TEDxUChicago 2011 - Michael Strong - The Creation of Conscious Culture through Ed. Innovation

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. The organizers have been fantastic. This is very much a U of Chicago talk, so I'm especially pleased to be at the University of Chicago for this. I'm gonna start by saying some things that are perhaps banal, and then other things that seem completely implausible. And one of my tasks in this talk is going to try to get in at least some of your minds a continuum between banal, ordinary, and what's the big deal, to oh my God, I had no idea that that's a possibility. So, we're gonna try to, you know, open up possibility in a big way. I love Thomas Frey's talk to introduce this. Our moderator talked about how we love technology and innovation. I love technology innovation. I love Google. I love Apple. I love all the cool gadgets we have. But I'm fundamentally a humanist. For me, the most important innovation that's barely begun so far is innovation around the human spirit, innovation around culture. I mean, it's great to have cool gadgets, it's going to be great to have more cool gadgets, more cool medicines, more cool all the stuff that technology gives us, but ultimately, I want to create a world in which we have more cool humanity, where people are just amazing. I mean, I happen to love situations in which someone dazzles me. I've met people who are better at making other people laugh than I'll ever be, and I love those people. I've met people who are better at making other people more comfortable than I can make in a social situation. I love those people. I've met people who are spectacular mothers, amazing fathers, absolutely incredible brothers and sisters. I've met people who have an intuitive sense that is just absolutely beyond my kin. Quick anecdote about that: my first wife at one point, um, picked up the phone and said, as she handed the phone to me, "Uh, this is a renegade member of a blue-blood family." She had never heard this person's voice before. It was somebody I had never met before. It turns out, in fact, that's exactly who he was. A few months later, she picked up the phone again, somebody I'd never met, and she said, "Um, this person is a lesbian with a pickup truck and a dog in the back." Never met this person, a second, third cousin. Voilà! Here comes this second or third cousin I'd never met. She was a lesbian with a pickup truck and a dog in the back. Absolutely stunning. I think that people are amazing. And sadly, education has become sort of sad and banal. I spent 15 years in K-12 education creating new programs in schools. I'd go to a party and say, you know, I'm in education. And people would say, oh, how good. And their eyes would glaze over. And they'd look for somebody who was into computers or design or advertising or something cool. You know, the nice educators, the boring people over there. There's that sense. And that's tragic. Once upon a time, we had the sense of potential in education. You know, I think, again, in in terms of human capacity, the Buddhist monks who serenely burned themselves to death. I mean, it's horrifying, but in terms of human capacity, imagine being so absolutely serene that you can immolate yourself. Horrible but powerful in another way. There are South Sea Islanders who apparently could navigate by putting their hand to the water and they would feel the currents. I can't do that. Native American hunters who could track animal tracks in the forest just by glancing at twigs and things. I can't do that. I have this sense of human potential that's incredible, and yet it's almost completely undeveloped. And this is a tragedy for me. So before going into my specific experiences in education as an educator, I'm going to talk a little bit about the innovation dynamic. I do think that we're like fish in the water. We're swimming in this modern world. We have no idea on a day-to-day basis how grateful we ought to be. But, you know, Go to Rwanda. Rwanda is mostly subsistence farmers, people growing corn and potatoes and so forth, working hard all day in the fields. In 1800, most of humanity was more or less a subsistence farmer. For me, when I look around at everything we've got, everything, I feel like we should be amazed and grateful for the miracle constantly. The fact that so many people, and of course we want to have more, and more people are getting more of a of this life, but the fact that we have all of this is just stunning. The normal narrative about innovation and technology is that there were smart inventors that created cool devices, and those cool devices are what give us this lifestyle. So, for instance, Thomas Edison, hero, invented the light bulb. That kind of narrative, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but when in fact a key element of this was not just the extraordinary inventors, but thousands and thousands of individuals tweaking and changing and modifying and experimenting. Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell are just tiny, tiny percentages of what happened. Much of the technology revolution since the 1970s was created by high school and college dropouts. You think about it, there are obviously Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Michael Dell are all college dropouts. But when I was graduate— I graduated from high school in '79, a lot of my classmates were either dropped out of high school, dropped out of college, got into the technology field, and did amazing things. And all the little tweaks they did to all the little systems they were creating cumulatively gave us what we have today. And I think we need to be grateful for systems that allow thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of people to constantly tweak and change and improve. In the late 1980s, I was at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, and a computer scientist with whom I was working here, Stuart Kurtz, said, "You know, any decent university in the US has more computing power than the entire Soviet Union." This was well before the Soviet Union fell. It's just stunning. The Soviet Union had some of the best mathematicians on Earth, and plenty of sand for silicon, but somehow they were not able to create computing power. Meanwhile, by the late '80s, everybody, almost everybody in the educated world had a computer already, and it was just multiplying rapidly. That was all these uneducated high school and college dropouts. What people don't realize is something similar happened in the first industrial revolution. Working-class boys in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century created bridges and machine tools and early locomotives and all sorts of factory devices. They were tinkers. This was not— the first industrial revolution was not a scientific revolution. There were a few tiny bits of science that plugged into it, but most of it were just a lot of working-class boys creating stuff. And some of that stuff became, you know, developed into successful machines that became part of successful factories and devices. And voilà, pretty soon we have iron bridges and huge machines doing all sorts of amazing things, and railroads, and everything changed because of all these hundreds of thousands of people just tweaking stuff all the time. So, I have great respect for that system of innovation that's created this miracle from basically in 1800, we're all in the fields, if we're not dead, most of us be dead, those of us who are not dead are working long hours, you know, doing corn or potatoes or whatever. Now, we have this life and it's just an amazing system. So, I wanted to give you that innovation dynamic as kind of a conceptual apparatus. Remember that the miracle has happened in technology, it has not happened in human development. Most people people think human development or education is boring and sad and gosh, we've got to help those kids over there and aw shucks, I wish it could be better. It's not exciting, it's not cool, it's not engaging. So, I'm now going to switch to my personal experience and kind of tell you how I got where I am and where I would like to see things go. I went to St. John's College, great books college, a kind of cousin, a lineage cousin to the Hutchins-Adler University of Chicago. I loved intellectual dialogue. I had gotten into St. John's before, while I was still in high school. I had good test scores, so my college counselor sent me to Harvard. I was bored at Harvard. I hate having famous people talk at me. I love thinking and talking with other human beings. St. John's, 4 years, all you do is think and talk about people. It's known as the Great Books Program. Forget the great books. It's really about thinking and talking. They would say, you know, physicists that stay up till 3 in the morning talking about string theory, that's life. That's what learning is about. You think and talk. So I did that for 4 years, loved it, came to graduate school at the University of Chicago, the Committee on Social Thought. It's a different story I won't get into, but I started consulting for Mortimer Adler's Paideia Project in Chicago inner city public schools. Fortunately, my first Socratic seminar in an inner city school in Chicago was a success. There's a story called The Monkey's Paw. I went into a 5th grade classroom and just started leading a discussion with with no training other than the fact I went to St. John's. The kids loved it. They were excited. They were alive. They dug into the story. They were analyzing everything. It was so much fun. I often say leading Socratic dialogue with young people is my second favorite activity, and that's above all else, except for that other one. And that led to training teachers in Chicago in Socratic seminars. But it was kind of a hit or miss. After that one first victory, there were a lot of situations in which I'd go in and I'd think, oh, I have a great question, I have a great text, I'm going to ask this, and it was just flat, boring, dull, nobody cared, it was a disaster. So it was kind of a sad roller coaster. Sometimes I'd have great conversations, sometimes rotten ones. Then I went to Alaska, I was recruited by the Alaska Paideia Project, where they developed, I would say, a new technology for leading Socratic discussions. And part of their technology was working every day closely analyzing difficult texts. So in Chicago, we'd done once a week, where once a week we'd have a Socratic seminar, hit or miss, whatever. In Alaska, really close detailed analysis, and we'd be using things like Kant and Buber with 7th grade inner city kids in Anchorage, and we'd do a paragraph at a time. Sometimes it would take us a week to get through a short essay, or a month, or 6 weeks. I did Dostoevsky's, uh, Underground Man, and it took 6 weeks just to cover that one story, because I was doing it starting out paragraph by paragraph, very slow, very laborious. But often people think, oh, this intellectual dialogue stuff, that's great for smart kids, the advanced kids, but these other kids need basic stuff. Well, it turned out that one of the things we were doing by closely analyzing text was teaching kids to read difficult material. If you look at the SAT verbal section, you have very difficult section of prose, and you're asked, very sophisticated, nuanced questions about the meaning of that prose. That's exactly what we were doing by closely analyzing this text. Um, so we ended up having great SAT verbal gains. Um, it was great preparation for Advanced Placement courses. It was really amazing intellectual development. But if you notice, um, instead of covering curriculum, we were really going paragraph by paragraph, ideally in at least 2 hours a day, typically social studies and English. For a year, and it often took a semester or a year before the students got any good at it. And initially, the students were dreadful. It was a disaster. But in Alaska, we developed these tools to kind of work with the group dynamic and get kids trained so that person A speaks, person B listens and thinks about it, and then responds. Sounds simple. You guys are all part of the intellectual life. It's something you do all the time. Again, fish in water. You don't even notice it. Most of you were probably raised in homes where your parents were modeling this behavior. If you go into a situation where kids have never had that experience, it's like a foreign language. You may as well be speaking in Polish as far as they're concerned. What is going on in here? They're shocked. Their minds are totally confused by this strange behavior. They're not used to ever having somebody ask their opinion. When somebody asks their opinion, often it leads to argument and so forth. But this notion of careful, thoughtful evaluation and comparing perspectives Again, it's a very sophisticated cultural process that we take for granted, but should not be taken for granted. So, after a couple of years in Alaska, we were on soft money, we were kicked out. Some parents started— asked me to start a school, and I started creating schools. The great thing about that was when you create a school, you can hire every teacher so that they are all on board with this sort of a program. It was painful in a regular school that I'd get them to think and ask questions in period 3, and period 4 would tell them to shut up and not ask any questions. That literally is, you know, that much. As a consequence, I was much more successful in these small private and then a charter school where I was able to control things, but it was hard to train teachers. It took me often a year to train teachers. I'm sorry to say, teacher education, somebody with an education degree was perfectly worthless to me. This is very sophisticated art of getting kids to cooperate in a way, and I needed to train them. Finally, in New Mexico, I was able to have two teachers that I trained 10 years earlier in Alaska moved from Alaska to New Mexico to join me. Another teacher who'd worked with some of my colleagues in Alaska also joined me. And so in a small school in New Mexico, 3 of my faculty were people that had a full year of Socratic training by me and my colleagues. And that school was, uh, in a place in northern New Mexico that had never taken AP courses, Advanced Placement courses. In our second year, I introduced an AP program. On J. Matthew's Challenge Index, we ranked 143rd best high school in the nation. The third year, we were ranked the 36th best high school in the nation. And up until recently, we've been near the top in a place that never had performed like that before. But I was kicked out after the second year because I didn't have a teacher's license. I'd never been administrator— licensed as an administrator or teacher. And gradually, because we're doing something that's not normal, things have eroded. What happens is there's a standard operating system around the world where education is portrayed as 2nd grade science, 7th grade English. There are textbooks with curriculum and tests at the end of the year, and teachers are trained to transmit curriculum in a standard operating system. I compare it to an operating system with much larger market share than Microsoft, but legislatively financed and coercively enforced, so that around the world— I go to Rwanda, I go to Senegal, I go to Chile, I go to Costa Rica, and there's a default operating system with the expectation that this is what school looks like. But what if school shouldn't look like a course? What if it's not 7th grade science? What if it's deep immersion in the process of thinking and talking about ideas? Or to take another example, I was extremely wound up and anxious and full of anxiety and insomnia when I was younger. I started doing tai chi and meditation and Gradually, I, I managed to get to the point where I became much less, much calmer, much less wound up. But that required deep immersion in practices, hours a day for years at a time, not the sort of thing that you can go and take from a 5-minute workshop. Take another example, Montessori. There was recently a Wall Street Journal article about the Montessori mafia, pointing out that the Google boys and Jeff Bezos and a lot of other successful entrepreneurs had a Montessori education. Montessori education encourages deep focus for hours a day. There's some Montessori schools that have tried to become charter schools, but the dominant operating system gradually erodes that deep focus because you've got to make sure the kids get, you know, 3rd grade social studies and 4th grade science and all that. This coercive system that requires that we fit in certain boxes I regard as profoundly unnatural to the human spirit. And for me, if we want to develop extraordinary human capabilities, we need to allow cool and innovative brands in human development to develop. My Socratic practice was not exactly the same as people other people from St. John's, it's not exactly the same as other people from Alaska. Just like in music, there are all sorts of genres, you know, there are different skateboarders with different skateboarding styles. In every category of human development, people start doing new and different things all sorts of ways— weirdo ways, wild ways, whatever— some of them great, some of them rotten. But I need to be able to train people in the way that I'm doing it, and I need to be able to have the people that like the way I'm doing it come and work with me. And then I need to have Montessori schools that do their thing in their own way. AMS and AMI are two Montessori brands that have a certain presence, but they don't have adequate control of what they're doing. They're also tiny, underfunded. Um, I calculated once the average Montessori teacher in the private sector sacrifices about $1 million in lifetime income to teach in a Montessori school. I love Montessori schools, and I would say, having been in a lot of them, many of them are dysfunctional. They're dysfunctional because they're poor, exhausted, underemployed people. They don't get the best talent in many cases. And we need to find ways to get a lot more cash and resources going into innovative, cool lifestyle programs. So, the way I see this happening is if, if we could apply an innovation dynamic like what happened in technology, if we could have people who were extraordinary at getting people to laugh, people who were extraordinary at mothering, people that were extraordinary at kindness, people that were insightful beyond belief, if we could create institutions where those people could transmit their skills and their practices to others, and we could have brand-name institutions where Jane's Spectacular Kindness School could develop that reputation. And you knew when you hired somebody from that school that, wow, they were just knock-your-socks-off amazing. Gradually, we could create a Silicon Valley of education, as it were. We could create a human development field where we could have extraordinary people who would dazzle us. Our children would be better and more capable, more delightful human beings than we are. And then we would not only be dazzled by technology and innovation in the sense of our iPhones and Google and so forth, but we would be dazzled by human capacity. And we would look forward to people from all cultures finding suitable human development strategies for them, who would help them become extraordinary people who could serve others in the modern world and have wonderful, fabulous lives doing so. Thank you.