 All right. This is a Rex pop-up call on Friday, January 19th, 2018. Welcome. We have as our guest Mark Prensky, whom I will introduce in just a moment, but it is our custom in Rex to start events and calls and such with a poem. And I found one that might be entertaining given our topic today about education, learning, accomplishment, and so forth. And the poem is titled 47 Minutes by Nick Flynn and goes like this. Years later, I'm standing before a room full of young writers in a high school in Texas. I've asked them to locate an image in the poem. We just read their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back and forth about the grass and a styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand and asks, Does it matter? I smile. It is as if the universe balanced on those three words and we've landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that, no, it doesn't not really matter if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But I whisper leaning in close to get through the next 47 minutes. We might have to pretend it does. Let me read it again. 47 minutes by Nick Flynn, written in 1960. Years later, I'm standing before a room full of young writers in a high school in Texas. I've asked them to locate an image in a poem. We've just read their heads at this moment are bowed to the page. After some back and forth about the grass and the styrofoam cup, a girl raises her hand and asks, Does it matter? I smile. It is as if the universe balanced on those three words and we've landed in the unanswerable. I have to admit that, no, it doesn't not really matter if rain is an image or rain is an idea or rain is a sound in our heads. But I whisper leaning in close to get through the next 47 minutes. We might have to pretend it does. It's always actually great fun searching for a poem that fits the theme. And when I hit this and I'm like, Oh, right, right, right, this is perfect. Well, I had two things were came to my mind immediately as reactions. First one heads down to the page today that would be heads down to the phone. And they might or might not be reading the poem on the phone. The second was image, which is now the image would be on the phone a real image. And I remember it made me remember something I hadn't thought about in a really long time that at the game developers conference one year will write who always competed in the in the challenge. Created a an app essentially, I don't think it was an app at the time, that took a poem. So he took this Emily Dickinson poem. And then, you know, one of her son, it's he put it through an algorithm that was a salient algorithm that picked out the most important words. And then it automatically went to Google images and picked an image for that thing. And while the poem was read aloud, it showed the images that it picked and it just took the first one. So and it was brilliant. And when we saw this, it was and it was algorithmic, which was better. So I haven't had a long time, but I'm going to bring that up and write about that because English teachers should do that. Sounds very cool. And will was the developer of SimCity back in the day. Right. And he then went on to the sim, which everybody laughed at and wouldn't give him money for and then that made a lot of money. And then he did and then he did spore. Right, which never quite took off. Never caught on. He was he was a little early to what, you know, what might have been as well. It also had, you know, I mean, it was a God program. So, you know, you have to sort of believe that the universe evolves according to you. Yeah, and spore, you could it was basically you were reinventing the world. You were creating creatures. You were you were kind of having a hand in evolution. It's quite interesting as background. Do you want to give us just a quick sketch of how you got where you are. Sure. I started I started out in in in life in math science and left it for the humanities when I was in college. I didn't want to spend my life in a laboratory. I spent some time as a professional musician spent some time, went to business school at Harvard, went to the Boston Consulting Group where I stayed six years and helped them create new products, and then went to a software development company, which wasn't a software development company till I got there. It was a training company, but it but I started making games because that was the way to interest people in training. It was so boring that we if we did through games, it made it a little bit more interesting. And so my very first game is where it was for an airline. And it was where in the world is Carmen San Diego's luggage. So we you had to do customer service and find that stuff out. Well, that was that led me into actually creating both games to train. And I thought at the time that, oh my God, business has all the content and no engagement and education, in fact, has all the content and no engagement or very little and games have all the engagement and no content. So that's a should be a marriage made in heaven. Well, it wasn't. And the reason it wasn't is it's very hard to teach what we usually call content through games and games change and you can teach some skills, but it's very hard to make a game and the technology changes very quickly. So I made a few of them made the first first person shooter for for business training. How to shoot your customers. Well, what we had we went through this this was for bankers trust. We shot ideas out of a cell phone light bulbs came out of the cell phone. Nice, hit with ideas you had to do something so it was cute. The we then made a game for for 3D CAD program called Dr. Monkey wrench, the monkey wrench conspiracy. And that was fun. But in the end, it turns out that that was just a kind of parcel partial solution that was useful from time to time, both in business and in and in education. But along that way, I started thinking about young people who I was working with in the company and seeing how they did things differently from me, especially how they got their information how they posted stuff online. And that led me to this concept of digital natives, that people were growing up in a digital world differently than they were growing up than they've grown up before. And so I wrote a piece on digital natives and digital immigrants and that got seen around the world and that got me into education, essentially, because people said, Oh, let's talk about these kids and let's think about this. Which was really fun for me, because my heart turned out to be in education and with young people and trying to get them to a better state than the current school system provides. And I went through several evolutions. The first one was games. Then I said, that's not enough. Then I said, Well, it must be the kind of way we teach. It must be our pedagogy. And I wrote a book about that teaching digital natives and that helped a lot of people like that book. I said, No, but that's not enough because we're not teaching the right things because the content that we teach is really, as you said in the poem. You know, is it relevant? Is it important? Is it meaningful or not? And it turned out that lots of it isn't or isn't anymore. And so I wrote a book on curriculum and I'm still thinking about new ways to present and think about curriculum. But then I discovered that wasn't enough either, that ultimately it was our goal of education was not right. That we used to have kids, we tried to make them better people intellectually, and then we hope they'd go out and someday improve the world. But actually what they can do now is improve the world while their students. And that's a much better goal is to say, Let's make a better world as we see it as we want it. And then finally, the final step for me is saying as I as I try to go deeper and deeper into causes is we don't really treat our kids very well. And we as I started searching for how we do this and why the most what the kids asked for all over the world is more respect and more trust. The we essentially treat our kids as pets. We love that. And that's going to be my next book. Our kids are not pets. We tell them when to sit, where to go, follow us, do what we say, roll over, perform the tricks we taught you, which is what testing really is. We tell them when they can go to the bathroom often and when they can't. So it's a and we and we call the best student in the world, the teacher's pet. So we actually have a metaphor that said that. So where I am today is really trying to figure out what comes next. What if all these things are true and we know we don't have the right curriculum and we don't have the right pedagogy and we treat our kids badly, what should we do? And what's interesting to me is that I see that emerging in the world. So I don't see it in any country. People say what country does it? No country does it, but individuals and schools in almost every place I go to in the world are starting to do this. They're starting to treat kids differently to have different goals to say, yes, we should do real world projects that make your world better organizations like Design for Change are doing this. And so I see in the terms of and you probably know the book Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolution. That's very funny. I was just looking at my brain this morning because of a completely different article. Well, I'm writing an article now about how that informs what's going on in education and it's incredibly informative because he talks about how you have normal science, which is essentially like normal education. The whole world does our normal education in classrooms with teachers and we all know what that is. And then you have come to an anomaly, something that doesn't work. And that turns out to be our kids because they've become so much more empowered. And that leads to a crisis where people are struggling. What do I do? And you get teachers who say is what I teach my kids what they really need. And you see kids who say, am I learning what I really need for the future? Is it relevant? And you see countries trying to change their educations and eventually new solutions emerge or new approaches emerge or new paradigm. He calls it paradigms emerge and paradigm is the way practitioners see the world. And then you move after this period of crisis to a new normal. And what's interesting is that the paradigm, you know, we say these days the term is so familiar that we say anything's a paradigm change. Move the chairs in a circle and that's a paradigm change. But I think the biggest paradigm change that we need and whom refers to it as a change of lenses seeing the world differently is how we look at our kids. And that's really my current thinking is that if we look at our kids more as people, as humans, not fully developed. But, you know, when people say their frontal lobes are not developed enough, maybe that's a positive. Maybe, in fact, that's what that's what enters game is about. You know, maybe we want kids who are not totally. The last starfighter. Don't forget that. Yeah, or the last starfighter or all of those things. The young people have advantages that we've never taken advantage of. And, and they're now empowered in ways they never were. So, when one of my favorite examples is when a teacher says to a kid, okay, let's do a survey on this as an interesting question. Let's survey some people. And in the past, who could they survey if say elementary school kids, they could survey their class, they could survey their school, maybe they can go home and survey their parents. You know, we're talking about a hundred a couple hundred kids. Now, with SurveyMonkey, you could say to the kid, I would like you to go out and survey a million people. And don't come back until you have answers from a million people. And they can do that. You know, a sixth grader can easily do that. My kid could have done that in the sixth grade. And so that level of empowerment and capability on the part of students, and I have to say the things of projects that kids have done, is something totally new in the world that we need to take advantage of. Greetings. Exactly. I have a slide I use or a section of a presentation that I use now and then about the miracles that are within every smartphone. And I basically pan through movie studio, film recording equipment. It's an HD movie taker. People are actually doing regular production movies from their iPhone, from their smartphone. It's a CAD cam studio. The number of things that are already baked in that cost almost nothing is mind boggling. And I think we are kind of boggled. So instead, we're busy playing games and liking pictures on Instagram. Well, I think we forget that we have these capabilities. I certainly do. Because I didn't grow up thinking I had a video camera in my pocket. I didn't grow up. So I remember there's some great stories. I remember seeing these elevator doors in some place that were painted on curtains. And so when the elevator door opened, the curtains opened. And it was a great image. And so I took out my camera and I took a picture of it. But I never occurred to me. That's what's interesting about that is the movie image. Or I was a musician and I wanted to play duets. And the best way it turns out to play duets with yourself is to record one part and then play the other part. Never occurred to me. I had this recording device right in my pocket. So I think what's going on, and I think kids remember it more than we do because they use it more. So one of the differences between what I call immigrants and natives is that kids are just more familiar with the tools. They're just more comfortable saying, yeah, of course I have. I can take video anytime I want to. They do it for Instagram and they do it for Snapchat and they do it for all these things. And so what I see is so different is the attitudes of kids. Not that those of us who are old can't do technology because we can. And not that every kid who's young can do technology because not all of them can. But their attitudes are really, really different than ours often to toward what they can do and their capabilities. You're great. Kevin, did you want to jump in earlier? Okay, I was the auctioneer and we saw you raise your hand for a moment. Mark, can you take us a bit into the difference between achievement and accomplishment and why that matters to you? How you frame it. The way I frame it is to say we have focused very much on what we call achievement. And achievement is something like, okay, you get to the top of the dean's list at some point or you get to the top of a mountain. You do something that you personally get in some place where you would like to be if you benefit. It occurred to me that that's not the same as accomplishment. Because accomplishment is something that you do that benefits others and in some way. So if you, and for me, the distinction is if you play the, if you learn to play an instrument, say the violin phenomenally, and you only play in your room, that's a very nice achievement. But it's not an accomplishment until, as I use the word, until you go out and give concerts and make the people happy and do this kind of thing. And that's what I think about education is that we should focus more on accomplishment. It also involves getting through the film, but so does achievement. But accomplishment is getting things done that help. And so if you were at a company, you don't just want to have achievements, you want to have accomplishments. Google says we're looking for people who can get things done. And whether you call it accomplishment or getting things done, it's different. It's really taking an outward looking attitude rather than an immature attitude. And I like, I was really captivated by Kieran Bursetti's TED Talk from the Riverside School in Ahmedabad. Basically just riffing off of accomplishment. She took the phrase, the really simple phrase, I can. And set about trying to create an I can mindset among students in our school and did that by sending them out in the real world to find and solve real world problems. And in the talk, she has a couple of video clips where there's adults saying, gosh, I didn't know kids could do all that or whatever, or some variant of that. And that's just this constant refrain. It's really so interesting how we have infantilized children, which sounds really weird. But one of my favorite thinkers in this space is John Taylor Gatto, the retired New York High School teacher. And one of the things he does in his book, The Underground History of American Education, is he does a lot of case studies of kids who dropped out of school early and did phenomenal things. I mean, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, it's never finished their graduate degrees. But even way earlier, our first admiral, David Farragut, was nine years old when he was put on board a warship as a kid with an officer's career track. Because that's what we did back then. And at age 12, he had the first command of a ship, that kind of thing. That's the hornblower side of it. As well. Absolutely. I think that the three things I say about my kids is that they are, you know, disrespected and underappreciated and underestimated. And if you talk to elements any kids, they will agree with that. And they will tell you that I can do a whole lot more than my teachers ask me to do, or my parents ask me to do, or anybody asks me to do. And they often demonstrate it in, interestingly enough, in the games world. My 12-year-old, when he was a couple of years ago, was a vice admiral on a starship. And his job, when he had applied for that job, he'd written a several-page application, and his job was recruiting other people and then training them. And this is, you know, a 10-year-old who can do this kind of stuff, who can take this level of responsibility. He had his issues from time to time. But they were things that we could talk about that normally you would never talk about with kids. You know, what does it mean to be responsible in a job and to get your things done and to have a boss? He had a boss and et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, at one time he told his boss an untruth. And that was a huge opportunity for us to have that kind of a discussion that, you know, do you ever want to get hired again? So I have always been a fan of kids and always thought that they really, that all kids have dreams. And sometimes when you talk about passion, you talk about dreaming, people say, oh, my kid doesn't know or doesn't have a thing or doesn't have a passion. I don't think that's true. I think we have to help kids dig and find what they're interested in. And one of the questions that I ask now when kids tell me that is I say, what do you watch on YouTube? Right? That'll be a good clue. But we've managed to insulate kids from the real world almost as much as you might do. I mean, we put them in Petrie dishes called schools. We, you know, we give them games that are artifice. We shelter them from the real world a lot. It's very, I mean, it's interesting. We've, I think, created at least in the U.S. this image that the world is very dangerous, even though crime is falling, even though lots of things are happening. We've created a series of motivations for what's called helicopter parenting or over parenting or whatever else you want to call it. And then we've also created an educational fish ladder that is so intense that parents have their kids, you know, programmed every second of the day, lest they not learn how to master the violin and do their work at the soup kitchen. And it's crazy how we sort of taken over, we both sheltered them and taken over their lives. Well, here's my perspective as I thought about education over time in history. It used to be that most workers in the world, most people in the world were agricultural workers at one time. And some of them did a few other craft jobs and they were trained by doing these jobs from the time they were kids, right? So either you were trained by your parents or shown by your parents how to do this stuff, educated in a sense by your parents or by a master if you were an apprentice or by the church if you became a priest. And your job was to get things done and you were shown how to do that. And so I call that the accomplishment tradition of education, which is a very, is our longest tradition. Even if you were the king, you know, your father taught how to be the next. Then along came in our history, academia. People, you know, starting back with Socrates and other people said, we're going to think for a living. We're thinking is just incredibly important and we're going to get together in academies and think. So they developed this thinking academic tradition. And those are two very separate tradition ways to educate people. And for some reason, which I really don't know exactly. So I think people need to do more research on this. The academic tradition hijacked our schools totally. And this is around the world. So that thinking of school, whatever it is from primary all the way up through university is a very academic process. It's a thinking process. And there's nothing wrong with that except that it leaves out all the accomplishment leaves out the action and the doing and the accomplishing. So what happened with that tradition that didn't go away. It went into business. It went into professions. So as a result, the funny thing is you need two educations to get anything done. You need this academic education, not because it's going to help you necessarily, some of it may, but because it's required. You need that certificate. That's right. You need that seal on your life record. You need that because we say you do. And then when you go into any profession or company, you started the very bottom. You start all over. You're an intern. You're a first year person. You do very little until you accumulate. That educational experience that you get inside a company or profession and that that lets you, you know, do it for real. So what I think is that we should really put the two together. It's not that the, it's not that the thinking part isn't important. Of course it is. But the doing part is also important. It's not just doing in the sense that, that somebody like Dewey said, you need to do because it helps you learn better if you physically touch things and do this. It's because it's, it's accomplishing things in the world and knowing that you can accomplish things in that. That's why the I can that you mentioned before is so important. Amazingly enough, I just discovered her a year ago. She is doing in practice what I have advocated doing in theory. And so now we're working together and it's incredible when she's got this wonderful thing coming up. And I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about it, but I'm going to talk about it anyway. She's gotten in touch with the Pope and she's got us a something coming up called that I can Vatican that's going to happen at the Vatican. Right, VAT I can that's the end of Vatican. So this is going to happen in 2020 I think or something like that. And this is the first time I've seen a movement around this. This is the first time I've seen a movement around empowering kids and having them understand that they can better their world because my book is called education to better their world. And I think that's the right thing to do. She is doing it. She's having kids do it. So here's something new projects in the U.S. and their projects all over the world. She's got 66 countries, but some of two of my favorites in the U.S. one, Texas, and she works in the U.S. and very poor schools. The kids school was surrounded by drug houses. They call them trap houses where people sold drugs and the kids got together and figured out a plan and went to the police and got these houses shut down. And they really made that progress happen. The other one that happened just recently in Idaho, northern Idaho, is that there were a lot of teen suicides. And the kids got together and said, how do we prevent these suicides? I came up with this fabulous program, including, you know, sixth graders talking to kindergarteners and a whole set of things that they are doing that are making a difference. So I have a new metric. My metric, because everybody wants a metric these days, my metric is measurable positive impact. So if you do a project, you have to have measurable, not necessarily measurable quantitatively, but it has to have measurable positive impact. There has to be a difference that is perceivable in the world because of this project. If it's just PBL, project-based learning, nothing. Great. You can still do project-based learning inside the Petrie Nation. It still had no effect on your world. So the connection to the real world was really essential here. I think Kevin was going to jump in a while ago. Kevin, is that thoughts still in your head? No, I've just been, I just move, all right? So you're interpreting my fidgeting as wanting to jump in. I will jump in when, thank you. My apologies. Anybody else? Where does this line of thinking take you? Does it resonate with your own history? And also Bo just asked, Mark, I don't think you ever met Jay Cross, did you? Yes, I know Jay Cross. Oh, good. Okay. So yeah, there's a connection. We met each other a couple of years ago when I first moved out here to Silicon Valley and we hadn't seen each other in a long time. Yeah, he was on informal learning, I think was his sort of headline. Exactly. And many of us intersected with him around that. And then I think you know, he passed away a couple of years ago. Oh, I didn't know that. Well, I'm sorry to hear. Well, we will remember him by informal learning. Remember that. Exactly. I just want to rip off a couple of things. First of all, I'm really enjoying this and I really enjoy your passion. You clearly are in love and passionate about what you're doing. I remember when I was in school, one thing I just couldn't stand. By the way, I also, I grew up on a farm. So I got to have the real experience you're talking about. You know, rebuilding engines when I was 12 years old and acting alone most of the time. So I do have an interesting perspective. So I see what you're talking about because I experienced it. What I couldn't understand was how the teachers would say, this is going to be hard. This is going to be hard. And all I kept thinking is, well, it's going to be fun. And so it's a little hard, you know, just talk about the fun. Let's be in the passion. I just, the way they did that all the time. So I was very early on, I decided that I wasn't going to trust my teachers for my learning anymore. And I just stopped trusting them and I started reading the books myself. And I would, I mean, I'd go so far as sometimes just fall asleep in class because I already had the book. Because I just, I'm not trusting you people anymore. You're not falling asleep now, which is great. So can you riff off that if you want it to? Sure. You know, Seymour Papert used to talk about hard fun. And that when he was talking about the kind of learning that happens in video games. And the way I interpret that is if there's something that you really want to do or a place that essentially that you really want to get, you'll figure out a way to get there. And the work you do along the way, like practicing your golf, doing whatever it is, is not, doesn't feel like it. So that's precisely it. I didn't, that's why I didn't understand why they didn't go there. Just have fun with it. But what that means is that each person individually, her own motivation to figure out where they hear she wants to go. And we don't do a very good job of that at all. We do a terrible job of helping kids figure out, you know, who they are as individuals and what their dreams are. And that could change. But if they know that, you know, and there's research that demonstrate this automatically. So if you, if you're trying to teach kids to read and you give them all the same reader, they will learn at various rates or not at all. If you give each kid something to read that relates to what that kid is interested in, then that kid will move incredibly fast through the reading and they'll get the comprehension as well. You know, if a kid likes motorcycles, give him an article on motorcycles. If a kid likes dance, giving, you know, or something on dance or him. The, and we don't, we didn't do that in the past. It was hard to do. But now we have computers. And so because we have that one of the ways we can create custom educations. And that's something that we should be doing. We should. Wow, that's a big one. Talk about Mark. Yeah. Okay. I think that's amazing. I think that what one of the things that you're talking about is that individuals can enter into flow states, right? You know, with the, you know, work by ChickSense, Mahai on, you know, flow psychology. It's hard to get a group to enter into a flow state. You know, it's an individual, you know, matter of attention. The, the countervailing thing that we're actually seeing in social media right now is how do you create a scaffolding so that there are some commonalities, right, that are available as a member of society, right? So, you know, if you were to, you know, fully cater only to what somebody wanted to pay attention to, you wouldn't have a lot of socialization taking place and you wouldn't have any commonality available for cooperation or being a member, say, of, you know, a democratic society, right? So, those are competing, right, in my opinion. My counterpoint to that is NASA is NASA is when we had a collective vision of getting to the moon. We said, oh no, these guys are all on a similar page. They're all different. They're all working that way. But that team, the teams at NASA were in the flow state. I think the teams at SpaceX or probably at Tesla are probably in a flow state. So what this, this reminds me of something that, that a friend of mine said that I think is unbelievable with technology. Everybody in the world, no matter who you are, can find the group in which you are in the top 10%. So, you know, you're in the top 10% of elevator operators or janitors or taxi drivers or scientists or anything. And if you find that group, you will, you can interact very tightly with that group and even be a leader in that group. So, so I think, again, the way to find that stuff out and to get everybody into the flow state individually and collectively is to help them have similar goals, to understand what their goals are. And then if they're shared goals to take them as, as, as shared goals and because everything's happening. It's very, very little is happening or can happen as an individual. Yeah, that's what I was pointing out in the chat about the pronoun problem is that we have a tendency to use the I pronoun a lot here in the United States. When I go to Japan, you know, it's not about I, it's about we, right? There's a lot of, you know, we discussions, you know, going on. And it's not about success or accomplishments about competency, right? It's about, you know, being able to do something as a group. And do you see those differences, you know, across a variety of cultures and regions around the world? I think that's right. I think I'm married to Japanese women. So I have a little bit experience there. And they don't use the I pronoun, but they use their name as the I pronoun. So they, they, they actually, you know, but I see what you're saying. I see your point is that they, they have had a culture for centuries that let them work in groups towards animals and to respect each other. And when they're not, what they also do that's very interesting is when they're doing different things, they ignore each other. They know how to absolutely compartmentalize. So if you were in, you know, the room next door and there's a paper screen behind, you know, between you, you don't listen. You don't even pay attention because that's cool. Let me, let me take us back a little bit. I'm interested because you've been working with Esther Wojcicki and many other people who are busy trying to implement these things or trying to figure out how to influence the educational system. What barriers do you hit and what conversations have you had that give you some cause to hope that the system is bending or flexible or that some of these things are actually cracking through because the system is really well defended. The system has antibodies that will, that will find and kill off and drag out into the gutter, you know, things that are trying to change it. And that goes back to what, what Kuhn says about science is that this is at the times of crisis between when paradigms change in science, the exact same thing happens. These huge barriers grow up. Some people never get to the new paradigm. They just resist it for their whole lives. So there is a lot of resistance to new things. Esther tells the famous story, or I made it famous, I think she told me, that the, she got in her new facility, the wonderful chairs on wheels that the kids can move around into small groups to collaborate. And her fellow teachers all wanted to take the wheels off and put the chairs and rows. Wow. Even at Pelle, at Palo Alto High School. Wow. Even in her department. So, so this is, but the incentives to do it the old way are all in place. And so there's all, you know, whether the kid, you're, you're now being evaluated on whether your kids get scores and whether they get into the schools and whether they do all these kind of things. But the other thing that's missing that I thought about a while ago, and I'm still thinking about is that there has not been a clearly articulated, well articulated model of a better solution. So you can say I don't want my kid to have this academic stressful ranking education. What do you want. And, and, you know, there are a few things you could say, okay, I, you know, Steiner Montessori or whatever, you can point to a few of these little things. But there's no way to say I really want them to have an education that helps them learn to better their world or learn to do projects or learn to accomplish. And we're still searching for that term. I think what's, what's happened, what I sense is that the parameters of that term are now being developed. Their empowerment of kids, they're bettering the world. They're focusing on a broad range of skills rather than subject content. But we still need to make that a viable alternative in the world. And that's I think what Kiran and other people are working on. So I'd love to take this last piece of our time together to follow that thread a little bit and take us a little bit into the meta conversation that I mentioned in the invite about when you and I started talking and so forth. I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm saying roughly the same thing, except my language, I usually say I deprecate teaching and education in favor of learning. I think that's really about, you know, the child or adult being able to learn at any moment their whole lives. And, and we've kind of separated the world, you know, our lives and our days into the time when you learn the time when you work and the time when you play, which is an artificial division, right. But for me, the chain of causality I was making was that, you know, if you learn how to learn and you have and you can reconnect with a sense of agency, which agency is the part of the part of this that drives toward what you're talking about with accomplishment. And maybe agency is more abstract, but agency is the sense that you have permission, authority, maybe even responsibility and capacity to cause change in your world, to change your world for the better. And so, so our ends are identical. It's like, how do we get humans to improve their world and to feel like it's okay to do so and so forth. And then my narrative for why that's impossible right now is that we consumerized our entire lives and our only job as consumers is to buy shit and to buy more shit. And if we stop buying more shit, the world economic engine comes to a halt and we're all in trouble. In order to buy shit, we have to make shit. Exactly. And that means we need good factory workers and we need good consumers and our educational system was designed on purpose to give us those two entities. And then there was a small elite education system created to show a few people how the whole system runs and to help them sort of own and run the system. And this is kind of prep schools to Yale kind of path, right. Prep schools to Ivy League. And it's a way of seeing the educational system that's a little bit, it's a little bit dark, but but it maps pretty well to what I've seen happening in the world. So, so I'm interested from everybody in do either of these threads of language work for you if not what would work better what have you seen or heard out in the world that really like brings your bell, because, you know, whether it's aiming for accomplishment and having an eye can mentality and looking for a measurable positive impact. And then this is part of the language that Mark is using, or whether it's, you know, learning plus agency gives you humans that are reconnected in society, overcoming consumerism or something else. What, what, what works for you guys, Mark Spakowski or sorry, Dave Witzel. I wanted to beat the Minerva horse just a little bit. Yeah, please. That's the experiment that I'm watching the closest I suppose. So Mark, I don't know if you've run into Minerva, it's the new. I know, I know Minerva, I think they're great. And so I think there's like, it's interesting to see it a couple of different things that they're doing. One is I'd say they've split the learning problem away from the content. So there's two, there's so many different problems, I think it's the issue. And so in some of them are inside the university walls and some of them are outside. And so inside, right, for learning, they've refocused, you know, like you can't do lectures, you have to, you have to participate in this active learning forum. They have a goal of the students being actively engaged in the classes, 75% of the time, like every student being actively engaged at least 75% of the time. They structure the curriculum deliberately so that they drive that engagement. So like, you know, they'll have a situation where every student knows that they're going to be asked a question, they have to pay attention. But after you've been asked your question, you're not going to get another one, so they stop paying attention. So then they introduced, but you're going to have to do a wrap up of the session at the end so that they force you back into paying attention, you know, but that's a deliberate process around how to promote learning. And then we know a lot about learning, we can do a much better job with, you know, helping learning. And then the other piece is the content piece where they're, they kind of discarded the concept that the school is to teach content. But traditionally, things like what we do is we give people a bunch of content, we hope they learn to think. And Minerva, I think, has flipped to we're going to help people learn how to think, we'll use content to do that. And so they have these 115 habits of thought and foundational concepts that they focus on and they have a hashtag reach one and the kids actually get scored on these habits of thought. And you can probably find, if you're looking like this is the Amazon side thing, if you look at appendix A, you can see a list of them. There are a list of 115 habits of thought. But it's interesting, right? Because the thought, the concept is now I'm not teaching you economics, I'm teaching you how to think about stuff. Here's economics, here's weather, here's other, you know, complexity concept. So, and then I guess one of the things you're talking about. Okay, I'll finish. I'll speak to Minerva in a second and to other stuff, yeah. And then the other, just the other, sorry, the other piece that strikes me though, is that, and I think it's outside the walls, is this whole concept that, you know, the way we have as a society envisioned to show our kids lives. One is, you know, we talk about like when you enter the real world, right, you know, enter the real world after you've left college. So that, you know, it's the same thing we have, the same problem we have with retirement is like somehow you have to work and then you get to retire. You know, so we have this image of life that's kind of destructive, really, from the concept of contributing and creating value and living a full life. Very much. And that doesn't live within the university, that's just the university has to put it upon them. So in the Minerva case, I think, you know, they're creaming a bunch of kids who are in, have an intention, have more intentionality. And then it turns out when you put a bunch of kids with intentionality together, it gets magnified. So even if you were just a little bit, you know, ambitious and wanted to do stuff, you put yourself with a bunch of other kids you are, and you get more, I think, so. Let me sort of speak, speaking back to Jerry, and then I'll come back to Minerva in a second because I like it, but the what I did, I recently discovered actually fairly recently that I was going along with a model that said learning is kind of what the, the world says is learning that you put new things concepts into your head it's thinking, it might be, it might be ways of thinking, etc. But it's, it's very different than, than actually doing so. I remember I was part of, in the 80s, the move from teaching to learning, there was a huge switch in, in conversation, and in vocabulary. When we were all talking about teaching and we all said, Oh, no, no, no, it's got to be from the receiver. Let's make it about, about learning. But learning is, is a, is a concept that is, is incredibly fluid. I wrote an article 10 years ago that somebody wrote to me is still important that everybody's got a different definition of learning. And they go, those definitions run from what educationalists, I think, think about learning, which is mostly intellectual, to the idea of changing behavior. And Jerry, you just talked about putting learning together with agency. So is agency part of learning or isn't it part of learning? If you want to take the big concept of, well, yes, learning is agency, and it's doing, and it's doing, and it's what the scientists call it, you know, as dealing with having the same inputs and getting different outputs. That's fine. But that is not the way the world sees learning in general. And so when I do the people who say education is the bad boy, because it's the system, and learning is the good boy, because it's the, all the things that we want. I, I think that's a very, a lot of people say that I've come across them. But I think it doesn't help us because people don't think of learning in terms of the same way that maybe you, Jerry, or Joey, when he talks about lifelong learning and many of these people, they think you get courses. And so we have this huge, you know, billion dollar industry now in giving lifelong courses and badges and this. And, and Minerva, which is wonderful. I mean, the fact that they are able to recruit kids at the same level or higher as the Ivy League into this place that does things a little differently is, is wonderful. It says gay, you know, there may be other ways to do that. But it's a couple of things. First, it's only the top 1% of the world, because that's who they take. And second, and second, as we described, it's all intellectual. Habits of mind, ways of thinking, you know, so we don't do the content, we do the, we do the, we do the skills. But we, and they're working in a little bit more, it's my understanding, and I need to learn a lot more about Minerva, that there's some of this accomplishment into it. But I don't think, just hearing you talk about it, it sounds like another academic institution that does things a little different. And there are several of those. MIT is now very project focused. And so we're seeing, I think, the transition from intellectual only and thinking only, and that if you can just think right, you'll do things. No, if you can think right, you'll be an academic. And that's the interesting thing about our educational system is that it's really vocational training for academics. It's teaching people how to think, right? Well, okay, but we don't need a world full of academics and thinkers. We need people who can think and do. And that is something that I think needs to, and if Minerva is headed in those directions, I'm 100% for it. If MIT is headed in those directions, I'm 100% for it. We have to merge the thinking and accomplishment traditions. Anyone else want to put an opinion or a vector into their conversation at this point? If you're either comfortable or uncomfortable with this. Go ahead, Kevin. Yeah, I was just, I just put something in the chat that, you know, I'm kind of observing right now that increasingly a large percentage of the population are going to be in thinking roles as increasingly the doing part, at least the physicality of doing becomes automated. Right, so it's going to be designing and that becomes the doing. All right, so we're going to be arcing more toward, you know, what makes, you know, being human, you know, different from, you know, other forms of life, that we're going to be, you know, thinking about it and having more time for bot work, as opposed to, you know, physical, because we're going to, you know, design it or program it or encourage the system to be augmented by it. It's a pretty interesting arc. I don't know what changes about education during that period of time you're learning, but I know that the roles are likely to shift and our time will be reallocated and we'll need to think about that. That's really interesting. I didn't know that I would equate the thinking side of these roles with, or that I would equate doing with accomplishment. That is to say the ability to get things done is different than the ability to think. And, and whether that you get it done through machines or other things. But let me share with you this thought and see if you see if it means anything to you. I can't find my video here. The, where we're moving to is just as you said, and I agree, is that almost anything that two people can do equally well, or almost equally well, can and will be automated. It's just a question of cost. And so where I think people are going in terms of jobs and what they need in preparation is towards uniqueness. That the only thing that can't be automated is something unique. And how do you, as an individual, and some people will do it through unique thinking, which is hopefully what I try to do. Some people will do it through other forms of uniqueness. Where I would say, no, I don't want to hire the machine. I want to hire Jerry Mikowski, you know. And so I am moving towards this concept for schools, for parents, for everybody to say, let's help our kids figure out how they are unique and maximize that. In ways that are in accord with what the world needs and what they love to do. And then our kids will be in a position, you know, some of them it'll be through thinking, but for some of them it'll still be through groundskeeping. And, you know, you look at these, I don't know where, I'm thinking the only thing that's coming to my mind is baseball fields. Right, and now we have these beautiful mode baseball fields and patterns. Is that a result of thinking and letting just machines do the whole thing? Or is it a combination of the idea put together with its execution in different ways by different people? And that's kind of where I'm thinking about. I mean, I'm kind of curious about that. The Minerva line would be that they're training kids for jobs that don't exist yet. And the kids will repeat that back to you. And one of the things that strikes me about the uniqueness thing is, I feel to me it's reductionist. You're projecting that what kids need to be is unique and you're working backwards from that. I don't think we know what the kids are going to run into. Right, and they should be, we want to equip them with the capacity, the ability to handle whatever's thrown into the skill set. Right, in the sense that I say it's a silly thing to say, you know, we have to figure out what they're going to be equipped for. We don't know. We need to prepare them for anything because who knows what will happen. But if you can't figure out what your strengths are and what you love and what turns you on and then also through all sorts of guidance, which I think education should seriously provide in ways it doesn't, figure out how to apply that to things that are going on and needs in the world and stuff like that. I don't, you know, I don't think you can reduce it to one thing, but I think that you have to find out what each human being is and that's something we haven't done. We've approached it from the job side. These are our needs and let's form our kids to fit whatever those needs are, but we less approach it from the human side and say, who are these people and how do we maximize what they can do? We have reached the top of the hour and I think we should respect everybody's schedules and head out. Mark, is there anything you'd like to add to the conversation at this point just as a wrap? You don't have to say it in wrap. You can say it in regular prose, regular fiction. My idea in the world, can I get back to the video and see you guys? That would be really lovely. You need to find the Zoom app? I'm in the Zoom app. It says, we look good on mobile too. Interesting. So you have somehow hidden the display from yourself. I don't have the display at all. So anyway. Sorry about that. I shared my screen. Did that ever share with anybody? I have not seen the screen pop up. Okay. Well, there are a lot of resources on my site. What I try to think about and everybody's doing this together. So I'm a nerve of people are doing this and everybody's trying to figure out how we can move to the future. If I can possibly share a slide, there is a slide I want to share, but I'm not sure quite how to do it here. Go to share screen and pick which screen. None of these things that you suggest. All I see again is Zoom and. If you mouse over the middle of your Zoom app, you might see some icons up here across the bottom. It said it re-sent me a thing, joined a meeting. That's a different that was happened earlier. I'll read it to you. Okay. So what it seems to me is that there are a number of changes in perspective that we need in order to move to education. One of them is we've discussed in a sense, but I didn't put this in is from learning to becoming. If you don't think about your learning, you're actually trying to become something better than a better person, a more capable person, a world improving person. It's a change from bettering yourself to bettering your world. That's what we talked about with the achievement accomplishment from empowered to learn as I see learning and I think most of the world does to empower to take positive action. From passion, which we all talk about to applied passion, taking that passion and doing something that's needed in the world from high P's or from rankings to kids who can get things done from thinking like academics, thinking like non academics, because we're too much in that load. And from we don't know what's coming, which is jobs that don't exist yet to we are prepared for anything. And that's what I really like to say I'd like to say how what are the things that kids need to be prepared for anything. And I think that's a set of skills that that the world has developed over over millennia that I have put into some kind of a chart. I think I think it's an attitude of of empowerment that I can the I can thing that we talked about. And I think it's an attitude of helping make the world a better place, your world a better place as you see. So those are that's that's what I think prepares people for anything. And I hope that the direction we move. Excellent. Thank you very much. Thank Mark. Thank you for your time and thank you for all the time enough for you put into coming up with this way of expressing you know how we might actually create a lot of positive good in the world. So we appreciate it a lot. And I will post this conversation on YouTube and we can point to it and use it later on. Well, I so appreciate that. And I if there are ways specifically the gentlemen who spoke about the NERVA. Are you part of NERVA? Dave's son is in Minerva is in Minerva. Well, I would appreciate your your contacting me offline and so I can learn more. Yeah, you know that the book I like to in the chat. I'm enjoying it's actually a pretty a pretty helpful kind of description of the big concept and individually break each chapter is like a piece of the concept. It's it's kind of interesting. What book are we talking about? It's called the building intentional universe. Go ahead. Sorry. The intentional universe. And so Ben, Ben and Coslyn have co edited this volume. Okay, I'll read it. Very cool. Okay, thank you everybody. Let's be careful out there.