal education. Being educated was mainly for the privileged few who could afford it. Mass systems of education were developed primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution and they mirror the principles of industrial production: linearity, conformity and standardization.

      In almost all of them there is the same hierarchy of disciplines, which shows itself in the time given to them; whether they are compulsory or optional; whether they are in the mainstream curriculum or after school; whether they are included in standardized tests and how much they feature in political polemics about raising standards. At the top of the hierarchy are mathematics, languages and sciences; next come the humanities – history, geography and social studies – and physical education; at the bottom are the arts. There is another hierarchy within the arts: art and music usually have higher status than theater and dance. There is hardly a school system in the world that teaches dance every day as a compulsory discipline in the way that mathematics is taught. This hierarchy is not accidental: it is based on assumptions about supply and demand in the marketplace and about intelligence and academic ability in particular.

      Many government reforms in education have been doubling down on this model. They have reinforced the hierarchy, imposed a culture of standardized testing and limited the discretion of educators in deciding what and how to teach. This is not a party political strategy. Politicians are curiously united in this respect. They argue over the funding and organization of education, over access and selection and about the best ways to improve standards. It is rare to hear politicians of any party raise questions about the absolute importance of academic standards or the need for standardized tests to secure them. Ironically, they promote these policies in the interests of the economy.2 I say ironically because these reforms are stifling the very skills and qualities that are essential to meet the challenges we face: creativity, cultural understanding, communication, collaboration and problem solving.

      All organizations are competing in a world in which the ability to innovate and adapt to change is not a luxury: it is a necessity.3 The consequences of being inflexible to change can be severe. Organizations that stand still may be swept aside: corporate history is littered with the wreckage of companies, and whole industries, that were resistant to change. They became stuck in old habits and missed the wave of change that carried more innovative companies forward. It’s not only companies that risk decline.

      Few would dispute that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europe, and especially Great Britain, dominated the world culturally, politically and economically. Britain was the crucible of the Industrial Revolution and its military forces secured the colonies as surely as the English language invaded their cultures. When Queen Victoria ascended to the throne in 1837, she presided over the largest empire in history: the empire on which the sun never set. If you had gone to her court in 1870 and suggested that this empire would be over within a generation, you would have been laughed out of the building. But it was true. By the end of World War I in 1918, the empire was fatally wounded and, by the time I was born in 1950, it was a memory. Culturally, politically and economically, the twentieth century was dominated by the United States, as surely as Europe had dominated the nineteenth. Whether it will dominate the twenty-first century remains to be seen. As award-winning US scientist Jared Diamond has shown, empires tend to collapse rather than fade away.4 Think of the Soviet Union and its rapid dissolution in the 1980s and 1990s.

      All organizations are perishable. They are created by people and they need to be constantly revitalized if they are to survive. When organizations fail, the jobs and communities that depend on them falter too. Among the worst affected

2

“No country has moved up the human development ladder without steady investment in education,” Mrs Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, is quoted as saying at the launch of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Reaching the Marginalized, in January 2010. “The failure to stay competitive in the international playing field is a direct result of our failure to stay competitive in the education field,” says Jeff Beard, the Director-General of the International Baccalaureate in Geneva, Switzerland.

3

In 2010, IBM published Capitalizing on Complexity, the fourth edition of its biennial global CEO study series led by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The study was based on personal interviews with 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders representing different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries. In addition, the study surveyed the views of 3,619 students from more than 100 major universities around the world including students on undergraduate and graduate programs, including MBA and doctoral students. Introducing the report, Samuel J. Palmisano, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM said, “We occupy a world that is connected on multiple dimensions and at a deeper level – a global system of systems.”

4

Diamond, J. (2006).