 Our guest today is Mark Penske from Palo Alto, California. Mark, welcome to BT Murrayfield in Edinburgh. End to PCF 9. And thank you for speaking with the Commonwealth of London. It's my pleasure to be here. Let me begin by asking you a seminal question that's been bugging me for a long time. You know that there is a lot of advice that people have given. And you too have been in that place yourself, offering a lot of advice about what we should be doing, what education is not doing, and where we should be going. So we have plenty of advice about what we should be doing, which we shouldn't be doing. The question that I have for you is basically this. How can contemporary organizations, institutions, let's talk about higher education institutions in particular, lead education for tomorrow? Are they ready to lead education for tomorrow the way you see it? Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here in Edinburgh and at this wonderful, beautiful stadium. The question is really about the world changing. And the world is changing, and the capabilities of our kids are changing. So if you want to start with higher ed, well, it's going to for a long time receive what it gets from the bottom, and it will probably continue in many ways. But it also has the job of forming teachers. So one of the important things that higher ed can be doing is giving the people who want to be teachers a new direction to think about doing with their students, at which point we'll get students who begin from kindergarten doing something different. And in my case, I think that's real world projects. And so by the time they reach the university, they will have had 12 years of preparation for that. Right now, some of the universities, many of them, I think, are moving to these real world projects. A good example is in MIT in the States, they invented a football that captures the kicks that the players, kids, or adults put into it. And then you can take that football home and use it to light your home or run your devices. So what I see the world moving towards is instead of helping individuals get better, intellectually better so that someday they can improve the world, what they're doing is starting when they're very young, using their new capabilities to do projects that improve their local and national and community worlds. And so they get better and better at this. And eventually, they'll do it for the rest of their lives. A lot of people will agree with you. I certainly agree with you. And that's the same for secondary education, tertiary education. So we agree with that. Now, I go back to my question. Do you think the organization, the way we are organized, the way education, formal education is organized, are we prepared to promote that kind of education experience? Not without a change. Not without a change. Not without a change because right now we're based on a system of learning in advance. We have courses, we have classrooms, we bring people together or we do it virtually through the MOOCs or something else. And we say, first learn and then later you can go do. We'll give you permission to do. You now have credentials. I think we really need to shift to not say credentials come first, but credentials come from the doing of the projects. And what that means is that somebody who is a teacher, what we would call a teacher really has a different role because their role becomes more like a coach in this wonderful stadium. The coach is somebody who's not better than all the players who doesn't know more necessarily than all the players but who knows how to bring out the best of the players and knows how to bring out the best in the team. And I think that's the real switch is that from putting knowledge into individuals we're mentoring teams and coaching teams to improve the world. Okay, so you're talking about the curriculum. Now the curriculum needs to be reorganized or differently organized in order to promote that kind of an educational experience. Are you then saying, and I'm hearing you saying, the way curriculum in higher education is organized in courses and programs is not the way to get there. Is that what you're saying? I don't think it's the way to get there except for the people who know exactly what they want. So one of the things that we do well is if somebody says, I want to be a doctor, we can say here's the curriculum that you need to be a doctor. But if somebody says, I want to realize my dreams or I want to use my talents, we now have to steer them to a set of predetermined courses. But why is the difference? Why is the difference? What's the difference between somebody who wants to realize their dream and somebody who wants to be a doctor? Because the dream, if it's a dream that is already in the mainstream, we know how to do it. Fine, we can make it clear about it. It's not, if they're not clear, but if the world is not clear about how you do this. So my dream, say, is to have all the two billion kids in the world be following their dreams. That we have to invent a new way to do. Okay, let's talk about the new way. I'm gonna put you in a situation, talk about the sort of problem-centered activity-driven experience. You have recently been appointed a chancellor or vice chancellor or president of a reputable university. Call it MIT, call it Harvard, whatever you like. How would you go about reorganizing the curriculum for the kind of experience that you would like your students to have? Well, it's very interesting because now, what we would do in that school is we would look at a whole bunch of people and we would say who is best matched to our offering in terms of our curriculum. Who has got the right amount of preparation, who's got the right amount of intelligence, who's got the right amount of whatever we think are the right criteria. Well, who's we? The university. And that means? Then they will admit you, right? If you meet those criteria. Another way to do it is to say, we're gonna be, and this is the open university that we're here talking about, you come and we're gonna begin with an interview and you're gonna tell us what your dreams are. You're gonna tell us. Okay, we've got one million students in some universities. Are you gonna do that with one million students? Oh yes, because you can now do this, you can use artificial intelligence to do a lot of this. You can, there are many ways to interview people to find out about them. But what we typically don't do is start with the people. We don't start with the students and say, this is my dream, these are my interests, these are my concerns of the problems. The way we do it now is we have boxes, which is called our curriculum, and we fit people into the boxes. What we can do now because of technology, because of many things, is we can build the boxes around the people. So when I see you as a potential student, I say, well, tell me where you'd like to be, tell me what you'd like to do, tell me what you're concerned about, and I will build for you uniquely a curriculum, not of classes, but of projects that you will do, and as you do this project, we'll learn more, you'll learn more about yourself, we'll see the world improve a little bit, and you'll say, ah, for my next project, I'm gonna do this. And so your, for example, your university experience could be 50 projects that you've done over four years or over some of them. And you accumulate critics on those projects? No, you accumulate a resume. Uh-huh. The difference is we don't have to worry about credits or credentials because you have a resume, and when you go out into the world to talk to an employer, you say, this is what I've done, this is what I can do. So that's very different than showing up with saying, I got A-levels or O-levels or whatever this is or a university degree. People don't know what to do with that. Okay, okay, you are president of Harvard, right? You have your meeting and you're gonna propose this to your faculty. What do you think your faculty's gonna say? What do you think your dean's gonna say? I think that there's a real mix of people right now. The younger people, sometimes it varies by age, but not entirely by age. Some people will be very enthusiastic about this. They already are. People, I know lots of professors, some of them have Nobel Prizes, that say this is the only way to teach. All we do is project after project after project. Others who were brought up in another time where it's classes and lectures and things may have a harder time switching over. And there's certainly gonna be a period where we are switching over. Yeah, yeah, I think that that's the challenge, isn't it? It's how to get that balance right and how to convince those people because it becomes a management issue then it becomes a personality issue, an organizational issue, and presidents are strong. I put you in that position because I'm in that position myself and it's hard to bring about that change and how do you bring about the change? The question that I'm trying to get is how do you change our organizational choreographies, you know, the way we are organized. To achieve the kinds of, I totally agree with what you're talking about. Institutions are struggling with how to reorganize themselves with the existing resources they've got and the people they've got. You know, to achieve the kinds of things that you're pedagogically, everybody will agree with what you're saying. Well, part of it has to do with hiring and who you bring into the organization. And the biggest, the places like Arizona State University which did a huge transformation. They just hired a lot of the kinds of people that they wanted if they needed somebody to do this. Now we're hampered by things like tenure and policies that keep people, even if we think they are not doing the kind of job we need them to do, so we have to deal with it. And research, and research, the focus on research because what universities tend to be doing is hiring people who are prolific researchers but not teachers. Did you, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of the fact that both university teachers are not qualified teachers. We would insist that our childcare work hub or primary school teacher, elementary school teacher is qualified. We would never let our children close to them unless they were certified. But we leave our students to university teachers who have got no idea about learning in teaching, no qualifications in learning in teaching. Well, maybe that's good in some way. It is. Maybe there's a value in that in that if we are talking about people learning by doing the projects themselves, we're better off putting together these people who are students with researchers because that's how they will learn to do research. What we have done is we say, you are a good researcher but you're not a good classroom teacher, lecturer. Well, who cares anymore? Because the best lectures are already online somewhere. You don't need an individual. All the content that we traditionally gave as being a teacher. We don't need to give anymore because it's there. So what does the academic do? Is that the apprenticeship model that you're talking about? What does the researcher do? What does the academic do? What does the professor do? It's very much partially an apprenticeship model, partially a coaching model. And it's very much the big tradition in education for most of human history was the apprenticeship model. Was the master to apprentice or the parent to child and whether you were a farmer or did anything else. And then came along the academics. And the academic said, wait, we should think about things. And that's good. And Plato and Aristotle and all those people are academics and they started in the middle ages, the universities. But they were a small percentage of the people who it was good, gave us many thoughts. And that was fine. That was a separate kind of education. So most people got the achievement education and the accomplishment education. And a few people got the academic thinking only education. What happened was somehow the academics hijacked K-12. They hijacked the younger people. So now what do we do with our young people? We teach them to footnote. Who needs to footnote? An academic. So we have vocational education really for academics. And that's what we put all our kids through. And that's really become a mistake. I'm gonna take you back to where we were a few minutes ago. So you are changing this curriculum. You're selling this idea to your academic, to your faculty and some people will come on board. Some won't come on board. So you probably use different kinds of strategies to incentivize them and to motivate them, to educate them. But there's a point that I wanna go back to is about the hiring of these people, about the recruitment of these people. So how would you go about recruiting people to your faculty as a president or as a dean? Well, the main thing is are you good at helping other people realize what they want to do in teams? Where do you get that qualification from? People get it from all over the place. And it's not a qualification that you get as a diploma. It's a skill that you develop over time and that when we wanna hire you, we assess. Yeah. And so whether you come from it, that's most of what happens in industry of whatever kind, people run teams and they get things done. And that's really, if I could go on. Here's the hard question. You see, when we apply for jobs, you know, I mean, we spend a lot of time and money going to Harvard, going to MIT, getting our branded qualification. And we hope that when we apply for a job somewhere, the fact that I've got an MBA from Harvard Business School is gonna say it all. And I had one and it didn't. So I can tell you that. But what would have been much more interesting is if I had worked on a whole different set of projects and at the time I was very interested in it. Are we ready for that? Are employers ready for that? Or why are people still going to Harvard Business School then? Employers are more than, in fact, in order to go to Harvard Business School, you have to have worked for an employer and gotten some experience in understanding the world. The employers are very ready and what happens now, here's the real irony in this whole thing. You go to school for 20 years, maybe more than 20 years. You get you, you go through your MBA and you have the diploma and you think you're ready to work, but you're not. Because you don't know how to get anything accomplished. We've never taught you that, maybe in a few places, but mostly you go into a business or a company or a profession, you start at the very bottom, getting your second education. That's the education in getting things done. As it would be nice to combine the two. Can we just, yeah, stay on that point because as an academic and I'm being told the same sorts of things that you know your people, your nurses are graduating, your doctors are graduating, your engineers, and when they get in the workforce, they don't know how to do the job things of what the hell were you doing for the last four or five years and how did you get your degree? They might know the content as you might have been suggesting, but they don't know how to apply that. But that's a criticism that you could label against some institution, but not all of them. They are, for example, the master medical program, you know, master university, problem-based learning, you know, medical program, would say, no, no, no, that's not the way to do it. We actually teach our students how to do it right from the word get go, you know? So they, so another day is happening. Well, suppose it is in some places and medicine was one of the first professions to say, you know, it's not enough to just have gone through the lectures, you have to have spent time with patients from the very beginning, how you started it earlier in the training. And this is, I can give you an example of this. I knew a professor who teaches in a school in America and he's affiliated with the military. And what he does is he goes to the head of the Navy, the very top person and says, what are your biggest problems? What are the biggest things that you would need help with? And my class is gonna work on those problems. So we could do this with anything. We could say, go to businesses. If you go to the chief technology officer of any business, he or she will have 100 projects that they would love to do. And they will only get to 20 of those projects because they're constrained with people and money. What if we took the other 80 projects and gave them to students? What if we gave students real world problems to work on? Okay, a lot of people will argue that that is happening, Mark. It is happening. I mean, I could give you many examples in many places throughout the world, not just in the U.S. and Australia, where I come from, specific, it's happening. Now, the question then I have for you is why is it not happening so universally and what can we do about it? That's the beef, isn't it? Well, I think we're in a transition period. And I absolutely agree with you that it is happening. It is starting bottoms up in certain places and they're realizing that there's a lot of success. You see a school like a Coal Calde in France and there's no classes. It's all projects, it's all coding. It started in the coding world to a large extent. It started in the engineering world to a certain extent, medical world, like you said. And people are understanding, or some people are starting to understand, that this is a better way for the students to become ready to go and do things for the rest of their lives. Let's talk a little bit more about the models, assessment and feedback, you know, okay? So you've got your students and you've identified what they want to do and you took them on and some of it is happening in boutique areas like business, MBA programs and medical programs. But in the humanities and the social sciences, it's probably not so much. So let's talk about other kinds of things like, how would you suggest to your faculty to assess those kinds of learning outcomes and activities and provide feedback that is scalable? I'm talking about large numbers of students. I'm not talking about small numbers, like Oxford Cambridge might have. I'm talking about large numbers of students. How would you do that? Your faculty would say, listen Mark, you know, I understand what you're saying but I just don't have the resources to provide that kind of attention to the students that I have. I think it's actually easier to assess projects than it is to assess vaguely skills and to rank people. And one of the biggest problems that we've run into in our education system, particularly as we go from 5% of the people in tertiary education to 30 or 40 or 50% of the people in tertiary education, everybody wants to rank the people. It's very hard to rank people to say you are 33rd and I am 34th just based on tests because there's too many factors involved. A project on the other hand, if it's well defined, it either gets done or it doesn't get done. If it doesn't get done, it's not finished. You're not graded. But what you do is you get, you have to achieve a certain number of finished projects and we can set the criteria for what that means and that's part of the job of what the professor and the team does together. But you can really see this and coding started and medicine started because the results are very clear. A patient gets better or a patient doesn't get better. A code works or it doesn't work. Teaching is the same, accounting is the same. And gradually we're starting to figure out that you can really assess and that's what a resume does. It says this was a successful project. You can measure it sometimes in money, you can measure it sometimes in social impact, you can measure it sometimes in health, but the goal is now to better the world in some way. And the measurement of that is different than the measurement of what's your intellectual capability in a ranking system. How much? Okay, now you're the president of Harvard University. I love being the president of Harvard University. I love being in that position. Now, I mean, I'm thinking about organizations like professional organizations of the American Educational Resources Association, AERA, AECT, these are big organizations, very large numbers of people, thousands of them. Why aren't they, and I'm asking this question myself, and why aren't they on the bandwagon? Why aren't they asking for curriculum like that across the board? It's their job, isn't it? Some of them are and I would guess that almost everyone has some exploratory thing going on looking at this, but they were brought up as a union to support people doing a certain thing in a certain way. That's what they are. They're essentially the union, right? So if you say we're the union of coal miners, and you say, well, there's a new way to mine coal and it doesn't need people or it needs different people, they're not gonna immediately rush to do it. Have you spoken at any AERA event or AECT event? Not recently, but I have in the past. What's your experience with them? Well, I find that it's a mix of people who are forward-thinking and people who are not forward-thinking. What is their objection against what you're saying? Is there an objection? Often there is, and the objection is that if you believe that you are not ready to accomplish anything until you've had years of preparation, until you know all the content, until you have a diploma that says you know all the content and that's the only time you're qualified to start doing things, then you're not gonna like what I'm talking about. Can you give us some examples of where this has been working at a systemic level? Not at an institutional level, but at a program level, because I think people would want to know, listen, Mark, I understand what you're saying, I agree with what you're saying, but how do I make it work? How do I make it successful in an organizational context? So give me an example of a program, can you give me an example of a program where this works at a systemic level? If I had to think of one, and some people might not like what I'm pointing to, I would say the military, especially the American military, because the way they do it is you learn almost everything on the job. And then occasionally, when you have a particular job that requires a particular something that you have to learn in a different way, they bring you into the schoolhouse. But that's rare, and that's only from time to time, and it's for very selected people at very selected moments. So I would say that they, if you had to pick a system that did that the best, they would probably be the best system to look at. This is worrying, isn't it? That our education system is not doing it at a systemic level, isn't it? Why are the higher schools not doing it? Why are the college counties, whatever you have, are not doing that at a systemic level? It is worrying, but not because, it's worrying because the world has changed. It used to work. It was okay, as you pointed out the other day. You and I are here. We went through it, we're good, we succeeded. And it used to be a world where that just happened periodically, generation to generation. It was the same when you were an adult as when your father was an adult or your parents were an adult. So you just had to learn what you needed to move into that new role. Now we've got a world that's changing and changing dramatically fast, exponentially. And we've got very empowered people in ways that you and I would never empowered when we were young. So that combination of the speed in which the tools and the world and everything is changing and the fact that they're in the hands from the beginning of these very young people to use them, that is a huge difference. And that's what education and many things are trying to catch up with. And then when you add into that automation, which means that menial jobs, repetitive jobs are going away. And what you need from people is to be unique because if you're just another whatever it is, doctor, lawyer, or anything else, a machine will do a lot of what you used to do. But if you're a specialist, if I need you and not just a doctor or not just a lawyer or not just a teacher, even a professor, if I need you because you're unique and everybody's got a unique set of skills, everybody's got a unique set of interests and dreams and strengths and passions, then I think you have a better chance. So one of the big shifts from the past till now is making kids not clogs in a machine, which we did for a long time and that we can do with a curriculum and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, go through all these courses and you're there. Now we have to make you unique. Now we have to bring out the uniqueness in you. We have to put you on the kinds of projects that you're good at. We have to figure out what you love to do so that you motivate yourself in doing that. And that's just really a different task. Absolutely. And a different kind of organizational structure right from the top. A different kind of president's mindset, a different kind of dean's mindset, a different kind of faculty mindset, a different way of assisting and feedback. So we are talking about a different kind of organizational structure, isn't it? What we're talking about, a different kind of growing up. And right now, that's really what we're talking about because for me, the education is not the system. Education is the process from which you go to being a young person to being an adult. And that process has been a very strict sit in a classroom or if you're lucky enough, sit and go to a classroom and be in there and go through this process. Stay safe while your parents work. That's part of the reason we put the kids into the building and then go through this whole, that process is in the process of changing itself. Because if you can do things when you're a really young person and accomplish things, then you're gonna have much more self-efficacy as we heard about this morning. You're gonna have much more desire to do things. You're gonna understand that there's a great quote that I'm gonna use in my presentation from Thomas Carlisle, who's from this part of the world that says nothing builds self-confidence and self-efficacy like accomplishment. So now that our kids can really accomplish, they're gonna start to want to do more and want to do all these things and we're gonna have to transform our systems to help them or they'll just go around our systems. I'm optimistic about the kids. Whenever I see kids, whenever I talk to kids and I probe a little bit and I don't just say, you know, what's your favorite subject? That gives them four choices, right? So you really need to say, well, what do you love to do? What do you do? What YouTubes do you watch? What do you do when you're on your own time? What concerns do you have? What problems do you see that you care about? And when you start probing and one of your dreams, kids have answers to these questions. And that's all part of the learning experience that you're talking about. That is the learning experience. The learning, the experience is saying, what do I do with that? What do I do? Right now, what we do is we say to kids, forget it. We just like, I really don't care what your dreams are. I really don't care what you care about because what I care about is that you learn my curriculum and I've decided that's the right curriculum for you and or your parents have decided that that's the right curriculum for you. And whatever frustration you have, I don't care. And that's where my son is in school. And you know what he calls his high school? He goes to the best public high school in California. He calls it prison. He calls it prison because he has no choice. He has to sit there and have the stuff stuffed into his head and then he has to compete with everybody else on these exams. See, this is my point. This is my point that we are still, after having known all of this and people like you telling us all of these things, we're still not doing it and why aren't we doing it? And that's my question. We're not doing it because we grew up in another time with another system. We are, you and I are part of the last pre-internet generation the world will ever know. So we are from a pre-internet culture where different things held, different realities held, different things were important. And now we're in a new culture, the post-internet culture, which is just very, very different. And a great example that I met somebody here at the conference and here's this gentleman and he's gone through, he has completed 300 MOOCs, right? And he doesn't have a job, he still doesn't have a job. After 300 MOOCs, he doesn't have a job. And I'm thinking, you know what? There's a job for you. And the job is to go online and teach people to do MOOCs. You could make a living with a YouTube channel that people would pay to contribute and look at about how to do this. You have this knowledge in the world and you have the capability of bringing it to the world. Now, our generation wouldn't have thought of that at all. Maybe they would have said write a book but he's too young to write a book, et cetera, et cetera. No, it's a different world with different sets of opportunities that are available to young people who are empowered. And that's something that we have a hard time understanding in our generation. That's one of the reasons we're having these problems. When we look at a kid, we still see essentially a pet. We say eat the pet food, eat what we do, perform the tricks we taught you, and you'll be fine. But the kids are not pets anymore, if they ever were. They want to be out accomplishing. They want to be improving the world. They know we've left them a lot of problems. We've left them climate change and we've left them dirt and we've left them so many things. They say, we can fix this. That's why Greater Thumber is now known around the world. And it didn't take very long for her to get known around the world because when the kids want to do something, they now have the power to organize to get it done. We don't know how to use that yet. They don't know how to use that yet. It's just the first generation of this. It's just coming out. But we're learning and they're going to arise in their generation and figure out whole new ways to do stuff. There will be different kinds of schools and education because this is something that they can do and they know that it's going to help them and their kids and it's going to move on and it's going to keep going fast and keep evolving. And those people who really enjoyed sitting back and not changing and having, learning one thing and then doing it over and over for the rest of their lives and many of them are professors, they're not going to fit in. And so they'll last as long as they can. And for some it will, they'll retire and then the world will have fun. It's a different world. Right, pleasure talking to you. Thank you for talking to Colt.