‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Here, then, is yet another book about success. This time it’s not grit that helps children succeed. Nor is it having a Tiger Mom or letting children walk home alone or allowing them to skin their knees or teaching them Arabic or Mandarin. It’s not about supporting their spiritual development or eliminating the gluten in their diets or teaching them about white privilege or the importance of team sports. No, this new tract aimed at the heart of parental anxiety — “Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era,” by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith — argues that the only way to ensure any kind of future security for our children is to totally upend the education system and rethink what school is for.
“Disrupt” is a buzz word these tech-world gurus use sparingly, but that’s what they mean. Wagner works at Harvard’s Innovation Lab, Dintersmith in venture capital, funding education and tech start-ups. Both appear frequently on the lecture circuit; you can almost see the PowerPoint peeking out from beneath their prose. Their argument is this: Public education in America is based on antiquated late-19th-century priorities, on the need “to educate large numbers of immigrants and refugees from farms for basic citizenship and for jobs in a growing industrial economy.” Most of the stuff children are forced to know, and on which our culture’s sense of achievement is based, is unnecessary in the age of Google. But tests and test-makers still run the show, and kids are required to “jump through hoops” and drill and drill to assimilate reams of facts (“content”) instead of learning the skills that will keep them employed and employable for years to come — which is to say, the skills to be entrepreneurs.
After the revolution Wagner and Dintersmith imagine, college will no longer be a scandalously expensive universal requirement but an option for only the most academically minded. They propose an overhaul of the SAT scoring system in which adolescents would be sorted into categories of collegiate preparedness: “In Good Shape,” “It Won’t Be Easy” and “Think Different.” Those in the last two categories might be satisfied, and indeed better served, in free or low-cost apprenticeships or by taking vocational courses.
It’s clear that American education overemphasizes test scores and grade-point averages at the expense of the deep curiosity and creativity that characterize real learning. Many of the disruptions the authors suggest — an interdisciplinary approach; hands-on, project-based learning; student-directed curriculums — are already in place in some of the country’s best schools. Less convincing is the assumption that undergirds this whole tract: that every person can — or should — be molded into an entrepreneur.
Is an entrepreneurial mind-set really the key to success? Will a culture that ‘Most Likely to Succeed,’ by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith - The New York Times:
