{"id":30165,"date":"2012-04-29T23:46:43","date_gmt":"2012-04-29T23:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/creating-innovators-why-americas-education\/"},"modified":"2012-04-29T23:46:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-29T23:46:43","slug":"creating-innovators-why-americas-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/creating-innovators-why-americas-education\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating Innovators: Why America&#8217;s Education System Is Obsolete"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/femmebot.tumblr.com\/post\/22074165141\/creating-innovators-why-americas-education-system-is\">femmebot<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<ol>\n<li>Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs \u2014 school is a competition among peers. \u201cBut innovation is a team sport,\u201d says Wagner. \u201cYes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.\u201d Student Loans: A Long Journey Of Confusion That Ends In Owe, Owe, Owe Sheryl Nance-Nash Contributor The Perfect Marketing Strategy For Soap, Soda, And Startups Brian Clark Contributor<\/li>\n<li>Specialization is celebrated and rewarded: High school curriculum is structured using Carnegie units, a system that is 125 years old, says Wagner. He says the director of talent at Google once told him, \u201cIf there\u2019s one thing that educators need to understand, it\u2019s that you can neither understand nor solve problems within the context and bright lines of subject content.\u201d Wagner declares, \u201cLearning to be an innovator is about learning to cross disciplinary boundaries and exploring problems and their solutions from multiple perspectives.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>Risk aversion is the norm: \u201cWe penalize mistakes,\u201d says Wagner. \u201cThe whole challenge in schooling is to figure out what the teacher wants. And the teachers have to figure out what the superintendent wants or the state wants. It\u2019s a compliance-driven, risk-averse culture.\u201d Innovation, on the other hand, is grounded in taking risks and learning via trial and error. Educators could take a note from design firm IDEO with its mantra of \u201cFail early, fail often,\u201d says Wagner. And at Stanford\u2019s Institute of Design, he says they are considering ideas like, \u201cWe\u2019re thinking F is the new A.\u201d Without failure, there is no innovation.<\/li>\n<li>Learning is profoundly passive: For 12 to 16 years, we learn to consume information while in school, says Wagner. He suspects that our schooling culture has actually turned us into the \u201cgood little consumers\u201d that we are. Innovative learning cultures teach about creating, not consuming, he says.<\/li>\n<li>Extrinsic incentives drive learning: \u201cCarrots and sticks, As and Fs,\u201d Wagner remarks. Young innovators are intrinsically motivated, he says. They aren\u2019t interested in grading scales and petty reward systems. Parents and teachers can encourage innovative thinking by nurturing the curiosity and inquisitiveness of young people, Wagner says. As he describes it, it\u2019s a pattern of \u201cplay to passion to purpose.\u201d Parents of innovators encouraged their children to play in more exploratory ways, he says. \u201cFewer toys, more toys without batteries, more unstructured time in their day.\u201d Those children grow up to find passions, not just academic achievement, he says. \u201cAnd that passion matures to a profound sense of purpose. Every young person I interviewed wants to make a difference in the world, put a ding in the universe.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/ericaswallow\/2012\/04\/25\/creating-innovators\/\">Creating Innovators: Why America\u2019s Education System is Obsolete [Forbes]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>hat tip to Notational.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>femmebot: Individual achievement is the focus: Students spend a bulk of their time focusing on improving their GPAs \u2014 school is a competition among peers. \u201cBut innovation is a team sport,\u201d says Wagner. \u201cYes, it requires some solitude and reflection, but fundamentally problems are too complex to innovate or solve by oneself.\u201d Student Loans: A [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[1538],"class_list":["post-30165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-humane-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-7Qx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}