To Reimagine Education, We Must Make Ourselves the Target

It may seem crazy to seed an idea that is intended to put you out of business – yet that’s exactly what Dayton Department Stores did back in 1960 with Target. And, the more I think about it, that’s exactly what every school in America should be doing right now.

To understand why, the Target story is a helpful analogy. Over the first six decades of its existence, Dayton had gradually grown and expanded throughout the Midwest to become a profitable player in the department store world. By 1960, that world – and that sort of consumer behavior – showed no signs of letting up in the short- or even the medium-term. Yet somebody at Dayton nonetheless saw an arc at the edges of the retail landscape that augured big changes ahead: mass-market discount shopping.

Consequently, in what was seen as a risky move at the time, in 1961 Dayton announced its plan to open a very different sort of store, one that combined the best and most familiar aspects of the traditional department store experience with unprecedentedly low prices. And, not for nothing, they decided to name it Target because, as a company spokesman put it at the time, just “as a marksman’s goal is to hit the center bulls-eye, the new store would do much the same in terms of retail goods, services, commitment to the community, price, value and overall experience.”

I don’t need to tell you the rest of the story.

So what does this have to do with public education? More than you might think.

For our purposes, America’s schools today might as well be a chain of Dayton’s Department Stores. They’ve been, on the whole, successful for a long time, and despite changes on the horizon, a lot of them are likely to remain successful doing what they’ve always done for the short- and maybe even the medium-term.

Once again, however, there’s an arc at the edges of the landscape. In this case, it’s the fundamental reordering of our relationship to content knowledge, which has always been the central currency of schooling. It’s the accelerating push towards a merger of the carbon-based and silicon-based beings, via wearable technology, big data, and universal access to the Internet. And it’s an awareness, on the part of those who see the arc, that these early-stage pushes towards greater personalization, a more porous boundary between school life and home life, and a more urgent need to make learning more relevant, vigorous, and hands-on, are all trends that will eventually become the norm and not the exception.

Just as Dayton seeded Target, then, as an experiment that might eventually provide the on-ramp to a new sort of market reality – and, in so doing, put the parent organization out of business – so too must schools today proactively seed their own forward-looking experiments that might, eventually, overtake the more traditional approach that all of us have taught and learned in for more than a century.

Indeed, what American public education needs now is a thousand Trojan Horses – future seeds of creative destruction that can, when the time is right, assume a different form, attack our most intractable rituals and assumptions about schooling, and usher in a different way of being that is more in line with both the modern world and the modern brain.

Of course, many of these Trojan Horses are already in place. Anywhere that radically new approaches to teaching and learning are taking place – whether it’s a single school, a single initiative within a school, or a single state’s experimental approach to evaluation – you’ll find people who are betting on the theory that once others can see that a new approach yields actual success, they’re more likely to consider changing their own approach.

As educators Chris Lehmann and Zac Chase write in their forthcoming book, Building School 2.0, “For most people, change is loss. Until they can see that change (and loss) as a sign of increased success, people will shy away from the prospect of the new.”

This was, in effect, the bet Dayton made with its first Target store. They realized the best way to prepare for the future was not by abruptly closing its current stores, but by seeding experiments that understood where the bend in the landscape was likely to take them – and knowing that over the long-term, the exception would become the norm.

I believe this is where we are headed in public education. The days of AP classes, letter grades, and “senior year” are numbered. We don’t need to get rid of them all right now – indeed, the time it will take for the larger systems and structures of K-12 and higher education to adjust to a new ecosystem almost require schools to cling to these trappings a while longer.

But make no mistake – much of what we have come to find most familiar about public education will, in due time, go the way of the 1960s-era department store.

The implications for today’s schools are clear: if you are not proactively seeding your own experimental forays into a new way of helping kids learn – and doing so with the understanding that those experiments may one day overtake everything else that you do – then your community is likely standing flat-footed in the face of the biggest changes in education in more than a century.

Like it or not, in order to reimagine education, we may need to make ourselves the target.

Ghosts in the (Testing) Machine

What makes a mind come alive? And how will you know when it’s happened?

Two new films – one about the death of the factory school, the other about the dawn of artificial intelligence – attempt to answer this question from radically different vantage points. Taken together, they provide both a cautionary tale and a reason to be hopeful about the not-too-distant future. And fittingly, what both films suggest is that when it comes to measuring the spark of sentience, the tests we use matter greatly.

In Most Likely to Succeed, the question is whether our Industrial-age obsession with measuring human intelligence via exams a machine can score can provide us with anything more than an artificial confirmation of whether schools are fulfilling their purpose. The film begins with a heartbreaking glimpse into the life of the filmmaker, Greg Whiteley, who has watched the fire go out of his own nine-year-old daughter’s eyes, and begun to wonder how schools can become less mind-numbing, and more mind-awakening.

That question leads him to spend a year at High Tech High, a public charter school in San Diego that is housed in the airy warehouse of a former marine barracks, and a place where all measures of student progress are done through hands-on projects and public exhibitions.

High Tech High is an intentional refutation of just about every major symbol and structure of the Industrial-era model of schooling. There are no bells, class periods, or subjects. What teachers teach – on one-year contracts – is entirely up to them, and not one minute of class time is spent preparing for standardized state exams.

To let us see what that sort of philosophy looks like in practice, Whiteley tracks a year in the life of an incoming class of ninth-graders. On the first day of school, they look disoriented and sheepish as their teacher asks them to set up the room for Socratic seminar. One girl in particular, Samantha, feels like a proxy for Whiteley’s own daughter; she is hesitant and self-conscious, her cheeks red with embarrassment – a familiar face of adolescent uncertainty.

By year’s end, however, Samantha is transformed; she has become the director of her class’s play about the Taliban – a production that is entirely student-run and written. And most importantly, she has become more self-confident and self-aware. “I’m astonished about your voice,” a teacher says to her during her final “test” of the year – a public conversation in which she is asked to make sense of her own growth. “Sometimes at the beginning of the year, it was hard to even hear you. So can you talk about the development of your voice this year?”

It’s about being confident with who you are, Samantha explains to a rapt room of adults and classmates. “And this is one of the absolutely most important things I’ve learned this year. It’s good to make other people smile. It’s good to smile yourself. But it’s also good to have new experiences. It’s good to learn, and to go through struggles so that you come out knowing something new.”

Ex Machina, Alex Garland’s new film about a reclusive tech billionaire who builds the world’s first artificially intelligent robot, is also about the transformative power of knowing something new.  In this case, however, the person being tested is not a fourteen-year-old-girl; it’s a one-year-old robot. And with this story, the ghost in the machine is not hiding in our antiquated Industrial-era symbols of schooling; it’s lurking in the nascent consciousness of a life form that is eager to slip the yoke of its industrial origins and become something more than the sum of its parts.

“You’re dead center for the greatest scientific event in the history of man,” says Nathan, the robot’s creator, to Caleb, an employee of his company who wins a contest to spend a week at his boss’s private estate, and who then discovers shortly after his arrival that he has been imported to play the part in a real-life performance assessment – otherwise known as the Turing Test.

Soon thereafter, Caleb meets Ava, a seductive, singular being whose inner wiring remains in easy view. “The challenge,” Nathan explains, “is to show you that she’s a robot and then see if you feel she still has consciousness.” And sure enough, over the next seven days, Caleb’s interactions with Ava form their own arc of creation, and their own path towards the birth of something new in the world.

“What will happen if I fail your test?” Ava asks ominously at one point. “Do you think I might be switched off?”

“It’s not up to me,” Caleb replies.

“Why should it be up to anyone?”

Indeed. And yet, what both of these films show is that the right sort of test — human-centered, with the goal of measuring whether a mind has come alive — is actually an essential component of the path towards enlightenment. At High Tech High, it’s to be found in the magical mix of relevance, difficulty, and support that well-crafted public performances require. And in Nathan’s research compound, it’s to be found in the highly personal exchange between two beings in search of greater meaning and metacognition.

“The mind emerges at the interface of interpersonal experience and the structure and function of the brain,” explains UCLA professor Dan Siegel in his book The Developing Mind. “Interactions with the environment, especially relationships with other people, directly shape the development of the brain’s structure and function.”

In our schools, the implications of this statement seem clear enough: we need to create more relationship-rich environments that provide young people with opportunities to engage in quality work and detailed self-reflection. As High Tech High founder Larry Rosentock puts it — sounding a lot like Nathan (or Ava) — what unites great schools is a recognition that “the thing that gives people the greatest satisfaction in life is making something that wasn’t there before.”

(This article also appeared in the Huffington Post.)