Simon Sinek on Education

So here's a question. Why am I talking about education? We have to look at how we're setting up the next generation. Are we doing enough to support young people to thrive?

One of the things that I personally struggled with when I went to school is there was only one way to judge a student, which is how you performed in your classes. And I was never the kind of person who was motivated by grades. I learned things at school that weren't recognized or rewarded. I have add, and so I was terrible at paying attention, terrible at reading, really bad at reading. So I had to learn to ask good questions. I had to learn to go after class to talk to the teacher. I had to learn to go up to my friends and say, can you explain that to me? I became a good question asker, and I became a really good listener. The solutions I found to the challenges of my own childhood became my strengths as an adult. So are we doing that at school now? Are we helping kids find solutions to their own challenges, which likely will become their strengths as adults?

When we talk about the what of education, we're going to talk about grades and classrooms, and we're going to talk about stuff that we generally talk about now. But if we talk about the why of education, we're going to ask entirely different questions. We're going to ask how we can help children be more curious. We're going to ask how we can help them learn empathy. We're going to ask and try and figure out how we can help foster their passions rather than just help them make a grade.

So many people make a big point of the number of jobs that exist today they couldn't even conceive of 20 or 30 years ago. So of course, the same will be 20 or 30 years from now. And people will always have to play a role. There's going to be a lot of redefining of what work looks like. I, for one, do not buy into the whole thing that AI and robotics is going to replace everything. We like human interaction. And I think the education system can play a much bigger role in preparing us to be human. We measure a student's performance, how well they perform on a test, but we have no metrics in school for the whole person. And we ignore their ability to lead, we ignore their ability to communicate. So I think when we teach kids how to come together, how to organize, how to have opinions, I think that that's what our future will hold. They will do the things we teach them.

Exams at school, of course, are important, but they're not all Important. We put so much pressure on kids to make the grade. We treat education like a finite, like school is the only thing. But education is our whole lives. So how do we use school to prepare a child to continue to learn for their entire life? We want to be completely open to the idea that we have more to learn.

I don't think anybody goes to teaching college and dreams of becoming a teacher because they just want to teach math. There's a service component to becoming a teacher that there's an element of giving back to do something of higher purpose. It has nothing to do with the subjects they teach, but what is the underlying cause that would inspire them to become a teacher in the first place.

Administrations have to obsess with creating an environment in which teachers want to come to school, in which they feel that the administration has their backs. If I ask any school administrator what's your number one priority? They're going to tell me the student.

The responsibility of leadership has nothing to do with the results. Leaders are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.

Administration serves the teachers and teachers serve the students. And when the administration believes that the numbers are everything, the teachers will protect themselves from their own leaders and then the students will suffer.

The things that I think are so good about Generation Z is how open minded they are, how accepting they are. They really are driven, driven by inclusion and acceptance. I think that's a huge benefit to the future of society. I love that they're an activist generation. They're not just hashtagging their discontent. They're arranging rallies and they're actually showing up.

They're coming of age right now and they're coming of age in a time of stress in the world. They're seeing tension in their own countries, political divides that we have never seen before. And this is forming their worldview. I think some of the liabilities that their generation has to face and has to deal with is that we are seeing increasing rates of addiction to social media and suicide, depression, anxiety.

And we're letting young people grow up and just hoping that it works out. But why not teach them? Why not guide how to interact with other human beings? What's appropriate and what's inappropriate. We can take responsibility for teaching some of these skills.

I think one of the most difficult things about reform. Imagine a world that's different to the the one we live in now. We all have to take some responsibility that the future leaders are going to come from the schools that we have now. And if we better equip students, next school now.