As you know, there is an enormous amount of talk about schools.
I started counting, and I ended up with about 40 different approaches all over this country—and not just all over this country, all over the developed world—aimed at restoring the school of yesterday.
And I'm all for it.
Let me say the school of yesterday had one enormous advantage.
Yes, the children did learn basic skills.
But perhaps equally important, they acquired self-confidence.
In the school of today, or a very large number of the schools of today, children lose self-confidence, and that's the greatest barrier to learning.
At the same time, we know that the school of tomorrow will not just be a restored version of yesterday's school.
We know that it will have to be a very different school.
And we know why, and we know how.
The basic reason is not technology.
And it is not educational theory.
The basic reason is the change in demographics.
When I was born, there was no country in which more than three out of four people in the work force did not work with their hands.
They worked with their hands as farmers, as domestic servants, as store clerks, in small shops, in factories.
And today in this country, only two out of every ten people still work with their hands, and the percentage is going down.
And of the eight out of ten—the 80 percent who are no longer manual workers—half of them are being paid for putting knowledge to work.
And it isn't only that they need a very different preparation.
It is, above all, that they need to learn something that yesterday's school paid no attention to:
They need to learn how to learn.
Knowledge makes itself obsolete very fast.
This coming Saturday I will teach—I still teach all day—our advanced management program, and about half the people in it are engineers.
I asked them when we began this course a few weeks ago, "How often do you have to go back to school?"
And they said, "Every other year, at least, to keep up with the changes.
And every three or four years, we go back to relearn the basics, or we're obsolete."
And these are not high-tech people mostly.
They are mostly people in traditional industries—a lot of automotive, a lot of aviation, a lot of machine tools.
And yet this knowledge changes so fast.
And the same is true of the physician or any other knowledge worker.
I work closely with our big local hospital on the training of nurses, and they have to go back to school at least once every year for several weeks, and every three or four years for three months, or they're hopelessly behind.
This is something fundamentally new in human history.
And it means that the most important thing to learn in school is how to learn—the habit of continuous learning.
Add to this that knowledge is effective only if specialized.
I may need a knee replacement in a few weeks—an old skiing injury.
And I'm going to somebody who does nothing else but knee replacements.
And that's true in all areas.
At the same time, as you go up even a little bit in organizations, you increasingly will have to relate your specialization to the universe of specializations.
The orthopedic surgeon who will do my knee told me that he's now taking a course in physical therapy.
He is not going to become a physical therapist, but it's changed so much in the last few years, and he has to know enough that he can tell his patients what they need to do.
And, again, this requires the ability to continue to learn.
Another thing:
Working life has extended so much in the last 50 years that it exceeds the life expectancy of even the most successful businesses.
Very few businesses are successful for more than 25 or 30 years.
And yet most educated people who go to work in their early twenties will keep on working until they are 70.
And so they [had] better be prepared for a second career, whether it's in another organization where they're doing what they have been doing or in a new line of work.
They must be prepared to learn again.
They must be prepared to position themselves.
They must be prepared to want to learn—to see it not as something they need to do, but as something they enjoy doing.
They will have to learn how to learn.
They will have to have acquired the habit of learning.
We also know the implications of these changes.
We know that this means a different focus very early in education.
When you look at the school we have, it started in Florence around 1756, 250 years ago, and it was a school that quite rightly for its time focused not only on base skills but also on bringing everybody up to a minimum.
And therefore it focused on the weaknesses of the student.
And so it is today.
Not long ago, I visited one of my children and her daughter in fourth grade.
And I went along to the parent-teacher meeting.
And the teacher came up to us and said, "Ah, you're Mary Ellen's mother.
She needs more work on division."
She didn't say that Mary Ellen, this granddaughter of mine, is an excellent writer, loves to write stories.
She didn't say, "She ought to do more stories."
She rightly, understandably, focused on what Mary Ellen needs to do to come up to the minimum.
But that is counterproductive if we're focused on getting people to learn.
We know that nothing so motivates people—nothing—as much as achievement.
And, therefore, we will have to focus learning on what children and adults excel in.
I get incredible, fabulous work from my advanced students because they are 45 or 48 years old and they are corners, or their organizations wouldn't send them to us for a year or two or three.
And when I say, "What are you good at?" they usually don't know that.
Then I say, "I want you to write your first paper on what you are good at."
And you have no idea what an explosion I get because they reach for excellence, and now they're reaching for excellence in everything, even the things where they are very poor.
They are motivated by achievement.
And this is nothing new.
Every one of the great educational leaders since [eighteenth-century Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich] Pestalozzi knew it.
But we can't do it in the normal schoolroom of yesterday with 30 children, where everybody has to come up to a minimum level and the minimum skills.
Instead, we have to focus on "your Mary Ellen needs more work on division.
She is not very good at it."
The teacher can't say, "She ought to do more writing."
She paid no attention to Mary Ellen's writing because it didn't need any attention.
Mary Ellen is good in writing.
What does she need any attention for?
But we know that if you want to create the habit of learning, you have to give children a sense of achievement, and that means building on their strengths.
The weaknesses are universal.
The strengths are individual—and that you can't address in the traditional classroom.
We also know, by way of implementation, that in order to acquire the habit of learning you have to manage yourself.
And, incidentally, this is probably one area where the computer is a real help, because when you look at those 5-year-olds with the computer, they are way ahead in computer literacy—way ahead of me.
Well, 85 years ahead of me.
When you look at them, they focus on what they're good at, whether they play computer games or do simple learning work.
They manage themselves.
They go back to what they're not good at.
But they focus on what they're good at, and it motivates them.
The computer has given them competences, but they can't utilize them in the traditional classroom.
And so we already know the specs of the school of the future.
The focus is going to be on learning.
And the teacher's job will increasingly be to encourage learning, to help learning, to assist with learning, to mentor learning.
That will require a good deal of teaching, but the starting point will be learning and not teaching.
And we know quite a bit about it.
First, we know that learning is very individual.
There are some children who never crawl—who go straight to walking from sitting up.
And others keep on crawling until they are 3.
But by 3, they can all walk.
Learning is individual, and learning builds on what we are good at.
And this we know is going to be one of the specs:
How do we enable children to focus on what they're good at, on their strengths?
We also know that the best way to learn, especially for young people, is to teach.
I learned that when I was a sophomore in high school, and my closest friend was one year younger.
He was a very bright boy, but he had difficulty learning the traditional key subjects of my Austrian school:
Latin and Greek and math.
He was a very gifted musician, and made a very respectable career in music, ending up as conductor of a major orchestra.
But in Latin and Greek and math, the key subjects, he was slow.
And so I began, without any conscious effort, to tutor him.
I myself had been a very indifferent student—not because things were difficult, but because I was lazy.
Yet six weeks after I began to tutor Ernest in Latin (which I wasn't particularly fond of) and Greek (which I loved) and math (which I was good at), I suddenly was at the head of my class.
Suddenly I enjoyed all of these subjects.
Joy is the right word.
And I learned them because I had to explain them.
And suddenly it hit me:
The best way to learn is to teach.
Indeed, one of the reasons why the one-room schoolhouse of a hundred years ago was such a good learning environment is that the teacher with 70 kids from ages 6 to 16 had to use the older children to tutor and mentor the younger ones.
And the older children learned.
And we know that this is part of the specs for the school of tomorrow:
How do we put the more advanced youngsters to work teaching so that they not only learn but also discover learning and the joy of learning?
Finally, we know that we can do these things.
And this is where technology comes in.
Technology makes it possible for the individual student to work individually, and work at his or her own speed and rhythm and attention span.
Rhythm is especially important because if you violate it, you create fatigue.
And so modern technology enables especially young children to work how they learn best, so that they can achieve.
Technology can also greatly extend a teacher's span, the time a teacher has to spend with individuals.
That's because the custodial job, which takes so much time, even in high school, can be taken over by technology.
With technology, a student manages himself or herself very largely.
Yes, you have to supervise them, but to a large extent the oldest children do that, if you use them as teachers, just as I supervised many years ago that Latin school friend of mine in doing his algebra.
We know that the new school is not going to be cheap—and it shouldn't be.
A good school never has been.
It is, after all, the real capital investment of a modern economy.
But it'll probably be cheaper than the traditional school.
The technology is no longer very expensive, and it's getting cheaper by the day.
But the main, the central, the profound shift is that the school of the future is one in which the focus is on learning.
That's always been the end product of the school.
But the focus of the traditional school is teaching.
We have no "learning colleges"; we have teachers' colleges.
We don't really talk of good learners; we talk of good teachers.
We need teachers' colleges and we need good teachers, but we will have to develop something that historically we've paid no attention to:
good learners.
Historically, for the great mass of students, we aimed at minimum skills, very low skills, skills so that they were not disadvantaged.
In a knowledge society, education has to be the way for everyone to find what he or she can excel in—to set a standard and not just meet it.
And that means a different school, and not in its class size.
The new technology makes larger classes more productive.
And there is almost no evidence for the idea that small classes give better results unless the class is very, very small.
But once you have 15, it makes no difference anymore.
And in order to have enough excitement in the class you probably need larger classes.
Small classes are dull; there's not enough variety, diversity, not enough mutual stimulation.
I think the present emphasis on small classes is a misunderstanding.
The school of the future will be different from the school of yesterday not just because we will expect most of the students to have one area of achievement, and not just a general universal mediocrity, but because its emphasis will have shifted from teaching to learning.
From a speech delivered at a "School of the Future" conference, sponsored by the accounting firm Arthur Andersen.
Let me start out by saying that maybe six weeks ago I had a visit from an old student.
Forty years ago, he was a young Taiwanese.
In the meantime, he has built a very successful business in Taiwan, and for the last seven years or so has been in Shanghai, where he is now head of a very large joint-venture firm.
And I asked him, "What has happened?
What's the most important thing that has happened in China the last three to five years?"
And he thought for about five seconds and then said, "That we now consider owning an automobile a necessity and not a luxury."
That is what globalization means.
It is not an economic event; it's a psychological phenomenon.
It means that all of the developed West's values — its mindset and expectations and aspiration — are seen as the norm.
Note that my friend did not say everybody in Shanghai now owns a car.
Far from it.
He did not say that everybody in Shanghai expects to own a car.
They're at the stage where they are shifting from bicycles to motorbikes, which is deadlier.
He said that owning a car is considered a necessity, and that is what globalization actually means.
It is a fundamental change in expectations and values.
And what are some of the implications?
Let me say there are still parts of the world where globalization has not happened.
Africa, certainly not yet.
But a few years back we were in Paraguay, which is not exactly in the center of things, especially if you get into the interior.
And yet it was very clear that in this desperately poor country with little education, the values are clearly those of, well, the developed world.
And maybe in the interior of China, way back in rural China, globalization has not yet really penetrated — though I think it might be getting there.
But other than that, this is now a universal phenomenon.
The first implication is that competition means something different than it used to.
And this is why I am convinced that protectionism is inevitable, not in a traditional form but in new, nontraditional forms.
And yet it will not protect.
Let me give you a simple example.
A few months ago, as all of you perhaps remember, the US steel industry complained about the dumping of hot rolled steel, which is used for automobile bodies.
And so President Bush ordered steel imports stopped.
But the automobile companies in this country, including the Japanese, are not paying the price the steel companies ask.
They negotiate to pay the price that they would have had to pay if Bush had not stopped the dumping.
Toyota, for one, has said very loud and clear to the steel companies:
"If you don't give us the steel at the world market price (which is 40 percent below the American price), we will simply shift more of our body manufacturing to Japan and to Mexico.
We'll cut body manufacturing in this country by 80 percent within six months."
And they are now negotiating for the next model year.
Ford is doing the same.
And that is going to be the norm.
Globalization does not mean that there is worldwide trade in goods or services.
It means that there is worldwide information.
And that is the determining factor.
There is also talk that all of our jobs are being exported overseas.
This is simply nonsense.
It's labor union propaganda — primarily garment workers' propaganda.
Actually, foreign investors in this country have created four and a haIf times as many manufacturing jobs as we have exported.
Yes, the three domestic automobile companies are shrinking.
But practically none of the shrinkage of manufacturing jobs has anything to do with product moving overseas.
It has to do with the fact that we are in the midst of a major industrial revolution in manufacturing technology, as profound as the shift to mass production in the early 1920s.
When I first talked about it in 1969, I called it "flexible mass production."
The name for it is now "lean manufacturing."
In mass production, the rule was very simple.
The mass production people said to the engineers, "You give us your designs, and we'll figure out how to make them."
Now, you design so that it can be made.
And let me say that [pioneering quality consultant W. Edwards] Deming — and he was a friend of mine — is totally obsolete.
Quality control was on the plant floor.
The new quality control is in the design stage.
That is a radical change from the mass production approach, in which engineers and manufacturing people basically didn't talk to each other, had infinite contempt for each other.
The engineers looked upon the mass production people as "just the toolmakers," and the mass production people looked at the engineers as "those arrogant snobs."
Today, you begin with certain manufacturing specs and the quality specs in the design.
And that is what underlies the greatest shrinkage of jobs.
Perhaps what is most amazing is that this tremendous change had caused no social disruption in this country.
You explain it to me; I don't understand it.
We have had no social problem of transition.
So, what are the greatest challenges ahead?
I'm an old consultant, and so my answer is colored by my experience.
The most difficult problem I have found with my clients, whether they are profit or nonprofit, is to change their mindset.
It's not technology; it's not economic conditions.
It is to change their mindset.
The most difficult period of my lifetime was immediately after World War II.
Practically all the people who ran institutions were absolutely certain that we would have a major recession after the war.
And it was incredibly difficult to change that mindset when, during the years of the Depression, the goal was to survive.
And I'm not just talking of business.
I joined a major business school [at New York University] in 1950, and our big problem was that our dean, who had kept that school together during the Depression — and it wasn't easy — could not be convinced that our enrollment was going up.
He just could not believe it, and it was absolutely clear that we needed a new building, and he refused, saying, "Well, that isn't going to last; it can't."
And he was fairly typical.
After all, every major war since the mid-seventeenth century had been followed by a major recession.
And so there was no precedent for what happened after World War II.
And nobody can explain it to this day.
The few who were willing to accept the facts — like the man who built Sears Roebuck, Gen. [Robert E.] Wood — succeeded without even having to try very hard.
But most of the senior management people, and not just in business but also in education, failed miserably and were out within 10 years because they could not accept the facts.
They could not change their mindset.
During the 1920s, there was increasing protectionism, increasing isolationism, and an increasing push towards self-sufficiency.
And then came the Depression.
And around 1950, I was working quite a bit with the New York banks, and they could not accept the fact that there was suddenly international banking.
And most of these banks disappeared, very largely because they could not accept the fact that there was economic expansion and international business.
So this is always a great challenge.
I am also bothered by the fact that so many of my friends in American business — and European business is worse — have become captives of their computer.
The computer is fascinating, but let me say it is fascinating for mental age 5.
That's probably the age at which people are best on these computers.
All it gives most of you are inside data, accounting data in infinite detail.
And we cannot put outside data on the computer because they are not in computer-useable form.
To put things on the computer, they have to be quantifiable.
But very little information about the outside is in that form, and so the computer people dismiss it as being anecdotal.
How do you quantify what this Chinese friend of mine told me when he said that the people in Shanghai and Beijing now consider owning an automobile a necessity?
You can't quantify it, but it tells you more about China than all the Chinese statistics.
It tells you that you have a totally different country.
It's a poor country now, but it's no longer an underdeveloped country.
It's a fundamental difference.
You can't quantify it, but spend 10 minutes in either city and you'll know the difference.
And if you only look at your computer data, you'll never find out.
From a lecture delivered at Claremont Graduate University.
