That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [79]
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
There are two messages contained in Jobs’s speech. The first is the importance of a liberal-arts education. To be sure, no one can be a creative programmer without knowing math or basic computing. And no one can be a creative engineer without knowing basic physics, nor can anyone invent a new drug without a background in biology and chemistry. Being grounded in the three R’s and in an intellectual discipline matters. But if, in our rush to get everyone a proper grounding in math and science, we throw out or shrink art, music, journalism, choir, band, film, physical education, dance—and calligraphy—as many public schools are being forced to do, we lose the very things that encourage collaboration and inspire creativity and mash-ups.
The other lesson of Jobs’s speech for teaching creativity is the importance of what Wagner calls “play” and “discovery.” These two are related in children from an early age. Jobs was indulging himself when he took that calligraphy course, just exploring things he never knew about before or never felt he had time to explore. He was “playing,” in the way educators use that word. “Every kid is an artist in kindergarten,” explains Wagner. “Play is a form of discovery, and it is how we begin to make sense of the world and discover our passions.” The problem with school today, Wagner argues, “is that it doesn’t respect play, passion, and purpose—and isolates those who won’t conform.” Because these attributes cannot be measured, they cannot be tested, so they are not really valued.
Marc Tucker heads the National Center for Education and the Economy. He says that some of the best school systems he has studied, such as Denmark’s, promote play with a purpose—but at a very high level. “I observed this in a technical high school in Denmark,” said Tucker, “where the class was divided into four or five teams and each was given the assignment to build a dogsled. They competed with one another. First, they had to decide: Do we optimize for speed, for going a long distance, or for carrying heavy loads? You had to announce your criteria in advance and lay out your plan, and then build to it.” While teams could decide their own work schedules, it was not just unstructured exploration. “It was supported exploration,” said Tucker. “What I mean is that you take a problem that others have worked on before and you work your own way toward solving it. It requires you to draw on but then extend your classroom knowledge, to search for the relevant information you need, to filter out what can and can’t be used to solve the problem, to learn how to be skeptical of some information, and ultimately to translate it all into a solution. At each stage you are supported by the faculty, so it is not totally unstructured.”
Tucker added, “I have seen lots of project-based curriculum in the U.S. but the substance is often so shallow. To make this work, it has to be built on a solid base of knowledge. You have to know some basic engineering to build a dogsled. If you don’t have that solid base of underlying skills, you will get nowhere.” The goal, Tucker said, is a classroom situation where students can explore and collaborate, “but it has to be against a set of high standards for