The photo to the right is of our family dog, Treetree (we stupidly allowed a 2 year old to name her and Treetree is what we ended up with.) She’s a yellow Labrador Retriever, a breed notoriously easy to train. Dog motivation, and particularly Lab motivation is pretty simple: they want to please their owners and extra food is always welcome, and so a carrot and stick approach works very well. They do a good job, they get a treat, they do a bad job and they are scolded. Despite the fact that Treetree is definitely not the smartest dog in the world, and that we were not the most consistent and industrious dog trainers ever, she’s a well trained dog; the carrot and stick approach of “if-then” turns out to be a good way to train a dog, but is it how we should be educating our children?
To recap briefly my argument put forward so far over the last few months: as traditional “left-brained” jobs get automated and outsourced to China and elsewhere, and as these countries themselves start to move into the innovation space, the US and other western countries need to be educating children in a whole new way. We are not educating our children to be creative, innovative, inventive leaders for the 21st century, we are not even improving our ability to compete in traditional left-brained-based activities with other countries. So, now let’s fantasize for a moment that the Department of Education wakes up and realizes how truly lacking the education system in this country is. They do away with standardized, multiple-choice exams; they do away with the traditional grading system until high school; they devise a curriculum that encourages children to be intellectually vibrant, academic risk-takers for life. Even if this were all to happen, I think that there would still be a part of the puzzle that would be missing: how to motivate children in this brave new world.
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