Why education fails students of the future | Dr. Samuel H. Houston Jr, Ed.D | TEDxWIS Youth

As I was saying, I, I became a little bit confused about the purpose of public education my first day in school. I was born in 1944. My father was in World War II, and they tell me that I was 2 when he returned. I, of course, remember every minute of it. But then it was finally time to start school. You'll hear a little bit more about this in a moment, but my first time in a cap and gown was in 1949. I was the mascot for the graduating class of 1949 in Kings Mountain, North Carolina. So at age 5 in 1949, my parents had had enough of me, so they put me in school. My mom took me the first day before school actually opened and introduced me to the teacher, Mrs. Covington. So I go back the second day, and one of the most brutal things we do to children, particularly in their early days, is ask them to stand and offer an essay about their family. You know how many times First day of school, "Sammy, tell us about your family." "Well," I said, "my father works in the drugstore downtown and my mother has red hair." And she said, "Your mother does not have red hair." And I evidently became belligerent, debated with her that my mother has red hair. She took me in this cloakroom thing beside the classroom and hit me with a ping-pong paddle. Now, that's the first morning, first day, and somebody's trying to tell me that school is a good thing. I was not convinced. The night before, my mother dyed her hair, and it came out much redder than it should have. And all I could hear that day was the debate between my mother and my father about her red hair. I did not lie. I told the truth and I was beaten for it. So that started my career. I've been very fortunate. I wasn't very interested in school, but I found my way through. And then, you know, at age 15, I fell in love. And my wife said she was going to go to college. I thought, oh goodness, maybe I better go to college. And I was told, "You haven't done the things you need to do. You may not find success in college." Well, I graduated in 3 years. I got my master's degree the 4th year. I got an educational specialist degree after that and then my doctorate. And each time I sent the notification of that to those teachers who weren't sure I would make it. My point being is that, that it's important to remember, those of you who may be educators or parents, is that you can't give up on kids because we don't know what's going to come next. We have no idea of where they're going to be, or here's the challenge, what we're teaching them has to do with where they're going to be. Because in a minute I'm going to tell you that content doesn't matter, and then out of the other side of my mouth I'm going to say content is very important. But what content? Let's start this way. How many of you can calculate the volume of a cone? Raise your hand. Okay, there's one or two, I think. You must either be mathematicians or very strange people. Because who cares? Who cares about that? And in North Carolina, you have to be able to do that to pass the 8th grade math test. I could take you through any number of content issues that in your age and that of mine— and you maybe figured that out, I'll be 80 in September— I've seen a whole lot of things change. Some content has remained constant, but most of it has not. The content that we need to know, particularly in the maths, in science, in technology, in engineering, everything is changing. It's sometimes said, "No shift happens." Well, there's a constant shift in information and the use of information. And if you think it's over, you're wrong. You're wrong. Let me give you a little, little bit of a rundown of how technology has impacted education over time. One of the major technological events that disturbed teachers was somebody decided to put an eraser on the end of a pencil. That was a technological breakthrough. Instead of you having the rubber to use to erase, someone put it on the pencil. You know what the teachers said? Oh God, they're going to cheat now. They can change their answers. They can rewrite what they wrote. It was frightening. We had just barely moved from using chalk tablets to the pencil. Then a big technological breakthrough: the overhead projector. Any of you remember an overhead projector? God, as a teacher, we loved it because we could see those brats while we were teaching instead of having our back to them working on the chalkboard. By the way, the chalkboard was an innovation too. It was black at one time, wasn't it? Then we went to a green board. People today, in my opinion, don't have any idea about what technology is going to do to us. We're not there yet. See that thing? That's an adult tool. If kids were allowed to use adult tools like we use them in school, they would all make A's. They would make the high scores on SAT. But we say no, you can't use the tools you're going to use the day you graduate. You're not going to be allowed to use those. I don't know where it's going, but I know that our great concerns about artificial intelligence, a couple years from now we'll look back and say, my goodness, how immature was that? It's not— we're not there yet. Now, artificial intelligence, I say it has the 3 Ps. It has great potential, it has great power, and it has some problems. But we'll work through all of those, and then we'll get to the point that maybe we allow people in school to act like they're going to act after they get out of school, rather than making it some kind of artificial lack of relationship between what I'm learning now and what I need to know. Did you ever ask when you were in school, why do I need to know this? What were you told? It's gonna be on the test. Why do I need to know it? Because it's gonna be on the test. Why are you going to put it on the test when you've already told me I need to know it and I've demonstrated that I do know it? We confuse education to a great extent out of the past. We do what was done to us. I think that's why you— why people go to school. You know, teachers go to school, they go to college, and then go back to school. Because they want to do to them what was done to them. It's just not even totally logical. And by the way, I've, uh, we live 300 miles south of here. The pollen left there about a month ago. Then I drive up here And everything's blooming, and it's driving my head crazy. But anyway, we, uh, we've got to start to think differently about what an education is all about. Now, I have just tried to say content doesn't matter. Content does matter. Can I say that again? Content does matter. I repeat what I said also, but what content matters? And beyond that point, what are the skills and characteristics and talents that people need to have to use content like it's used in the real world? As I started to say, as a high school principal, we graduated kids. I had about 400 seniors. And give them all a diploma when they would walk across the stage. And I fully well knew they weren't ready for tomorrow. They were not ready to go on the street and act as an adult. But they had completed all of the coursework. So we let them go. Some of them were accepted to college, and we knew they were not ready for college. But the universities took them anyway. Then the universities complain about the need to give them remedial education. If they had asked my faculty, should you accept Johnny or Sammy, we would have probably said no, they're not ready. Well, we didn't do that. Point being is content's important, but what content? And how we measure it is important. Now, I'm going to jump to the end of this discussion and talk about just 3 things. How many of you remember the movie City Slickers? Okay. 3 guys approaching what they thought was midlife crisis were looking for what I do, how do I deal with this? So they signed on to a cattle drive, and Jack Palance was leading that drive. And they were constantly saying, "What's the secret?" And he would say, "It's just one thing. Just one thing." I don't remember if they ever found out what that one thing was. I don't remember the rest of the movie, but I was always kind of confused about the fact that he could ride a horse in the wind and the ashes never fell off of his cigarette. But it was a great movie. Billy Crystal was great in it and the other two gentlemen, whoever they were. I've come to the conclusion that education today is about just about three things. Content's important, but we need to make sure that we develop independent thinkers, not dependent. Now, to put that in perspective the way I see it, that means that we can measure independent versus dependent thinkers and learners beginning as early as kindergarten. And we sometimes wait thinking this capstone, this end of career event at the 12th grade is what we should be measuring. We need to measure the same things in kindergarten that we think are important in the 12th grade. We need to help kids develop those skills from the earliest stage. Now, how we would measure those skills would be different. We might measure an independent kindergarten thinker versus a dependent kindergarten thinker as a troublemaker, because they would have maybe some different ideas and different views and act out in a different way. But we can, we can tell through defining the characteristics of being an independent learner and thinker versus dependent. The dependent says, "Teacher, what do you want?" And the teacher's saying, "Well, you figure it out." But many times, you know what the teacher does? Tells them what they want, and they go produce it. And those that produce it best are the valedictorians and the top of the class, and don't make it in the real world, don't carry those skills that will help them be successful in an unknown, uncontrolled, uncomfortable condition. That's how we teach creativity, by the way. If I could do a survey of you, I'd say to you, "Are you a creative person?" Some would say, "I don't have a creative bone in my body." Others would say, "Yes, I'm creative." Then someone would say, "But you're born either creative or not." That is not true. That is absolutely not true. I can teach you to be creative by placing you in situations, as I say, unknown and uncomfortable. They don't have to hurt, but unknown and uncomfortable, and saying to you, "Find your way out." So we can look at things like dependent and independent thinkers, and measure it. Kindergarten, 12th grade, and then in the real world. You know, be thoughtful, not thoughtless. As I mentioned, on many of the examinations that we use, you can be totally thoughtless and do fine if you can regurgitate a response. You don't really have to be thoughtful. You can be thoughtless. Many times the kids that are most thoughtful get an answer, but it may not be the answer that satisfies the rubric. So we, we can tell when kids are being thoughtful versus thoughtless. Thoughtful kids can problem-solve. They can understand chaos. They can read an ad and and determine as to whether or not there's validity in that. They can deal with the unknown. Critical, but also measurable. I can tell you if a kid is thoughtful or thoughtless by the way they react to contrived situations. We can put them in conditions that require them to do something other than give me an answer. To the volume of a cone. Why would anybody care about the volume of a cone? If you're selling ice cream, you might. If you're selling snowballs, you might. There are a lot of reasons you might need to know the volume of a cone, particularly in all kinds of engineering aspects. Rocketry. But generally, we don't need to know those things, but we can put kids in a condition where they have to be thoughtful, not thoughtless. It's been said that the problem with kids is— today is that when they don't know what to do, they don't know what to do. Let me say that again. The problem with kids today is that when they don't know what to do, they don't know what to do. If it's not evident and clear to them, they're confused. And I told you I wanted to confuse you. I hope I have some. So we need to make sure that we help kids learn what to do when they're not sure what to do. That is a skillful teaching practice, but it can be taught. You can be taught to be a problem solver. Rather than one that doesn't know how to solve a problem by practicing the skills. Back to my content issue. You can take a test, be pretty thoughtless. You can't figure out what to do when you're not sure what to do by just having test-level information in your repertoire. You have to have a whole different set of skills, skills that we can teach. Now, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. But I want to give you one more. As President and CEO of the North Carolina Science, Math and Technology Center, which my wife and I counted as my 15th job, I've retired 3 times, I think this will be the last one, but I'm not sure. It's— I mean, it's just a wonderful opportunity, but I've had some confrontations. I created the center for the Burroughs-Wellcome Pharmaceutical Company back in 2003, signed a contract, said I'd do it for 3 to 5 years. Well, 20 years later, still there, but I'm still having fun. It became evident to me that this STEM debate was going the wrong direction, totally wrong, when I saw people putting other letters in the acronym, like STEAM, an A for the arts. Well, in North Carolina, that could be agriculture, it could be architecture, it could be aerospace. Why didn't we put an H in there for the humanities? It's ridiculous what people are trying to do to a concept. I was sitting at my desk one day and I was worried about the debate. The people in the arts community were seeming like they were being left out. Not true. People in the engineering community said, what's wrong with these people that don't understand that science, technology, and math is found in engineering? True. And it just hit me, that STEM acronym stands for Strategies That Engage Minds, and I own the trademark on it. You may use it, but please make sure you trademark it. That's the new world, how we teach kids to use information like they're going to need to use it in their adult world, in their adult profession, and in their life. Again, that's my story and I'm sticking to it, and thank you.