Excerpts from "Free Agent Nation" by Daniel H. Pink

15

School’s Out: Free Agency and the Future of Education

Here’s a riddle of the New Economy:

Whenever students around the world take those tests that measure which country’s children know the most, American kids invariably score near the bottom. Whether the subject is math or science or reading, when the international rankings come out, European and Asian nations finish first while the U.S. pulls up the rear. This, we all know, isn’t good.

Yet by almost every measure, the American economy outperforms those very same, far brainier, nations of Asia and Europe. We create greater wealth, deliver more and better goods and services, and positively kick butt on innovation. This, we all know, is good.

Now the riddle: If we’re so dumb, how come we’re so rich? How can we fare so poorly on international measures of education yet perform so well in an economy that depends on brainpower?

The answer is complex, but within it are clues about the future of education—and how free agency may rock the schoolhouse as profoundly as it has upended the organization.

THE HOMOGENIZING HOPPER

Whenever I walk into a public school, I stagger a bit at the entrance. The moment I step across the threshold, I’m nearly toppled by a wave of nostalgia. Most schools I’ve visited in the twenty-first century look and feel exactly like the central Ohio public schools I attended in the 1970s. The classrooms are the same size. The desks stand in those same rows. Bulletin boards preview the next national holiday. The hallways even smell the same. Sure, some classrooms might have a computer or two. But in most respects, the schools American children attend today seem indistinguishable from the ones their parents and grandparents attended generations earlier.

At first such déjà vu warmed my soul. But then I thought about it. How many other places look and feel exactly as they did twenty, thirty, or forty years ago? Banks don’t. Hospitals don’t. Grocery stores don’t. Maybe the sweet nostalgia I sniffed on those classroom visits was really the odor of stagnation.

Since most other institutions in American society have changed dramatically in the past half-century, the stasis of schools is strange. And it’s doubly peculiar because school itself is not something we inherited from antiquity and preserve to honor our ancestors. School as we know it is a modern invention.

Through most of history, people learned from tutors or their close relations. In nineteenth-century America, says education historian David Tyack, “the school was a voluntary and incidental institution.” ¹ American kids learned the basics from their families—or from the one-room schoolhouse they’d drop into every now and again. Not until the early twentieth century did public schools as we know them—large buildings in which students segregated by age learn from government-certified professionals—become widespread. And not until the 1920s did attending one become compulsory. Think about that last fact a moment. Compared with much of the world, America is a remarkably hands-off land. We don’t force people to vote, or to work, or to serve in the military. But we do force young people to go to school for more than a decade. We don’t compel parents to love their kids or teach their kids. But we do compel parents to relinquish their kids to this institution for a dozen years, and threaten to jail those who resist.

Compulsory mass schooling is an aberration in history and an aberration in modern society. Yet it was the ideal preparation for the Organization Man economy. It equipped generations of future factory workers and middle managers with the basic skills and knowledge they needed on the job. And the broader lessons it conveyed were equally crucial. Kids learned how to obey rules, follow orders, and respect authority—and the penalties that came with refusal.

This was just the sort of training the old economy demanded. Schools had bells; factories had whistles. Schools had report card grades; offices had pay grades. Pleasing your teacher prepared you for pleasing your boss. And in either place, if you achieved a minimal level of performance, you were promoted. Taylorism, which I discussed in Chapter 1, didn’t spend all its time on the job. It also went to class. In the school, as in the workplace, the reigning theory was One Best Way. Organization Kids learned the same things at the same time in the same manner in the same place. Marshall McLuhan once described schools as “the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.” ² And schools made factory-style processing practically a religion—through standardized testing, standardized curricula, and standardized clusters of children. (Question: When was the last time you spent all day in a room filled exclusively with people born +/–6 months of your own birth date?)

So when we step into the typical school, we’re stepping into the past—a place whose architect is Frederick Winslow Taylor and whose tenant is the Organization Man. The one institution in American society that has least accommodated itself to the values and form of the free agent economy is the one institution Americans claim they value most. But it’s hard to imagine that this arrangement can last much longer—a One Size Fits All education system cranking out workers for a My Size Fits Me economy. Maybe the answer to the riddle I posed at the start of this chapter is that we’re succeeding in spite of our education system. But how long can that continue? And imagine how we’d prosper if we began educating our children more like we earn our livings.

Nearly twenty years ago, a landmark government report with the alarming title A Nation At Risk declared that American education was “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity.” That may no longer be true. Instead, American schools are awash in a rising tide of irrelevance.

Don’t get me wrong. In innumerable ways, mass public schooling has been a stirring success. Like Taylorism, it has accomplished some remarkable things—assisting throngs of immigrants in learning both English and the American way, helping more Americans become literate, equipping others to succeed beyond their parents’ imaginings. In a very large sense, America’s schools have been a breathtaking democratic achievement.

But that doesn’t mean they ought to be the same as they were when you and I were kids. Parents and the politicians have sensed the need for reform, and have pushed education toward the top of the national agenda. Unfortunately, few of the conventional remedies in the educational medicine cabinet—standardized testing, character training, recertifying teachers—will do much to cure what ails American schools, and may even make things worse. Free agency, though, will force the necessary changes. Look for free agency to accelerate and deepen three incipient movements in teaching and learning—the surging popularity of home schooling, the emerging alternatives to traditional high school, and inventive new approaches to adult learning. These changes will prove as pathbreaking as mass public schooling was a century ago. Together they will unschool American society.

THE HOME SCHOOLING REVOLUTION

“Home schooling,” though, is a bit of a misnomer. Parents don’t re-create the classroom in the living room any more than free agents re-create the cubicle in their basement offices. Instead, home schooling makes it easier for children to pursue their own interests in their own way—a My Size Fits Me approach to learning. In part for this reason, some adherents—particularly those who have opted out of traditional schools for reasons other than religion—prefer the term “unschooling.”

Perhaps most important, home schooling is almost perfectly consonant with the four values of the free agent work ethic I described in Chapter 4: having freedom, being authentic, putting yourself on the line, and defining your own success.

Take freedom. In the typical school, children often aren’t permitted to move unless a bell rings or an adult grants them permission. And except for a limited menu of offerings in high school, they generally can’t choose what to study or when to study it. Home schoolers have far greater freedom. They learn more like, well, children. We don’t teach little kids how to talk or walk or understand the world. We simply put them in nurturing situations and let them learn on their own. Sure, we impose certain restrictions. (“Don’t walk in the middle of the street.”) But we don’t go crazy. (“Please practice talking for forty-five minutes until a bell rings.”) It’s the same for home schoolers. Kids can become agents of their own education rather than merely recipients of someone else’s noble intentions.

Imagine a five-year-old child whose current passion is building with Legos. Every day she spends up to an hour, maybe more, absorbed in complex construction projects, creating farms, zoos, airplanes, spaceships. Often her friends come over and they work together. No one assigns her this project. No one tells her when and how to do it. And no one will give her creation a grade. Is she learning? Of course. This is how many home schoolers explore their subjects.

Now suppose some well-intentioned adults step in to teach the child a thing or two about Lego building. Let’s say they assign her a daily forty-five-minute Lego period, give her a grade at the end of each session, maybe even offer a reward for an A+ building. And why not bring in some more five-year-olds to teach them the same things about Legos? Why not have them all build their own forty-five-minute Lego buildings at the same time, then give them each a letter grade, with a prize for the best one? My guess: Pretty soon our five-year-old Lego lover would lose her passion. Her buildings would likely become less creative, her learning curve flatter. This is how many conventional schools work—or, I guess, don’t work.

The well-meaning adults have squelched the child’s freedom to play and learn and discover on her own. She’s no longer in control. She’s no longer having fun. Countless studies, particularly those by University of Rochester psychologist Edward L. Deci, have shown that kids and adults alike—in school, at work, at home—lose the intrinsic motivation and the pure joy derived from learning and working when somebody takes away their sense of autonomy and instead imposes some external system of reward and punishment. ¹⁰ It’s like the relationship between freedom and security I described in Chapter 5. Freedom isn’t a detour from learning. It’s the best pathway toward it.

Stay with our Lego lass a moment and think about authenticity—the basic desire people have to be who they are rather than conform to someone else’s standard. Our young builder has lost the sense that she is acting according to her own true self. Instead, she’s gotten the message. You build Legos for the same reason your employer father does his assignments: because an authority figure tells you to.

Or take accountability. The child is no longer fully accountable for her own Lego creating. Whatever she’s produced is by assignment. She did it for the Man, and therefore, in her mind, he gets a lot of the credit. Her creations are no longer truly hers.

And what about those Lego grades? Won’t that A+ motivate our girl to keep on building? Perhaps, but not on her own terms. Maybe she liked the B– building better than the A+ creation. Oh well. Now she’ll probably bury that feeling and work to measure up—to someone else’s standards. Should she take a chance—try building that space shuttle she’s been dreaming about? Probably not. Why take that risk when, chances are, it won’t make the grade? Self-defined success has no place in this regime. But for many home schoolers, success is something they can define themselves. (This is true even though, as I mentioned, home schoolers score off the charts on conventional measures of success—standardized tests in academic subjects.)

To be sure, some things most kids should learn are not intrinsically fun. There are times in life when we must eat our Brussels sprouts. For those subjects, the punishment-and-reward approach of traditional schooling may be in order. But too often, the sheer thrill of learning a new fact or mastering a tough equation is muted when schools take away a student’s sense of control. In home schooling, kids have greater freedom to pursue their passions, less pressure to conform to the wishes of authority figure teachers and Lord of the Flies peers—and can put themselves on the line, take risks, and define success on their own terms.

THE END OF HIGH SCHOOL

One other consequence of the move toward home school-ing—and the broader move away from mass institutions and toward individuals—will be something many of us wished for as teenagers: the demise of high school.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that high school replaced work as the thing most Americans did in their teens. But today, “American high school is obsolete,” says Bard College president Leon Botstein, one of the first to call for its end. He says today’s adolescents would be better off pursuing a college degree, jumping directly into the job market, engaging in public service, or taking on a vocational apprenticeship. ¹³ Even the National Association of Secondary School Principals, which has blasted home schooling, concedes that “high schools continue to go about their business in ways that sometimes bear startling resemblance to the flawed practices of the past.” ¹⁴

In the future, expect teens and their families to force an end to high school as we know it. Look for some of these changes to replace and augment traditional high schools with free-agent-style learning—and to unschool the American teenager:

• A renaissance of apprenticeships. For centuries, young people learned a craft or profession under the guidance of an experienced master. This method will revive—and not just for trades like plumbing, but for skills like computer programming and graphic design. Imagine a fourteen-year-old taking two or three academic courses each week, and spending the rest of her time apprenticing a commercial artist. As the home schoolers have figured out, traditional high schools tend to separate learning and doing. Free agency makes them indistinguishable.
• A flowering of teenage entrepreneurship. Young people may become free agents even before they get their driver’s licenses—and teen entrepreneurs (who both earn and learn by doing) will become more common. Indeed, most teens have the two crucial traits of a successful entrepreneur: a fresh way of looking at the world and a passionate intensity for what they do. In San Diego County, 8 percent of high school students already run their own online business. ¹⁵ That will increasingly become the norm and perhaps even become a teenage rite of passage.
•   A greater diversity of academic courses. Only sixteen states offer basic economics in high school. ¹⁶ That’s hardly a sound foundation for the free agent workplace. Expect a surge of new kinds of “home economics” courses that teach numeracy, accounting, and basic business.
•  A boom in national service. Some teenagers will seek greater direction than others and may want to spend a few years serving in the military or participating in a domestic service program. Today, many young people don’t consider these choices because of the pressure to go directly to college. Getting people out of high school earlier might get them into service sooner. Imagine a sixteen-year-old serving two years in a Civilian Conservation Corps in her neighborhood—before even considering attending college.
•  A backlash against standards. A high school diploma was once the gold standard of American education. Today, like gold, it has lost most of its usefulness as a benchmark. Yet politicians seem determined to make the diploma meaningful again by erecting all sorts of hurdles kids must leap to attain one—standardized subjects each student must study, standardized tests each student must pass. In some schools, students are already staging sit-ins to protest these tests. This could be American youth’s new cause célèbre. (“Hey hey, ho ho. Organization Man testing’s got to go.”)

Most politicians think the answer to the problems of high schools is to exert more control. The real answer, the free agent answer, is less control. In the free agent future, our teens will learn by less schooling and more doing.

THE UNSCHOOLING OF ADULTS

For much of the twentieth century, the U.S. depended on what I call the “Thanksgiving Turkey Model” of education. We placed kids in the oven of formal education for twelve years, cooked them until they were done, then served them to employers. (A select minority got a final, four-year basting at a place called college.) But this model doesn’t work in a world of accelerated cycle times, shrinking company half-lives, and the rapid obsolescence of knowledge and skills. It’s easier to articulate than legislate, but in a free agent economy our education system must allow people to learn throughout their lives. When we turn twenty-one, we’ve still got three fourths of our life to live and learn.

Instead of cooking a nation of Organization People, home schooling and alternatives to high school will create a nation of self-educators, free agent learners, if you will. Adults who were unschooled youths will know how to learn and expect to continue the habit throughout their lives—and not only when someone from the HR department or the “continuing education” mandarins of their profession tell them it’s time for training.

For example, how did anybody learn the World Wide Web? In 1993, it barely existed. By 1995, it was the foundation of dozens of new industries and an explosion of wealth. There weren’t any college classes in Web programming, HTML coding, or Web page design in those early years. There weren’t any university departments devoted to the topic. Yet somehow hundreds of thousands of people managed to learn. How? They taught themselves—working with colleagues, trying new things, and making mistakes. That was the secret to the Web’s success. Indeed, imposing formal requirements (required courses or a Web head bar exam) would have snuffed creativity and slowed development. The Web flourished almost entirely through the ethic and practice of self-teaching.

This is not a radical concept. Until the first part of this century, most Americans learned on their own—by reading. Literacy and access to books were an individual’s ticket to knowledge. Even today, in my Free Agent Nation online census, “reading” was the most prevalent way free agents said they stayed up-to-date in their field.

In the twenty-first century, access to the Internet and to a network of smart colleagues—much more than access to a fancy college degree—will be the ticket to adult learning. Expect more of us to punch and repunch those tickets throughout our lives.

Look for these early signs:

•   The devaluation of degrees. As the shelf life of a degree shortens, more students will go to college to acquire particular skills than to bring home an entire sheepskin. People’s need for knowledge doesn’t respect semesters. They’ll want higher education just in time—and if that means leaving the classroom before earning a degree, so be it. Remember: Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steven Spielberg never finished college.
•  Older students. Forty percent of college students are now older than twenty-five. According to the Wall Street Journal, “by some projections, the number of students age 35 and older will exceed those 18 and 19 within a few years.” ¹⁷ Young adults who do forgo a diploma in their early twenties may find a need and desire for college courses in their forties.
•   Free agent teaching. Distance learning (private ventures like the University of Phoenix, Unext, Ninth House Network, and Hungry Minds University) will help along this self-teaching trend. Today, some five thousand companies are in the online education business. Their $2 billion of revenues are expected to hit $11 billion by 2003. ¹⁸ And nontraditional teaching arrangements will abound. One lament of independent scholars—genre-straddling writers like Judith Rich Harris and Anne Hollander—is that they don’t have students. ¹⁹Here’s a ready supply. More free agent teachers and more free agent students will create tremendous liquidity in the learning market—with the Internet serving as the matchmaker and market maker for this new marketplace of learning.
•   Big trouble for elite colleges. All this means big trouble in Ivy City. Attending a fancy college serves three purposes in contemporary life: to prolong adolescence, to award a credential that’s modestly useful early in one’s working life, and to give people a network of friends. Elite colleges have moved slowly to keep up with the emerging free agent economy. In 1998, 78 percent of public four-year colleges offered distance-learning programs, compared with only 19 percent of private schools. ²⁰ Private college costs have soared, faster even than health care costs, for the past twenty years. But have these colleges improved at the same rate? Have they improved at all? What’s more, the students who make it to elite colleges are generally those who’ve proved most adroit at conventional (read: outdated) schooling. That could become a liability rather than an advantage. In his bestseller The Millionaire Mind, Thomas J. Stanley found a disproportionately large number of millionaires were free agents— but that the higher somebody’s SAT scores, the lesslikely he or she was to be a financial risk-taker and therefore to become a free agent. ²¹
•   Learning groupies. The conference industry, already hot, will continue to catch fire as more people seek gatherings of like-minded souls to make new connections and learn new things. One stunningly successful example is Fast Company’s Real Time Conferences—semiannual, phantasmagoric assemblages of models, mentors, tools, and networking. Notty Bumbo, a free agent medical consultant I introduced in Chapter 8, said, “I can attend a conference or seminar, and in essence, there is a sort of Socratic institution there. I can choose the mentor I will pay attention to for the next hour, or two hours, or day—whatever. I will listen to them at their knee, and also be in a position to ask them questions, challenge their assumptions, challenge my own assumptions, work within a group structure to test the ideas.” The F.A.N. Clubs I discussed in Chapter 7, and the many book clubs that already exist, will become important sources of education—much as Ben Franklin’s Junto educated a generation of colonial free agents.

The next few decades will be a fascinating, and perhaps revolutionary, time for learning in America. The specifics will surprise us and may defy even my soundest predictions. But the bottom line of the future of education in Free Agent Nation is glaringly clear: School’s out.