P74 – “We’re building an awareness in students of what design is and how it can affect their lives,” she tells me. “I see the design curriculum as providing a modern version of a liberal arts education for these kids.” No matter what path these students pursue, their experience at this school will enhance their ability to solve problems, understand others, and appreciate the world around them-essential abilities in the Conceptual Age.”
P187 – “This tight managerial discipline reflected the overall philosophy of Henry Ford, who stated that “When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two.” “Work and play, Ford feared, was a toxic combination.”
P188 – In the Conceptual Age, as we’ll see, fun and games are not just fun and games-and laughter is no laughing matter.
P193 – “The fact is when kids play video games they can experience a much more powerful form of learning than when they’re in the classroom. Learning isn’t about memorizing isolated facts. It’s about connecting and manipulating them.”… “Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society-our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.” (Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic)
P??“The past few decades have belonged to a certain kind of person with a certain kind of mind-computer programmers who could crank code, lawyers who could craft contracts, MBAs who could crunch numbers. But the keys to the kingdom are changing hands. The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind-creators and empathizers pattern recognizers and meaning makers. The people-artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big picture thinkers-will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”
P17 – “The Motivation 2.0 operating system has endured for a very long time. Indeed, it is so deeply embedded in our lives that most of us scarcely recognize that it exists. For as long as any of us can remember we configured our organizations and constructed our lives around its bedrock assumption: The way to improve performance, increase productivity, and encourage excellence is to reward the good and punish the bad.”
P185 – “If we want to equip young people for the new world of work-and, more important, if we want them to lead satisfying lives-we need to break Motivation 2.0’s grip on education and parenting. Unfortunately, as with business, there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what schools do. Science knows that if you promise a preschooler a fancy certificate for drawing a picture, that child will likely draw a picture for your-and then lose further interest in drawing. Yet in the face of this evidence-and as the world economy demands more nonroutine, creative, conceptual abilities-too many schools are moving in the wrong direction. They’re redoubling their emphasis on routines, right answers, and standardization. And they’re hauling out a wagon full of “if=then” rewards=pizza for reading books, iPods for showing up to class, cash for good test scores. We’re bribing students into compliance instead of challenging them into engagement.”
Five Type I schools in the United States with practices to emulate and stories to inspire.
- · Big Picture Learning. “Since 1996,… has been creating places that cultivate engagement rather than demand compliance.”… “Big Picture kids are assessed the way adults are-on work performance, individual presentations, effort, attitude, and behavior on the job.”….
- · Sudbury Valley School. … “Working from the assumption that all human beings are naturally curious and that the best kind of learning happens when it’s initiated and pursued by the one doing the learning, Sudbury Valley School gives its student total control over the task, time, and technique of their learning. Teachers and staff are there to help them make things happen.”… “engagement is the rule and compliance isn’t an option.”…
- · The Tinkering School. (Summer school created by computer scientist Gever Tulley)
- Puget Sound Community School - …”gives its students a radical dose of autonomy, turning the “one size fits all” approach of conventional schools on its head. Each student has an adviser who acts as her personal coach, helping her come up with her own learning goals. “School” consists of a mixture of class time and self-created independent study projects, along with community service devised by the students.”
- · Montessori Schools. …“Many of the key tenets of a Montessori education resonate with the principles of Motivation 3.0-that children naturally engage in self-directed learning and independent study; that teachers should act as observers and facilitators of that learning, and not lecturers or commanders; and that children are naturally inclined to experience periods of intense focus, concentration, and flow that adults should do their best not to interrupt.”…
P14 “Consider this: Fewer than one in ten Americans now works for a Fortune 500 company. The largest private employer in the U.S. is not Detroit’s General Motors or Ford, or even Seattle’s Microsoft or Amazon.com, but Milwaukee’s Manpower Inc., a temp agency with more than 1,100 offices in the U.S. The dream of America’s young people? Not to climb through an organization, or even to accept a job at one, but to create their own gig on their own terms-often on the World Wide Web.”
P17 – “Large permanent organizations with fixed rosters of individuals are giving way to small, flexible networks with every-changing collections of talent.”… “Increasingly, this is a common arrangement for producing new Web sites, new electronic goods, new magazines, new buildings, new ad campaigns, new pharmaceuticals, and just about any other product or service who key ingredients are the brainpower, creativity, skill, and commitment of the people involved.”
P18 – Work today, says business uber-guru Tom Peters, is about two things: talent and projects”
P19 – The mass production economy flourished through the assembly line techniques of Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose Scientific Management theory preached repetition, rote routines, standardization, and “one Best Way”- a practice that came to be known as Taylorism. The free agent economy flourishes through a different approach-personalized, customized, fashioned to the individual-what we might call “Tailorism.”
“For both the doers and the dreamers, free agency is not just a style of work. It’s a way of life. And-here’s the point- it’s usually a better way of life. This insight, borne out in hundreds of interviews and in the stories I’ll tell later in this book-and confirmed by academic research and public opinion data-surprises some, who expect rampant fear and loathing in Free Agent Nation.
P22 – “The main crisis in schools today is irrelevance. And the main problem with most education solutions is that they incrementally improve Taylorist solutions for a Tailorist workforce. Of all the institutions in America, schools have least adapted themselves to the free agent economy. Watch for more middle-class families opting to home-school their children on their own terms and consistent with their own values. And expect more Americans to begin questioning whether formal schooling should be compulsory and whether a college degree is necessary.”
P48 – This loyalty-for-security compact formed the foundation of corporate paternalism, and few companies worshipped it more reverently than IBM. For fifty years, across its far-flung operations, IBM maintained a “full-employment” policy. The company guaranteed its workers that it would never lay them off. Never. No matter how much business dropped or the economy drooped, their jobs were safe.”… Face with few alternatives, IBM abandoned its no-layoff policy, and in 1992 and 1993, whacked its payroll by 120,000 employees.
P102 – In the old social contract of work, the organization offered the individual security-and in return, the individual gave the organization loyalty. That bargain, we all know, has crumbled. As the churn of jobs, technologies, and companies has intensified, free agents have responded to this heightened risk by hedging. Today, just as they do in their financial lives, individuals are achieving security through diversification. Security means investing their human capital in several clients or projects rather than tying it up in a single company. Likewise, loyalty has changed. Vertical loyalty-giving loyalty up to an authority figure or institution-has been replaced by horizontal loyalty. The result is a new and more challenging social contract of work: The free agent provides talent (products, services, advice) in exchange for opportunity (money, learning, and connections).
P116 – “The boundaries are far less clear than they were in a world where wailing whistles signaled a day’s beginning and end. For instance, if you can answer client email at 10:00 P.M. from your den, where does work end and home begin? What exactly is the ‘workday’? What exactly is, to borrow a labor movement rallying cry, ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’? Whose time is it anyway? This daily smokiness, and not the hours themselves, may be stoking America’s time anxiety.”
P312 – Lego careers. Instead of climbing a prefabricated ladder, run by run, in a predetermined order, careers will have much greater variety. People will assemble and reassemble them much as kids play with Legos. The pieces will be contacts, skills, desires, and available opportunity-and people will build impermanent structures with infinite idiosyncratic variations.”