>>Amy Draves: Good afternoon. My name is Amy Draves, and I'm here to introduce Tony
Wagner, who's joining us as part of the Microsoft research Visiting Speakers Series. Tony is here
today to discuss his book, Creating Innovators, The Making of Young People Who Will Change
the World. The most effective teachers and employers are developing cultures of innovation.
Based on collaboration, problem solving, and intrinsic motivation. Through play, passion, and
purpose, we can create the change-makers of tomorrow. Tony Wagner is the innovation
education fellow at the Technology and Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. He is also the
author of the Global Achievement Gap, Change Leadership, Making the Grade, and How Schools
Change. Please join me in giving him a very warm welcome.
[applause]
>>Tony Wagner: Thanks. Good to be back. I think it's my third time here.
My favorite quote is Einstein's, “the formulation of the problem is often more essential than the
solution."
What's the problem with American education? Fundamentally, education is promised on the idea
of knowledge scarcity. I, as a teacher, have knowledge, you, the student, need, and the only way
you get it is through me. But that's simply no longer true as you all know.
Anybody been on the Con Academy website lately? Three thousand videos on every
conceivable topic, for free. Million and a half, two million students every single month.
Knowledge is a commodity. Free like air, like water. Growing exponentially, changing constantly.
How many here had to memorize the periodic table in high school? Raise your hands. How
many elements were there again?
>>: [Inaudible]
>>Tony Wagner: I'm sorry, I didn't hear that. Whatever answer you came up with was wrong
because two more were added last week. And planets, are we up one or down one today? I
haven't read my news feed.
The problem then is that the world simply no longer cares what our students know. How many of
you are parents, Just out of curiosity? Raise your -- good. One kid knowing more than the kid
next to them is no longer a competitive advantage.
You can buy it, you can download it, and you can teach yourself. What the world cares about, as
you all know, is what you can do with what you know, and that is a completely different education
problem. Then it's a matter of does the student have the skill and the will.
Sure, knowledge is a ticket to play necessary, but by no means sufficient. So I'm going to talk
about skill and will, and I'm going to talk about the need to reinvent, not reform, American
Education.
We reinvented American education as we transitioned from a rural agrarian economy to an urban
industrial society 150 years ago. We reinvented the one-room school house creating the factory
model assembly line schools we still have one century later.
Time to reinvent again.
Skill. How many of you have read The World is Flat? Raise your hands.
Everybody. I assumed that. I read it, and it scared the hell out of me. Because as you know, he
describes a world increasingly, any job that can be turned into a routine is very rapidly being
off-shored or automated.
Talked to Friedman recently, he said, "I got one thing wrong in that book," and I said, "What?"
He said, "The pace of change." It's happening far, far more rapidly than he ever imagined
possible.
So I decided to do a very different kind of research. I talked to a very wide range of executives,
beginning about five years ago, to try to understand what are the skills that matter most, what are
the gaps.
I talked to folks, literally, from Apple, that other place, to [inaudible], to the U.S. Army, to Microsoft
I talked to community leaders, I talked to college teachers, and I came to understand there's as
set of core competencies every single student must be well on their way to mastering before the
end of high school.
I call them the seven survival skills, and it's not just to get and keep a good job. These are the
same skills you need for continuous learning and active and informed citizenship.
These will not be in any way a surprise to you, but I'll repeat the list briefly.
Critical thinking and problem solving. What's that? First and foremost, the ability to ask the right
questions, really good questions.
Collaboration across networks and leading by influence.
Number three: Agility and adaptability. Number Four: Initiative and entrepreneurism. Dwell on
this for a minute.
Talked to Mark Chandler, Vice President of general council of Cisco Systems, and he said to me,
"You know, if I have an employee who sets and meets five goals, that's no longer good enough."
He said, "If, on the other hand, I have an employee who sets ten goals, takes initiative, and
perhaps only succeeds at seven or eight, he or she is a hero."
But think for a moment. What would that student be if he or she were in school. They would
have missed two or three out of ten, C or B student. We'll come back to this issue of failure.
Number five, effective oral and written communication, and it is the number one complaint of both
college teachers and employers.
a Senior executive at Dell said to me, "These kids can't write. They don't know how to think.
They don't know how to reason. They don't know how to analyze." And he said, "That's only half
the problem." He said, and then said something that kind of warmed my recovering high school
English teacher's heart. He said, "They do not know how to write with voice.” His exact words.
Meaning they don't know how to put their own passion and perspective into their communications
so as to be persuasive.
Number six: Accessing and analyzing information. We all know that one.
Number seven: Curiosity and imagination. How many have read [inaudible] book A Holy Mind?
Raise your hands.
As you may know, he argues that curiosity and imagination becomes increasingly important in a
very sophisticated consumer society where people want products and services that have flare,
that are creative, that are empathetic.
However, I've come to see curiosity and imagination and their importance in a completely new
light in the context of my recent research.
Okay. So that book came out, The Global Achievement Gap, three and a half years ago, and
essentially what the global achievement gap, quite simply stated, is that the gap between the new
skills all students need for careers, college and citizenship versus what is taught and tested even
in our very best public and independent schools, where I've spent an enormous amount of time
observing classes. Quite frankly, we're trying to do accountability on the cheap using factual
recall multiple choice tests that cost absolutely nothing about college, career, or citizenship
readiness.
Accountability 1.0 is totally broken. So that book came out. Two things happened immediately. I
got a kind of affirmation response worldwide that took me totally by surprise, Literally from Taiwan
to Singapore to Thailand to Bahrain to Helsinki to Budapest to Madrid.
And everywhere I went, literally, from West Point to Wall Street, people said yep, these are
exactly the right skills, no question.
But then the second thing happened. The economic collapse. And I suddenly observed kids
coming home with a BA degree in one hand and $30,000 of debt in the other, going home to no
job. Seemingly had mastered many of these skills. Why no job?
What's the problem?
Right now, today, 53% of all recent college graduates are either un or under employed, a third of
them living at home.
What's the problem? Well, as I tried to understand this economic crisis, I began to realize its
more than just credit default swaps and hyper-inflated real state market. Something I had not
realized until studying this, more than 70% of our economy is driven by consumer spending. It is
growing every year. Point 1.
Point 2, that consumer spending has been increasingly fueled by people going into debt, Pulling
money out of their houses, putting money on their credit cards as fast as they possibly can.
And in a sense the crisis was that everybody called in the debt suddenly.
But it fundamentally led me to realize that we've created an economy based on people spending
money they do not have to buy things they may not need, threatening the planet in the process.
It's very clear. And even economists now say that is not a sustainable economic model. Not
sustainable economically, not sustainable environmentally, and, I would argue, not sustainable
spiritually.
But what's the alternative? What's going to be our niche in the global knowledge economy? How
are we going to create jobs?
So as I studied this, one word appeared over and over again in all the literature. You know the
word. You guys live it. Innovation.
The idea, though, is not just high tech or stem innovation, not just those breakthroughs, but also
the idea being that we need to create more solutions to more problems that the world values and
wants to buy, more different solutions to a wide range of problems that generates jobs, creates
wealth.
One problem, though. How do we create more innovators?
And the innovators that we have, are they innovative because of or in spite of our education
system?
You know the Bill Gates story. But what about Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid instant
camera? What about Martin Zuckerberg? What about Bonny Raitt, the folk singer? What do all
four of them have in common? They weren't just college dropouts. They dropped out of Harvard,
thank you very much.
So I took on a very different kind of research this time. I started talking to young people in their
twenties, talking to a very wide range of them who were innovative in a number of areas.
Many of them were stem innovators, but others were innovative in arts, music, social
entrepreneurship and innovation.
And as I talked with them, I tried to understand the ecosystem that had helped them to become
innovators. I mean, some of them were born gifted, some of them not so gifted. But they all had
an ecosystem.
So I interviewed each one of their parents trying to discern patterns of parenting that made a
critical difference. I then asked each one of them, is there a parent or a teacher -- I'm sorry, a
teacher or a mentor who's made a critical difference in your life?
A third of them could not name a single teacher, most of them coming from disadvantaged urban
backgrounds.
I then interviewed all of those teachers and mentors and I discovered a pattern that I continue to
find deeply disturbing. In every single case the teachers whom I interviewed, from elementary
school to graduate school, were outliers, outliers in their educational settings, teaching in ways
that were very different than their colleagues, but ways that were very consistent with some the
most innovative schools I have been to, places like High Tech High in San Diego, New Tech
High, Olin College of Engineering, MIT's media lab, the D school at Stanford.
In all these places, consistent with what these teachers and how these teachers taught, the
culture of schooling as we know it and still practice it is radically at odds with the culture of
learning that creates innovators in five essential respects.
Number one, we celebrate and reward individual achievement. We grade and rank and sort kids
according to achievement levels. Some of that may be necessary, some of that may even be
useful, but as you well know, innovation is a team sport, and every one
of these teachers built real accountable teamwork into all of the assignments they gave their
students, as well as individual work.
Number two, we celebrate and reward specialization. And, of course, there's a role and an
importance for that, you again know that very well here.
But in every case we understand that real innovation is about a multiple discipline perspective on
a problem or a project.
Judy Gilbert, vice president of [inaudible] on Google said to me, if there's one thing educators
must realize it's that problems can neither but understood nor solved within the bright lines of
academic disciplines.
And yet that's what we reward. That's the way you get tenure in this country is to know this much
about something this wide.
When I did my dissertation at Harvard I was told that my dissertation be a conversation between
myself and one or two other people in the world.
[laughter]
Four years for conversation with two people. I don't think so.
Number three, cultured schooling is risk of [inaudible] we penalize failure. We discourage
teachers from trying new things. Increasingly it's all about teaching to the test. Test prep. It's the
only curriculum you find in schools today. But as you well know, innovation is all about trial and
error, all about making mistakes and learning from them.
Folks at IDO, the most innovative design company in the world, said to me, you know we have a
motto here, our motto is fail early and fail often. Guys might have a similar motto with Windows
1.0, I don't know.
[laughter]
We won't go there. So I go to the D school at Stanford, interdisciplinary school, fascinating place,
sitting around the table and they're saying, you know, we're actually kind of thinking F is the new
A. For some reason parents have a hard time with that. I can't understand.
I go to Olin College of Engineering, arguably the best college in the country right now today
except they've only graduated five classes. Every class is interdisciplinary project based, team
based, hands on. Every class. The entire senior year is spent on a project working in a team
with a corporation.
I talked to a student there. He said, you know, we actually don't even talk about failure here, we
talk about iteration, a completely different understanding of the learning process.
Number four, the culture of school is fundamentally a profoundly passive experience. The higher
up you go in schooling, the more you sit and get. In fact, I think that's where we get acculturated
into becoming such good little consumers, because that's how we spend our school days, years,
and so on.
Classrooms of innovators are all about making things. Creating, not consuming. Real products
for real audiences.
Number five, and perhaps most important, culture of schooling uses extrinsic incentives to
motivate learning. Carrots and sticks. Rewards and punishments. Pizza on Fridays for good
tests scores.
You know the drill.
But what I came to understand is that these young innovators whom I interviewed, from both
privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds, equally, are far, far more intrinsically motivated and
want to make a difference more than they want to make a lot of money.
And then when I looked at what did these parents do, what did these teachers do to foster that
intrinsic motivation, because you know we're born with it, we're born curious, creative, imaginative
until it's either parented or schooled out of us -- but not with these teachers and parents -- I found
a pattern. Both teachers and parents encouraged play, passion, and purpose.
Play, much more experimental, discovery based, free form play. Fewer toys. Toys without
batteries. Limiting screen time. Limiting the number of kinds of extracurricular activities the kids
would schedule their days up with, but also providing a buffet of rich and interesting opportunities
in order for kids to help discover what it was they were really passionate about.
And these teachers and parents both encouraged kids to find and pursue a passion and believe
that was more important than mere academic achievement. Because it's in the pursuit of passion
that you really learn the kind of persistence and self-discipline that are so essential today.
It's in the pursuit of passion that you try new things and you make mistakes and you fail and you
learn resilience and the self-confidence that comes from that.
But what happened with these young kids is that as they pursued a passion, the passion
changed. It morphed. It evolved. The parents didn't try to pin them down. Oh, You're interested
in science. That means you're going to be a good little scientist.
No. They didn't do that.
Their understanding of their children evolved as their children grew. And in every case, as these
adolescents became adults, their passion matured into a deeper sense of purpose.
Because both teachers and parents had talked about giving back. Just in simple ways, but giving
back. In every case these young people in different ways are trying to make a difference in the
world. And their purpose has become a kind of adult sense of play, which also incorporates their
passion.
So I'm going to stop in a minute, but before I do, I want to kind of give a little texture to these
ideas with a story. The heart of the book, our profiles of young innovators and also profiles of
parents who are themselves in highly innovative professions like yourselves. I'll tell one story.
His name is Kirk, grows up in Silicon Valley, parents are constantly kind of giving him
opportunities but also pushing him out to play. His mother said, you know, sometimes kids have
to get bored in order to learn how to be unbored. So plan a lot of time outside, limiting screen
time. Favorite toy is Legos. Nothing with batteries.
Along the way at about a middle school-aged kid he develops a real passion for science.
Absolutely passionate about science and reading biographies of scientists. And his parents
would throw all kinds of books in front of him. They had a rule.
Their rule is you, as a child of four children, must read one hour a day. You choose what you
read so long as it is nothing that is assigned by school. Experiment. Play. Literacy as play.
So he's reading all these biographies. He becomes passionate about science. They help him
find a summer job washing up test tubes in some lab. Doesn't matter. He's around scientists
getting a sense.
And so, you know, he wants to study science. So they look around, and they've got the means,
trying to find what's the best school in the country for science. They decide on Exeter Academy,
an elite school in New Hampshire.
They Send him off to Exeter. Eleventh grade, he's taken every science course except for the one
that they wont let him take for some reason or another. He's pissed off. He says, "I'm out of
here. I'm dropping out.”
What do you say to him as a parent, leaving Exeter, the end of eleventh grade, without a high
school diploma? They said fine. They said, okay, we'll support you. Exeter said you'll never get
into college. You're washing yourselves up.
Well, he got into Stanford for combined BS/MS Programming. Stanford [inaudible] said it's not
science because it's too isolating. It's too lonely. Becomes interested in computer science and
begins to realize he's kind of a closet engineer. But he can't imagine writing code for the rest of
his life either. So he's kind of stumbling along, not quite sure what to do.
He takes a course from an outlier teacher, Ed Carrier, Ph.D From Stanford, ten years of industry
experience. He's a professor of practice who never got tenure, will never get tenure, because
he's passionate about teaching young innovators.
Like the cofounder of Tesla, twenty people from Apple have all come through his lab. He teaches
a series of courses called Smart Product Design. Electrical engineering, mechanical engineering,
and computer science combined. Kids make robots in teams to solve problems.
Kirk takes this course. First time he's ever experienced real teamwork. First time he's ever
experienced multidisciplinary approaches to problem solving. He catches on fire, totally.
Takes a sequence of three courses, becomes the teaching fellow for Ed Carrier, and he gets
incredibly excited and decides to drop out. Two courses shy of both degrees, which were
concurrent.
Why does he drop out? Because he's recruited by Apple to be the product manager for the first
iPhone.
Does that incredibly successfully for three years. Learns a ton. What is he doing now? He's a
part of a startup called Sun Run that is developing entirely new approaches to financing solar
panels for residences. A startup. He's 29. He's an innovator.
And as you really kind of reflect on the story and all of these others, you begin to understand how
important play, passion, and purpose is in the lives of young innovators, and how much it is
missing from their schooling, and how hard these parents have worked to keep that spark alive.
So I want to stop at this point. I'm going to invite you to ask questions, disagree, challenge me. I
want to hear what's on your mind.
Yes, please.
>>: Did you talk to any of the kids after their graduation and get their perspective on the way the
different schooling impacted their performance or ability to function in the workplace and like in a
place like Microsoft versus small [inaudible]?
>>Tony Wagner: All of these young people I interviewed were in their twenties. And I've
interviewed them all within the last two and a half years. So I've not had enough of an
opportunity to do anything longitudinal. But it is very interesting, and I think it is going to be a
challenge for large companies. None of these kids are very excited about working in a large
corporation.
Not at all.
Many of them are far more entrepreneurial. And they're an interesting cross-section, you know.
They're not just gifted geeks, they're a cross-section of kids. Some are from, as I mentioned,
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
So I think that is an interesting challenge here for large corporations, about how do you attract
this kind of, and retain, this kind of talent?
I mean, after three years at Apple, Kirk was done. He was ready for his startup. Same with some
of these other kids.
So I think a question for large corporations, how do you really attend to this whole idea of intrinsic
motivation? How do you attend to play, passion, and purpose in the work place? How do you
encourage people to take risks and learn from mistakes,
Not just in writing code, but also in lots of others ways?
Other questions?
Yes sir.
>>: Do you have any proposals to how we could repair the U.S. education system?
>>Tony Wagner: Yes.
>>: Do you think the main problem is the lower grade or at the university level?
>>Tony Wagner: It's case 16. It's everywhere. And what I found out -- in fact, you know, I began
this project assuming that, of course, our research on universities, our best, our elites, are
contributing to innovation. Well, I interviewed five college professors -- MIT, Harvard, Stanford,
Carnegie Mellon, Tulane -- all of them having produced extraordinary young innovators. None of
them had tenure. None. Why?
Because research universities run on the amount of money they bring in for pure research. And
there is a huge gap between pure research and applied innovations. And all of these teachers
were much more interested in the master students and what they were going to do in the real
world than they were in creating more researchers.
But to finish the question -- I see your hand -- here's the first problem. What gets measured is
what gets taught. You know, in this business having the wrong metric is worse than having none
at all. We have the wrong metric in this country. We need accountability 2.0. We need business
leaders to speak up to that. We are measuring the wrong things.
Kids can score well on tests and be totally unprepared for college, careers, and citizenship.
Accountability 2.0 means assessing the skills that matter most. And the tests exist. I've
described them in my last book, the Global Achievement Gap. Tests like the college and work
readiness assessment. It's an online test of analytical reasoning, critical thinking, problem
solving, and writing.
We need to also gauge accountability for both students and teachers on a body of work of
students. I want to see every student have a digital portfolio that follows the student from first
grade.
We're going to also have to invest massively in completely reinventing the preparation of
teachers.
I went to Finland a couple of years ago and made a documentary a number of you may be
interested in called The Finland Phenomena. The highest performing education system in the
world, and what's their secret? Every teacher has a master's, every teacher has to do real
research, every teacher spends a year in the equivalent of a medical residency working with a
master teacher.
So that's the kind of outline I think we're going to have to do. Fundamentally we have to
understand it's not about content expertise of and by and for itself. You go to high school, you go
to college, and it's all about mastering content.
As I've said before, that's the wrong problem. We should not be simply testing content. It's about
skill and will.
Yes, please.
>>: I'm looking at this as a parent of young children.
>>Tony Wagner: As well you should.
>>: We're here and you're talking a lot about what we can do outside [inaudible] of school, right?
In the hour of reading, that sort of thing. Obviously a large portion of my children's [inaudible]
kindergartners occurs within the confines of school. And so I'm wondering what is your advice to
a parent to operate within the system today? Because reinvention isn't occurring. And [inaudible]
and who's not willing to move to Finland, what to, you know, what to do or how to guide?
>>Tony Wagner: As your kids get older, there's a simple thing every teacher can do and the best
teachers do do, and that's build projects in every course. Build time into every single course as a
part of the semester where students -- and they know it from the beginning. Okay, you've been
studying the Civil War. I want you to pick something, ask a question, study something that you're
really interested in. Become an expert in it and teach it to the class.
The whole idea of building time in for students to find and pursue a passion, to develop a deeper
interest. I've taught high school English for twelve years, and I did that as a matter of instinct.
There's absolutely no reason why every teacher in the country could not do this tomorrow.
The tools exist. The motivation does not. Why? Because they're held accountable for
standardized tests, not for students' quality of work. And that's a problem. That's why I want to
see digital portfolios.
Other questions?
Yes sir.
>>: We agree that the education system is broken today, but if you look back far enough, before
we had today's education system, we had the apprentice system, which seems very similar to
what you're describing, in fact. Be it a master, you go and work for the master with a team and
create something.
>>Tony Wagner: Yes, absolutely. In fact, interesting thing I learned in Finland. You know, in
Finland, the education system for every child is identical, grades 1 through 9. No tracking.
The performance differentiation between the highest performing versus the lowest performing
school in the country, less than four percent.
But what happens in tenth grade is that kids have a choice between an academic track and a
career vocational track that has been developed in close collaboration with businesses. 45
percent of the kids choose career vocational, which leads straight to a good job right out of high
school. In the end, almost all kids go to some form of post-secondary.
But the point is, in our country, increasingly we have only one flavor for every kid. College prep.
It's all we've got. It's very clear to me lots and lots of kids do not want to or need to go to college.
There are a lot of jobs going begging out there for want of skills, for want of apprenticeships.
But I think part of the problem is middle class parents who can't stand the thought of their children
wearing a blue collar. We do not respect the dignity of work in this country to the extent that we
once did or that they do in Europe, and we're going to have to get over it.
Because guess which jobs are not going to be off-shored or automated? Plumbing, electricians,
auto mechanics. There are going to be good jobs out there earning six figures for kids who have
blue collars.
Yes, please? And then Amy.
>>: So I have a five-year-old and a four-year-old, and my son doesn't seem to be motivated to
[inaudible] and.
>>Tony Wagner: Getting [inaudible] is boring.
[laughter]
>>Tony Wagner: No surprise. School is boring. Especially for boys. Because they make you sit
still. Boys hate that.
[laughter]
>>Tony Wagner: They do.
>>: Well, my parents taught me to be a good student, and I'm trying to impart that to my son, but
it doesn't' seem to be sticking. Do you have any suggestions?
>>Tony Wagner: Well, first of all, try a Montessori school. It's interesting, one of the pieces of
research I uncovered is that many of the most extraordinary innovators and entrepreneurs that
we know -- well, like the cofounders of Google, and many, many others, Jeff Bezos -- a huge
number of them went to Montessori schools.
So I seriously think it's worth pursuing another kind of kindergarten. We're pushing literacy down
kids' throats, early and when they're not ready. They're simply not ready, especially boys.
Especially when boys are told to be like this.
So I would offer the distinction between trying to help your son be a good student versus being a
real learner. And the two aren't the same.
I want to get Amy and then come to you and you.
Yes, please, Amy.
>>: I don't know how you chose the people you talked to. I want to know how you chose, how
did you choose the five professors from the five schools and also ask how you filtered for
innovative kids.
>>Tony Wagner: Essentially I could have written another book on the methodology. It's like
following hyperlinks. You know venture capitalists who suggested some young people who would
be interesting to talk to, some of my student researchers had heard about really neat kids or have
met some of them said, you know, go talk to them.
In the end what I strived for was a kind of representativeness demographically, socially, and
economically. So it's kind of a representative sample, cross-section of kids in their twenties.
How did I define innovation? As kids, in a sense, trying to create something new. That's the
simplest definition probably. How I got to the five college teachers? Through the students. I
didn't -- I asked the kid, tell me about a teacher who's made a huge difference in your life.
The Harvard story, David Sengi, five days before his graduation from the engineering program at
Harvard College, five days before his commencement, talked with him for two hours. He started
his first nonprofit when he was a high school student in Sierra Leone for better ways to distribute
malaria nets. While in college, he started working with a couple of other students on the idea of
generating electricity from dirt microbes. Extraordinary guy.
We talked for two hours, and he tells me all about this guy Paul Batino who's been kind of his
mentor, informally. He'd bap in and talk to Paul. Paul's not tenured. Never will be. He runs a
little program called the Technology and Entrepreneurships Center.
I talked with David and I said, David, you haven't said a word about your classes. You're five
days from commencement. He said, well, that's because I didn't learn a thing in any of my
classes. Except for Spanish. I learned to speak Spanish. He said everything I learned that I
value was out of the classroom.
So that's how I found those teachers -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford -- was through the students,
People whom they said had made the critical difference in their lives.
So hand here, hand here, hand here.
Yes, please.
>>: I was an exchange student in high school in Finland, so I lived in a small town in Finland, and
I had a couple really interesting experiences. One was a math teacher who became my mentor,
and we still keep in touch to this day. It's been a long time now. And then also just another note
on the five-year-old. Another thing that's interesting in Finland is they don't even start school until
they're seven.
>>Tony Wagner: That's right.
>>: And there was a seven-year-old host sister, and she was just beginning to start to go to
school. She had all that other time.
>>Tony Wagner: They have universal preschool that is entirely play-based and emphasizes the
arts. Kids go to school later, starting a year later, they spend less time in school, they have s
shorter school day, shorter school year. I talked to some ninth-graders. I said, how much
homework do you do?
They said three or four hours. I said, A night? They said, no, a week. Highest performing
education system in the world.
Yes, please?
>>: So you mentioned Montessori. Are there other sort of bright spots out there that you see?
>>Tony Wagner: Reggio Emilia is another great at the elementary level, another fabulous
program. I profile in the Global Achievement Gap, my last book, a number of outstanding high
schools that I think are doing an extraordinary job of teaching and assessing the skills that matter
most. New Tech High, which started in Napa.
Yeah?
>>: How about things like either schools of education or nonprofits that are trying to change the
system?
>>Tony Wagner: Well, there are a lot of nonprofits working into the kind of charter space, and I
think some of them are doing extremely interesting work. Some of them are doing great work sort
of after school.
The U.S. first Robotics, you guys know that one? Dean Kamen's effort? Fascinating program
that teaches kids to work in teams, preparing, building robots for competitions.
So there's a lot of stuff on the periphery. But the problem remains, increasingly, that our schools
are totally preoccupied with test scores of the wrong kind.
And just to finish the point, School of Ed, High Tech High, my favorite K12 system in the universe,
3500 kids in San Diego in eleven charter schools was so frustrated by the schools of Ed
graduates they were seeing from Stanford and other places, they started their own graduate
school of education. Right now if I were a startup teacher, that's the only place I would go.
Yes, please.
>>: When you say Finland is the best performing school, is that by standardized tests?
>>Tony Wagner: There is an assessment called PISA, Program for International Student
Assessment. It was started by OECD, Organization For Economic Cooperation and
Development in 2000, with the recognition that education is the key to economic vitality.
The difference with that test is three quarters of all of their tests, which they give every two years,
are open-ended, constructed response tests that demand that students apply what they've
learned, not regurgitate it. Completely different test.
You want to know how we did last time around? I'll tell you. 66 countries and municipalities were
involved. 15th in reading. Pretty good. 24th in science. 33rd in math. Out of 66 countries.
Because those tests assess things that our kids don't understand, how to apply what they've
learned. They've never been asked to do that.
Yes, please.
>>: I think the first place was by Shanghai.
>>Tony Wagner: Shanghai this year, [inaudible] last year was the first.
>>: How would you explain their success?
>>Tony Wagner: I've been to the East, I've been to Taiwan, I've been to Singapore, though not
Shanghai, and those are cram cultures. First of all, Shanghai attracts the best and the brightest
in the country. But beyond that, those kids are spending ten, twelve hours a day in school.
I did a focus group with some sixth graders in Singapore, which scored as high as Shanghai and
Finland. Kids start school at seven in the morning. They get home at four or five in the
afternoon. Sixth graders are doing two to three hours of homework a night.
Then they have their private lessons. And then they have high-stakes tests every three years.
And their system is entirely tracked, unlike Finland.
I went to the most elite school in Finland -- I'm sorry, in Singapore, a private school noted for its
math and science. And they tried out their very best kids to tell me about their new experiment.
Kids were experimenting with how to extract energy from coffee grounds. Used coffee grounds,
all right? They do this. Very, amazing. Really stunning. I asked one question. You know, I'm
an English teacher. What do I know? I simply said, Have you thought about how to calculate the
amount of energy it takes versus the amount of energy created?
They were like deer in the headlights. Terrified. Had no response. Frozen solid.
So, yes they can get certain results on certain tests, but can they innovate? I don't think so. And
that's the coin of realm in the 21st century. They're replicators, not innovators.
Yes, please.
>>: [Inaudible] if they don't assess those kids, they lose their confidence, so [inaudible] a kid
differently as an innovator, how do you assess them without forcing them? So, for example, say,
[inaudible] writing skill. To see another kid write better, they lose their confidence. So how do I
not force my kid [inaudible] a different style of education?
>>Tony Wagner: I don't have an easy answer for you. I think, in fact, that's one of the art forms
of good parenting is how do you instill that confidence in kids? I think in part it comes from their
experiencing your confidence in them.
You know, what does it take to say that's fine, son, if you want to drop out of Exeter, the most
elite high school in the country without a high school diploma, that's fine? What does that take?
A kind of confidence.
You will be fine. That's the message we need to be giving our kids. And it's fine if you're not as
skillful in something in particular right now, besides there's two different things here.
I was never skillful in music. But I happened to love it. Studied classical guitar. Never going to
be a good musician.
So what you're good at versus what you love may not be the same. And that has to be okay.
Yes, please.
>>: [Inaudible] I'm just wondering if you extrapolate that to the education field and the
commoditization of education what sort of impact that has? You've got wealthy parents sending
their kids to expensive schools to get better educations so they get through a better college, and
then they don't want them to fail because they need the [inaudible] because it's not actually about
education is about the certificate of proof that I went to school.
>>: Right. Right, you're going to get my college rap now. Here it comes. Here's the bad news.
The likelihood that American, middle-class kids are going to get into name-brand colleges is
dropping by the second to near zero. Why? Global applicant pool. Highly talented kids from all
over the world applying for slots in these elite colleges.
The good news is it matters less and less. Going to an elite undergraduate school no longer has
the competitive advantage it did a quarter of a century ago. Networks are moderately useful in
students getting their first job interview, But not the job itself.
You know that. You know, well, the questions you guys ask, tell us about a time you failed. Well,
if you've got a 4.0 GPA and you sailed right through high school and Harvard, you've never failed,
you don't know how to answer that question.
I'm serious. More important are the summer internships, other kinds of opportunities.
Point three, the world of colleges is changing. 750 universities, including very selective schools
like Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Carleton require no forms of standardized testing for admission any
longer.
The dean of admissions at Harvard, Bill Fitzsimmons, has chaired a commission three years ago
urging colleges to radically diminish their reliance on these standardized tests because, A, they're
highly class-biased and, B, they're a lousy predictor of how kids will do in college compared to
GPAs.
In fact, it was Tufts University last year that invited kids for the first time to submit YouTube
videos as a part of their application. We were stunned at the quality and how much they learned
from them.
So I think that is a changing world. And here's the cherry on the sundae. How many know about
Coursera? Raise your hands. Brand new company started up. A collaboration of University of
Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Stanford.
What are they doing? Offering free online courses. College courses.
Oh, and Harvard and MIT, not to be outdone, yesterday announced EdX. What is EdX? A
nonprofit offering certificates of mastery for online courses from those institutions. Okay. You go
to an online course, you take and you get a certificate of mastery and it's free, or you go to
Harvard for $50,000. What are you going to do?
[laughter]
Now, that's one answer. What I really worry about, though, is something different. Less about
affluent parents sending their kids to name-brand colleges, more about the kinds of educational
and extracurricular activities they offer these kids, vacations and summers and so on. The real
achievement gap happens over the summers between the very different experiences kids have.
I don't know how many are aware of this, but we've slowly lessened the black-white achievement
gap in this country. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between the most and least affluent in our
country has increased 40 percent in thirty years.
My biggest fear for the future of this country is the extent to which we're creating a permanent
underclass with no hope and no mobility, and it's all about the level of education they're getting.
That's my real fear. I don't see anybody talking about it.
You had a question, sir?
>>: I was wondering about investing playfulness not only in the school but in the workplace and if
you're intimidated of allergic reaction to electronic games, for example. So, for example, a lot of
Xbox games have -- I see my 14-year-old playing Xbox, I see him fail quite often.
>>Tony Wagner: I think there's a lot to be learned from electronic games. And I've played with
Xbox. Here's my concern. There's no question you learn skills. There's no question that there's
value in that. But my worry is it's addictive.
Kaiser Family Foundation does a study every five years on kids' use of electronic devices. Two
years ago was the last study. Kids between the ages of 8 and 18 after school after homework.
How many hours a day do you think they're spending on electronic devices? Before Twitter,
before texting. This was two years ago.
Guess.
>>: Three.
>>Tony Wagner: Seven hours and 38 minutes. Not a day after school. Not counting
multitasking. Counting multiple devices, it goes to 13 hours a day.
On the one hand, we have to bring the best of these new technologies, and I've worked with
Chris Dede, who's working with Microsoft on educational applications for Xbox, Which I think is
very promising. Simulations and so on. Incredibly powerful tools that belong in the classroom
along with unfiltered Internet access, which Finland's Finish kids have but ours do not.
So that's important.
But the other side of this is we're going to have to teach our kids when not to multitask And how
to develop the muscles of concentration, which are required for any kind of serious intellectual or
creative work.
Yes, sir?
>>: I guess it's a similar question. You talked about play as helping create innovative young
people, and I was wondering if you thought the same thing could apply to adults.
>>Tony Wagner: Absolutely. I think play, passion, and purpose are every bit as important in the
work place, and that what I suggested earlier, I think it's the only way you're going to be able to
retain the most talented of this generation. They're not going to work.
Classic story of my friend Bob Compton, venture capitalist, does a lot of startups. He was
involved in a software startup, and this young kid in his twenties, brilliant kid, brilliant programmer,
and he kind of took his time at lunch to go out and work out and do stuff like this, and Bob said,
Hey, can I offer you stock options if you put in more time?
He turned to him and said, Compton, I'm not coin-operated.
[laughter]
>>Tony Wagner: One more question, then I want to show you a short video, and I'll explain it
because I know you guys got to get back to work.
Yes, please.
>>: Have you made an assessment of home schooling and innovation?
>>Tony Wagner: You know, I'm asked that more and more, and there's an increasing interest in
that for obvious reasons. I haven't studied it. I do know the research in terms of how these kids
do in college. They do as well or better.
So there's no reason not to do it. But I mean, yeah, there are reasons not to. It's got to be done
well. You've got to attend to the extracurricular piece as well as the social piece.
Last question.
>>: Three things we can do at home.
>>Tony Wagner: Play, passion and purpose. Try to encourage more exploratory play, limit
screen time, encourage, get toys that you make things out of like Legos. By far the most popular
toy with all of these young innovators. Legos and things of that sort
Push teachers to make sure the kids have time to explore stuff on their own, to do projects and as
citizens, advocate for accountability 2.0. Assessing the skills that matter most. We need the
business voice at the table.
Accountability 1.0 became because of Kerns and Ser, I mean David Kerns and Lou Gerstner 20
years ago advocating as business leaders a reform of the education system. Educators were not
a part of that conversation because the business leaders didn't trust them, and for good reason.
They were opposed to accountability.
Now we need them at the table. We need to design an accountability system that in sends
powerful teaching learning instead of what we have today.
Now let me tell you about the book, because it features one of your great products. Did you know
that? Compton and I were sitting in Singapore a year ago. He says, Wagner, you can't just write
a book about innovation. It has to be innovative.
I said, What do you mean? He said, "How 'bout you embed tags or codes in the book, and how
about I go make a bunch of videos and so when you scan the Microsoft tags" -- which there are
60 of them in the book -- "it pulls up a video."
So he spent eight months shooting a 150 hours of video. So there are more than 60 Microsoft
tags in this book, which when you can bring up a video, that highlights some part of the book.
It's embedded, of course, in the iBook version, that other version. So, what we've done is create
a nine-minute sort of video clip that highlights some of the video content that I think you will find
interesting.
[Video played]
>>: How important is innovation? How important is oxygen to our life? I mean, I don't know any
other way to define innovation other than it's what drives us to the next level.
>>: I think innovation is the ability to look at a problem or question in a new way, to have a
passion for that
question and make it meaningful.
>>: CQ+PQ is always greater than IQ. That is, you give me, young person with a high curiosity
quotient and a young person who combines that with a high passion quotient to pursue their
curiosity, I'll always take the person over someone with a high IQ because when you get young
people who are curious and then they have a passion to pursue their curiosity, good things tend
to happen. The future lies for our country to become more productive. We need people to
innovate, we need people to create, and you start with your young.
>>: Raising someone with an intention that they'll be an innovator is actually different than raising
a child that you want to behave all the time and be quite compliant. How do I help create an
environment for this child to be curious, to ask a lot of questions and not be in any way inhibited
by the answers that he comes up with? He's in a school system that also provides that same
type of an environment so he gets it in school and we continue to foster it at home. But the goal
is to let him ask as many questions as possible and for us to always think in terms of lets be
curious about what's in front of us.
>>: Everybody is creative naturally. Look at what happens in kindergarten, you just go into a
kindergarten class and they're just wild in the streets, just totally coming with ideas. Interview a
second-grader and they'll have all kinds of ideas that you never thought of, right? Because their
mind is free to do that. So I think this whole system trains that out of.
>>: Our school really gives kids enough time to really get invested in something, to really figure it
out, it's not a quick study of something. If you're interested in blocks, you can build with blocks for
a two-hour period of time and really experiment with materials.
We talk about these basic open-ended materials we have for children every single day. There
are blocks, there's clay, there's easel painting, there's sand and water.
In that environment children have a way to work with each other that's very collaborative.
>>: The [inaudible] of High Tech High is founded largely on the idea of kids making, doing
building, shaping, and inventing stuff, along with teachers, and you can see when you're here that
we're producing things. Because when you're producing things you're also consuming those
technologies, but when you're consuming those technologies, you're not necessarily producing
those technologies.
The science part is simply the power tools behind you that make you do it faster and more
efficiently. It's not, in fact, what engineering is all about.
The curriculum requires that all students have a series of courses in design, and, in fact, the day
they arrive they begin designing and building things. They haven't yet had the calculus and the
physics background material, but that's okay because design thinking doesn't require science.
Design thinking actually has a lot in common with art.
It's about asking the right questions. It's about having the right insights and perceptions. Do
whatever it takes to increase the level of student engagement so they are intrinsically motivated,
they ask the right questions, they are empowered to use technology, and they are committed to
making a positive difference in the world.
>>: I think there's a class of young people that really want to change the world. They come from
countries like the U.S. Some have had very comfortable backgrounds and others have had to
work very hard, but they are really motivated to try to make a difference, and there's a whole
movement of organizations that are on the edge of nonprofits and for profits that really have a
social mission but also want to. They don't want to just ask for donations, they want to run it as a
business to keep themselves honest.
>>Female Voice: It's really important for students to find out what is their passion. There are
plenty of problems in the world and no one's going to solve all of them, so why not choose the
one that means the most to you?
>>: There are lots of amputees in [inaudible] I do have a lot of amputee friends from the war,
where a couple thousand people were maimed. Allow the user to work in different terrains to
work in a rainy season to do things on ground that is not level, but also have it be low cost and
have it be enabling, have them to have another dimension to their lives, they have to be able to
do more than just work, they have to be able to do their basic general life.
>>: I've always really wanted to make a real impact in the world. That's the biggest desire I've
had, I want to feel like what I'm doing every day matters, and it matters in a bigger way than
myself. When I was doing art the biggest struggle I had was I felt like art has meaning to people,
but I wasn't really changing the world with my art, and so the desire I started having in high
school and even in college was how can my art be more extended, how can creativity be more
extended and have bigger impact?
I'm not afraid of poverty. I'm really not. I think that's really important. I want to improve the
society that I live in and I believe that I can make it work if it's doing the right thing.
>>: I can't reinvent the foot, but I can reinvent the shoe or the way a shoe is made. I always am
able to take an image from my mind and make something out of it and being able to share that
with the world means everything to me.
>>: Everyone's here for a reason, and if you're here and you have the talent or the ability to do
something, if you're not going to utilize it you basically are taking away from the world, you're not
playing your role in this big ecosystem of things. I have the casting to do it, so I need to do it. If
I'm not, then I'm not only fighting myself but I'm failing the world.
>>Tony Wagner: The one thing that cannot be commoditized is innovation. It is increasingly
clear to me that young people who are capable of innovating in whatever they do, not just high.
Tech stuff, but in any kind of job, are really going to have richer, more satisfying lives and many
better opportunities to make a decent living to have interesting, challenging, and rewarding work.
So rather than all kids crunch. Ready. What I've come to see is we need to think about all
students, all children, innovation. Ready. That poses a found set of challenges for us as parents,
as teachers, as mentors, and employers. What must I do to enable my child, or my student to be
innovation ready? Our success is measured more or less by the rate of innovation.