Empowerment Hubs with Marc Prensky

Welcome to the future of Education. I'm Michael Horn. Looking forward to the conversation I'm about to have with my next guest, Mark Prensky, who I've known for probably 15 years at this point, maybe a little bit longer than that. He's been doing some really interesting work all the time about how to think differently fundamentally about education and what we're trying to achieve through learning for our young people and what are they trying to achieve, what are their real goals as they move forward and develop into citizens in our society. And he's always at the cutting edge, pushing and making people, helping people think differently about the opportunity in front of us and in front of the children themselves to do really incredible work. And so with that, I'll bring Mark up to the stage alongside me, so to speak. Mark, first, it's good to see you. It looks like Covid is treating you well.

I'm very happy here in California. It's amazing that I can run my whole life virtually from this chair.

It's incredible how things have progressed right in that way. I want to dive in with your latest, both book and more generally thinking and you've created community around this and so forth. That I think is very important set of concepts around, around the empowerment hub. So let's just start out with empowerment Hub. Sounds very empowering. What is it and why does it matter? Why is it important?

Thank you, Michael. It's good to be here. The empowerment hub is really part of a larger picture, which is there's a new way of growing up in the 21st century because our kids now have things that they can do, capabilities and beliefs that we never had in the past. So instead of sitting in a classroom and studying and gaining knowledge and gaining understanding, which really doesn't typically lead too much, certainly while the kids are young in terms of accomplishment, why not focus on accomplishment from the beginning? And so an empowerment hub is a place where, where a young person can go, it's an alternative. They can go and just do real world project after real world project, learning as they go, totally choosing on their own self direction and accomplishment with impact. And they can do this for years and years. They'll eventually have hundreds of these projects under their belt and that will be an incredible preparation for, for the rest of their life.

So through this they'll create. I mean, in many ways it sounds like it's a portfolio model of getting to work on meaty projects, building expertise through that and accomplishment. I want to pick on a couple parts of it just because, just to unpack this A little bit. First part of it, how young does this start for students? Are we talking kindergarten? Like, where does this begin?

We don't have time here to show you a lot of videos, but there are videos of three year olds doing this. There's a wonderful video of three year olds in Spain who were frustrated that they couldn't reach the garbage bins in the town. They designed new garbage bins, they met with the mayor, they got new garbage bins built, and then they all celebrated that they had accomplished. So I'm going to take slight issue with your terminology in terms of portfolio and these kind of things. That is education terminology. And I have resigned from the education space I am now in and trying to create the empowerment space. It's a different thing. Education is an artifact of the 20th century. And before it worked really well back then. It's what we needed. We didn't have access to information. We couldn't accomplish anything in the world. So when we were young, it made sense for us to get knowledge and skills. But it doesn't anymore because you get that stuff as you need it and you get it and you need it because you're following your own dreams. So there's.

I want to push you. Yeah, no, I love, I love this. And I want to push a little bit on this because there's a bunch of people who will listen and say, yeah, that makes sense. Except to do something, you need to know something to know the right question or curiosity to, you know, to, to be able to pick out a meaty project that'll give you the sense and opportunity to create and accomplish things. What's the role of adults in this? What's the role of helping them? Kids ask questions like, how does that all come together? And for those that maybe lack access to, you know, you know, certain resources, how do you think about that?

Great. It's not meaty projects we're after. It's real world projects with real world impact. And young people have done tens of thousands of these projects. The organization that sponsored them the most is probably designed for change out of India. But this is what happens in 4H and this is what happens sometimes in Scouts. It very rarely happens in, in schools and in education as we have conceived it. But if it were happening, and there are ways to make it happen both in schools and out of schools, the role of the young person is to follow their interests, is self direction. So every, my perspective is that every young people has interests at every point in their life. You may have to dig to find them and Then you ask them the question about what are you good at and what are the problems that you see in the world? Everybody sees problems. What are the problems that you want to solve or work on? And then they do that, they form teams. And the adult's role is to guide them. The adult's role is to suggest. The adult's role is to say this is not a good idea or this is not positive, or for the following reasons. But. And therefore every adult can be a teacher because every adult can advise on some kind of project. You don't need to have an education background in order to do that. And what we're finding is that that's really a great model in the, for example, First Robotics, where tons of engineers advise kids on their projects. Those are not real world impacting projects, but they are projects that kids do out of interest and it works really, really well. And every time this is done, every time this is tried, the young people love it. They really enjoy it because it's something that they've chosen. And at the end they can point to something and say, see that last year that was bad, or it didn't exist, or it was ugly. And now because of what I and my team did, it's so much better. Look at it. That's the new assessment, before and after.

Yeah, I love it. And it sounds like it would empower teachers or not teachers, but adults, right. To be these people in their lives as well. And putting up your book cover there because I want people to check it out. As we're talking about this conversation, it also seems to be Mark. It hits on what in. Through our research we've identified as the key motivator of children, which is that they want to feel like they are making an impact, progressing, experiencing success on a regular basis and accomplishment is perhaps the best way to allow them to do that. And because it's media, it's valued not just by them, frankly, but the community if it's really solving a problem. And it seems to tap into a lot of those sources of intrinsic motivation to help fuel them down this pathway, if I'm not mistaken.

I think so. I think that the only true motivation in the world, the only reason we do anything, is to achieve a goal that we have. And we go to school unless we're being pushed, unless we're being forced by law or by parents or by something else. But when we want to do something, whether it's we want to beat our boss in golf, whether we want to get into a good school, whether we want to Fix something in the world like Greta Thunberg. That is the great motivator. And what we should do knowing that is start when the people are very young and say, keep doing this, keep following your dreams. My new model is called the far better model. Find who you are, find the problems you care about. Not necessarily for all time, but at that moment, apply that to doing things that help your world and that make things better. And in so doing, guess what you're going to do? Realize your dreams, which is something that we really don't. We mouth those words, but we don't do much to help kids realize their dreams.

So let's get a little bit into brass tacks. Like how do students get to be part of this? How do they join, find, create empowerment hubs to be able to benefit from this?

Well, these are just forming in name now. They've existed in plenty of places for many years, but now we're trying to bring all the people who are doing this together into a just a new name for this alternative. And it's an alternative doesn't have to be separate at first. You can go to school and go to an empowerment hub on the weekends or after school. And there are empowerment hubs calling themselves that that are starting up on every continent. But even if you went to 4H, say and did project after project after project, you would effectively be getting an empowerment experience and be doing these projects. So the name that it's an empowerment hub is less important than what you do in these places that you accomplish with impact over and over and over again in directions that you want to go. And that's what leads to empowerment.

So when you describe it that way, I think of like New Vu Studio or some of these things that have popped up, you may or may not know some of these places, but that have created a lot of what you're describing it sounds like for kids often outside of the school day. To your point, I'm curious how you see that evolving. Where will you know what's the intersection of schools with empowerment hubs alongside replaced by. How do you, how do you see all that playing out as you fast forward? I mean, in some ways you're creating a brand or name to things that have existed to your point, and maybe in the process empowering many more of them to come into being.

We're creating an umbrella. It's not a brand because we're not going to own it. This is made up by a 22 year old. The name empowerment hub, but it works because it covers a specific thing. Empowerment is self direction and accomplishment with impact. And anybody who's doing those two things is effectively doing the work of an empowerment hub. Now there are a lot of them that are quote after school because it's a lot easier to do that stuff after school than within the rigid school environment. But there are a number of schools, and I can cite the SEK schools in Spain. That's a fancy private thing. And then there's the schools in India, like Riverside School. And then there's a group called Planet Pilots and that are trying to do this in schools. And we have a, there's a step by step method. First you have to learn to do the projects and what they are and that they're not pbl and they're not projects for learning, they're projects for accomplishing. And then you have to give kids the time to do that. And you have people like Esther Wojcicki who wants to give them 20% of their time to do that. That's probably step two. And then you start replacing the mess, math, English, science, social studies with more time on projects. And the end goal is you have an empowerment hub, kids who want to do projects. And not all kids do. A few kids are academic, but most kids want to do things that they're interested in that they see make a difference.

Mark, I want you to double click on something you just said because I think people listening maybe picked up the nuance there, but I think it'd be helpful to hear your talk track on it, which is you said explicitly it's not project based learning, it's not PBL as that's come to be known. What do you see as the big differences beyond the rhetoric, I suppose tactically, what are the big differences?

PBL is a great beginning in this direction, but it really, PBL is a, is a pedagogy for teaching the subject matter, for teaching the mess. And we know that because everybody spends the. We spend tons of time and money making concordances between what's in a project and what the standards are and checking them off what an empowerment hub project, an empowering project is. It has to have a measurable positive impact on the world. It's not about you learning or you gaining something. It's about having a measurable, positive impact on the world. Learning in the empowerment world is a byproduct. Learning is not a goal. The sad part about education for me is we send our kids off for however many years, 6, 10, 12, 15, to learn well, we don't need to do that anymore. We, because what we want to do in this world is accomplish and learning. You can't accomplish without learning things. But we have had it backwards. You don't need to learn in advance before you do stuff. All you need to do is watch and pay attention and get guidance and have somebody help helping you do that. And that goes whether you're a student or a doctor. There's all the time the doctors are learning new ways to do things and new operations. How are they learning this? They're watching YouTube, just like the kids they're attending virtual operations and real things. So this stuff happens in real time now. And that is hugely different than the way it was in the past.

So I think that's right. And I actually, since you went with a doctor analogy, I'm just curious to go down that a little bit, which is an expert, obviously, though, approaches a problem very different from a novice. And they do have foundational knowledge that they bring to the questions and what they sort out and don't and what they find useful and so forth. As they're framing that learning and the route to doing something, hopefully helpful for the individual that they're working with. How does that play into it at all? Because that doctor looking at that YouTube video to get or reading the quick abstract or whatever it might be, they bring a lot of background knowledge to that question that enables them to access that. How does that all play together?

Well, that's why people need mentors and that's why we need this. But we don't live as much as we used to in a world of experience. We live because it used to be a world of replacement. It used to be that you, when you said to a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? It was really, who do you want to replace when they die? That's what we really said because the roles didn't change. But now we don't have those same roles anymore. They're changing. The role of the doctor is totally changing. So much of it's going to be done by machines. And so the idea that you have to have all this background knowledge, I love Kevin Kelly's quote which says experience is overrated. And it used to be that having seen all these cases, a million cases, would. Would really be helpful. Now you can ask Watson, who's seen a lot, you know, trillions more than you will ever see. So it's a combination. There are things that human judgment is still important for, but that's not always what you get in school. And the myth, it's really a myth that all these years of kind of absorbing this stuff, sitting in the classes and the lectures bleary eyed really helps you succeed. It is just that it's a myth. And everybody who succeeded will tell you it's not the stuff they learned in school that helps.

Well, gosh, I don't want to get into the debate here, but I'm curious just because we know that experts though have automated 75% of what they known and they've forgotten it. So they don't even know what they got from school that might be helping them on that road. So I'm just, I guess I'm. What I'm curious about more is like, what are the trade offs in this? Right? Like what are the. Where would maybe not school as it's currently done because you know, I'm not a big fan of that, but where would some of the goals perhaps of schooling to build that still be useful? Where or where, where won't it be right? What are the trade offs in moving to something that's all about accomplishment and learning on demand as the problem arises?

Yeah, you know, it, it's really about growing up differently. And in the past we had three stages of growing up. We had parenting and going to school and finding a job. And the parenting phase in the past was a phase that was characterized almost everywhere, almost I. Ownership, ownership of your kids. You own them, you could tell them what to do, you could do that. That's switching now more to curation where you help your kid find out who they are and what they care about. School was a version of control. School said, we think these things are important. You should know these things. Here is the curriculum. You don't have a choice about that. That is very much changing to empowerment and self direction now. And that. So that's what's going. Whether it happens in schools or it happens somewhere else. That's the way the world is going. And we need to figure out how to do this in a way that involves every kid. And the reason it's so important is that education as we know it, and I'm not talking about whatever fancy ideas you may have in your head, but education as the world has conceived it is not for everybody. It's for the academics. And there are plenty of people who are, who have an academic bent and they may like school and that works out and great for them, but it's not universal because not everybody succeeds at that. Not everybody likes that. What is universal for every person is setting a personal goal and trying to reach it. That is Universal. Everybody does that and everybody feels good when they have done that. So really we need a different goal for those years, which now we call the school years. There's a graphic which I really like, which is that in the 20th century and before in the school we put stuff into kids heads, which is ironic because, you know, the word education comes from educare, which means to bring things out. But it isn't that, it's putting things in that we decide whether that we've done. Yeah, the ideas and all this. We need to bring things out. Our young people start out as incredibly creative beings and we squash so much of that as we try to put things in. That's why I have resigned from education and I've gone to empowerment. And I think that it's. It's not a specific brand, it's a philosophy, a way to look at young people in the 21st century and what they need. And if you do that, then the third piece of growing up, which is finding work that is satisfying, happens much more easily. Right now it's totally floundering. You have no idea. The stuff you learn in school is very unrelated to the work world. We all know that the success in school doesn't predict your success in the world of work. But if you have figured out who you are and where you add value and you've applied this to project after project after project, by the time you're ready for a job, you will know what you have to offer. Because what we call the future of work for me is, is about adding unique value. It's about what you can do uniquely, that you can help somebody by providing and that they're willing to pay you for, obviously. So it's those three phases. It's parenting, it's going to school and it's finding a job that really need to change in the 21st century.

So Mark, I want to go to some questions that are coming in from the audience and leave. Start with the first one where you just left off essentially around the job and labor market piece. And it's from Andy Miller who says, how do we translate Apply the empowerment hub model in adult learning programs where students are looking for flexibility, yet would benefit from this learning approach that you have described. What's your take there?

Well, suppose for example, all these empowerment hubs were actually inside companies and the companies were sponsoring them. And you could go in and you could say, oh, that looks very interesting. I'll go there and I'll do projects that interest me and that are of use to that company. And Then they will see whether you happen to be a good fit for that. And if that doesn't work, you can do other things. So there's a huge direct connection between people figuring out how they add value uniquely and the needs of businesses and society.

So, and I just want to hit on a couple of things there that you said and then I'll ask the next question. But I think there's some really important themes coming out the where do I add value? How do I accomplish to add that value, that searching in me? Who am I to find these places right where I can contribute and make impact? And the notion of goal setting and then learning in pursuit of the goal, the accomplishment, as opposed to just for its own sake. Those all, I think, land pretty significantly, frankly, in general. But certainly at this current moment, Scott Baron off of that asks, are prescribed curriculum models really dead or like directed instruction? Does it fit somewhere within. And I added the somewhere. Does it fit within a larger ecosystem?

It fits for some people. And this is the difference between the past and now. It used to be that we had to group people into these groups by date of manufacturing, you know, by age, by all these different things. Now, now we can have 2 billion individual curricula. It is different for every single person. If you decide you want to do a very specific thing, then yeah, we have ways of preparing you for that with very specific curriculum. If what you want to do is create new things that haven't happened before, then that prescribed curriculum is not going to help you very much. And I just to follow on, I think that there are really very few things that everybody needs. Very few. We need to know a little bit about society and how we run our governments and things like that. But very, very few things, even reading and writing, which were so important for hundreds of years, are being supplanted by listening as we get to voice to text and text to voice and everything available you can hear through your ears. And even the math is done. All the calculations are done by machines. You still have to know about setting them up. But still it is really, really a new world. And that is what is so important to understand. Because every adult today was born in the 20th century. And so every adult today has beliefs that were formed in the period of the 20th century. And what I see more than anything else is this huge beliefs gap between the people from the 20th century, not all of them, obviously, but and the young people. And if you. It doesn't matter what you look at, whether you look at education or property or privacy or sexuality or Anything like that. You're seeing these huge gaps and it's very, very challenging for the older people like me or maybe you or other people listening to look at those beliefs that they have and see that many of them don't apply anymore, even though they were so important in the 20th century.

Mark, I just want to make sure that I've heard what you said, right, that there, it sounds like you would say that there are certain things that are probably still common to be taught around civics, how the government functions. Perhaps there's a little bit of history there that comes out of that. If I, if I'm understanding you correctly, but not too much, maybe there's some computational steps to teach, but not calculation steps to teach in mathematics, if I'm understanding you correctly. But it's much thinner than what we've historically done. I think that the follow on question, if that's right, and I'll give you a chance to say if it is or isn't, but if we've captured that right, the follow on question I think is how do you think about people who say, well, for example, you know, you don't teach Johnny to read. You foreclosed certain options that maybe Johnny would have a really great aptitude for if only he was exposed to X and, and reading may be the wrong example there, but just as the hypothetical,

yeah, that's really important. What you're asking is really important. A lot of people talk about exposure, thinking that somehow school exposes them to a lot of things they need. It's a very narrow thing. It's a very narrow set of things that, that you get quote, exposed to in school. I think exposure is overrated. What's more important is that somebody go to a place, call it a school, call it whatever you want, and somebody, an adult, turns to that young person and says, tell me your dreams. Who are you? My job is to help you realize your dreams. That's what we need to do now. Along the way, you're going to have to live in society. You're going to have to know a few things because you won't be able to get along with other people if you don't know that the golden rule applies to pretty much everybody and don't murder your fellow beings. Those are, there are very few of those fundamental rules. The rest of it is who are you? Follow who you are. Figure it out. But not just follow it and not just figure it out, apply it, apply it. Find your unique individual value adding capability and then spend your life doing that. You'll be happy, the world will be happy. We'll all be much happier than we are now. Because as far as I can tell, very few kids like school at all. There are probably some, but when I interviewed kids, the only things they told me they liked consistently were their friends and sports.

I hear the same thing. So, last question as we wrap up here, which is I think what you've just asked, who are you? As a unique individual is the right question to be asking. I'm curious how you think about that again in the development context that you laid out of these three periods where if you're a child who maybe doesn't have access to role models in a deep way, where they see that a certain pathway could be open to them, where they don't even know about a certain set of problems that maybe would speak to them. And knowing that what you're passionate about isn't just what you know, but it's or it's not something that's necessarily natural. It's what you develop and work at often. How do you, how do you create that, you know, school doesn't do it. We can agree on that. How do you create those opportunities for deliberate exposure to make sure you're interacting with the right mentors along that pathway as you're solving problems so that you can make sure, you know, you ask a five year old, who are you? That's a meaningless question at that age to. At the level that someone could imagine it. It's a very meaningful question within a certain context. So I'm curious how you bridge those.

That's a great thing to think about because we've done a terrible job on all of those three levels at parenting, at schooling, and at finding meaningful work. And we need to get better. We need to invent new things. We're spending a lot of time inventing new ways to get to space and the moon. We need to also be inventing new ways to. For example, their parents need to understand that their job is to curate their kids and not to control their kids. Mainly what they do is pass down their own beliefs. But if they want to curate their kids, we don't really have good tools. We should have tools that a kindergartner, that a young person can take, that fit their age, that help them understand their uniqueness. We should be asking them what are the problems that they see in the world, because every kid, even if you're two, sees a problem that you care about because not everybody cares about the same problem. And so we need to get a lot better at that, and we're very, very much at the beginning, then we need to get a lot better at those middle applying years at saying it's not just about taking in information, because all that information is now there. You have to apply that information to things and you have to learn to do it as you change, as the world changes rapidly, as you grow up and change rapidly, and finally you've got to connect, which almost nobody in the world is, with really meaningful work. Most people feel like work sucks and, and the rightly so. And the number of people who have found a job where they say, oh God, you know, you should pay me, you know, I should pay you to do this job is very, is really sadly very small. And it could be everybody. It could be everybody if they were, if they were doing those things, if they were finding who they are uniquely, if they were getting experience applying that to making their world a better place, and if they were able to share that experience and their unique value with the world much more easily than today. So it's really much bigger than just school or education or all this. It really has to do with who young people are in a new world that we are entering that is just very different and I think very exciting. So I'm a big optimist. I think that the young people are going to understand this world. You know, a lot of people talk about the UN and SDGs, these 17 things as, as, as the goals for kids. And we've got to teach them about these goals. No, you know what those are? Those are our generation's epic fails. We failed to make the planet, you know, the right temperature. We failed to have clean water. We failed to do all these things for everybody. And epic fails is something that young people relate to and then they try to do better. So that's really what we need to do and we need to utilize the tools. The last piece is that we're moving into a time when we are all becoming symbiotic with technology. I have no, no time for the people who take away kids technology because it's like cutting off their arm. The technology is a new symbiotic body part. We're not perfect at using it yet, but you don't cut off your kid's hand when he punches somebody. You help them understand how to do that better. And so the symbiosis and understanding how to be symbiotic is something that didn't exist in the 20th century. No adult really knows how to do it. And the kids are just figuring it out. And learning. And that is perhaps the most important, important thing that we can help kids do in the 21st century is become symbiotic with all the wonderful new technologies we have.

And if we help every individual do something that they love, then they'll never work a day in their life. So I think it's a good place to end this. The book is empowered. The idea is the empowerment hubs you've heard, the diversity and the sense of problem seeking that it can inspire in individuals to learn on the road to accomplishment. Mark, thanks for lifting us up and joining me on the future of education. We'll be back next time.

Thanks for all your work. Michael.