STOP STEALING DREAMS

132. What we teach When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions. When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless. When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete. When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us. And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

“The best way to complain is to make things”

–James Murphy

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.

When we teach a child to love to learn, the amount of learning will become limitless.

When we teach a child to deal with a changing world, she will never become obsolete.

When we are brave enough to teach a child to question authority, even ours, we insulate ourselves from those who would use their authority to work against each of us.

And when we give students the desire to make things, even choices, we create a world filled with makers.

But in the meantime, go. Learn and lead and teach. If enough of us do this, school will have no choice but to listen, emulate, and rush to catch up.

Parents were raised to have a dream for their kids—we want our kids to be happy, adjusted, successful. We want them to live meaningful lives, to contribute and to find stability as they avoid pain.

Our dream for our kids, the dream of 1960 and 1970 and even 1980, is for the successful student, the famous college, and the good job. Our dream for our kids is the nice house and the happy family and the steady career. And the ticket for all that is good grades, excellent comportment, and a famous college.

And now that dream is gone. Our dream. But it’s not clear that our dream really matters. There’s a different dream available, one that’s actually closer to who we are as humans, that’s more exciting and significantly more likely to affect the world in a positive way.

When we let our kids dream, encourage them to contribute, and push them to do work that matters, we open doors for them that will lead to places that are difficult for us to imagine. When we turn school into more than just a finishing school for a factory job, we enable a new generation to achieve things that we were ill-prepared for.

For centuries, a significant portion of the ruling class has had a history with certain colleges, been a member of the famous-college tribe, sharing cultural touchstones and even a way of speaking. The label on a résumé is more than a description of what you did thirty years ago—it’s proof, the leaders say, that you’re one of us.

Until that changes, this tribe is going to continue to exert power and influence. The real question is how we decide who gets to be in it.

With so much information available about everyone, it gets ever harder to lump people into categories. Graduating from (or even getting into) a prestigious institution will become ever more valuable. We need labels desperately, because we don’t have enough time to judge all the people we need to judge. It’s worth asking if the current process of admitting and processing students (and giving a “gentlemen’s C” to anyone who asks) is the best way to do this labeling.

A university delivers four things:

Access to information (not perspective or understanding, but access)

Accreditation/A scarce degree

Membership in a tribe

A situation for growth (which is where you’d file perspective and understanding)

Stanford University has put up many of their courses online for free, and some have more than 30,000 active students at a time.

MIT just launched MITx, which will create ubiquitous access to information. The finest technical university in the world is going to share every course with any student who is willing to expend the effort to learn.

Hofstra University spent more than $3.5 million sponsoring a presidential debate in 2008. In exchange, they got 300 tickets for students (that works out to about $10,000 a ticket) and, as they’re happy to brag, a huge boost of publicity, apparently worthwhile because it makes their degree more valuable (famous = good). That famous degree then leads to more applicants, which allows the University to be more particular about their SAT scores and admission rate, which leads to better rankings in U.S. News, which leads to more applications and ultimately, more donations and a raise for the university’s president.