The Fascination Of What’s Difficult
Laura started a good discussion at Apt. 11D about Friedman’s take on the need for education reform. The moustache of understanding Friedman thinks that education needs to focus on… well, on what Tom Friedman focuses on:
So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.
(You might note the missing gerund in front of “entrepreneurship”—perhaps ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’?) But, as Laura notes, it’s heartening simply to see education on the Times editorial page, and Friedman manages to avoid putting too many metaphors through his usual enhanced interrogation.
Is it useful, though, to draw the kind of distinctions the piece is about? The idea of teaching creativity is more than the inadvertently ironic fodder for self-satisfied hipster smirking it initially seems. People in and out of education have been arguing whether creativity can be taught, probably for as long as people have been teaching. The Iowa Writer’s Workshop web site states:
we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can “learn” to play the violin or to paint, one can “learn” to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well.
What is creativity in the abstract? Every idea either falls into a discipline, combines disciplines, or invents one. Improving creativity has a whiff of Power Point bullet points that may look good at conferences or sound good in graduation speeches, but in practice, as Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his piece on the divergent paths people take to realize their talents, breakthroughs are likely to result either from years of expertise or else from the kind of stroke-of-genius insight you can’t really teach.
Friedman cites entrepreneurship as a means to a more secure future, individually and collectively. But starting a business or pushing an invention are among the most risky things one can do; and even entrepreneurs need people to answer the phones, make the coffee and sort the mail. Friedman shows the disrespect for staff jobs one would expect of The Wall Street Journal editorial page, and that underlies The New York Post’s statement that health care reform will tax “City’s Risk Takers” (so, “risk takers” and “wealthy” are synonymous? Good to know). In Friedman’s formulation, if you’re unemployed, you can only blame yourself:
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again hand them work could have a long wait.
Ouch. “Hand them work”? Really? Such a pain, handing people work. Do you mean, perhaps, “get hired”? The judgments such language betrays—that those in distress are there through deficiencies in initiative, character or fitness—are both merciless and naïve. Friedman prefers anecdote to statistic, citing “a former global executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international investor,” and “a Washington lawyer friend”:
I asked him [the Washington lawyer] who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work were being retained.
Nothing new under the sun there, or unique to our current economic crisis. But I’ve never worked for or with an actual company that fit tidy equations. Companies are made up of people. They are therefore venal and stupid. Talent gets overlooked, personality trumps ability; Golden Boys and Johnny Backslaps are promoted, quiet performers ignored, account execs with steady clientele fired because higher ups don’t like the cut of their jib.
As Larry Summers wrote: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. LOOK AROUND YOU.”
I do think Friedman, in his this-is-what-I-was-told-in-the-corporate-jet-coming-back-from-Davos way, ultimately has a point. But I wonder how much time he’s spent in classrooms. We don’t need to fill K-12 with B-school jargon. Kids start out in pre-school, for the most part, thrilled to learn, with no distinction between what they’re ‘supposed’ to learn and what’s fun. Too often, schools kill that enthusiasm, through tedium that teaches kids to be bored, and through outright (if unthinking) sabotage. I once heard a high school English teacher tell her class, “We’ll get through this together.” ‘This’ was Romeo and Juliet. Another teacher (mine, unfortunately) wrinkled her nose that she “just couldn’t get into” Sons & Lovers. Yeah; us, too. Conversely, my tenth grade teacher’s dramatic reading of Ted Hughes’ “Wind”—“This house has been far out at sea all night”—feeds my awareness of diction and sentence rhythm to this day. The same thing happened across all subjects—my algebra and geometry teacher loved math, loved how things worked, loved showing us. I’d been an indifferent math student up to then; with her, I began consistently scoring in the upper 90s.
Despair and excitement, resignation and hope, resentment and gratitude—they’re all contagious. So don’t tell kids to innovate. Don’t tell them be entrepreneurs. Just stop discouraging them, and maybe they’ll discover that Photoshop is more interesting than Facebook, guitar cooler than Guitar Hero, reality more rewarding than reality shows, every leaf and bug a mystery. They might even happen across a certain poem by Yeats. It’s called “The Fascination Of What’s Difficult.”
One has no way of knowing.
Update: Megan McArdle publishes a letter from a lawyer with an inside scoop on those Washington firings (via Laura).
