One often hears today the refrain that America is losing its global competitiveness and the only way back is to prepare our students to enter and excel in the most competitive of world markets. But does the essence of capitalism always result in hyper competition? Is such hyper competition what students should prepare for and engage in? Do we have a choice?
NY Times Columnist and Author David Brooks offers a different view. In his recent op-ed column he says that we “should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everyone else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.”
Brooks reflects on how much of our society from politics to business evoke the use of athletic metaphors (i.e. winners vs. losers). However despite this language, much of life doesn’t have to be reduced to zero-sum games that eke out marginal improvements against an always-crowded marketplace of alternatives. Rather, we can build distinctive identities, brands and niches wherein our creativity leads to breakthroughs, inventions and new paths or old paths forged in completely new directions.
Wayne Gretzky, nicknamed “The Great One” as the leading point scorer in National Hockey League history was once asked about the secret to his success. He famously said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Our education system needs to be more like that. We can continue to try to improve, better even best our current batch manufacturing process of moving children grouped by age through the fixed conveyor belt of school calendar time, adding standard sized learning units of content along the way, complete with an end of year quality control review via standardized tests. We can hope this manufacturing-like education process improves on its historically high “defect” rate.
Unfortunately the “widgets” of this system today are our future leaders of tomorrow. If we don’t completely disrupt this manufacturing process made for the industrial age with a completely new mass customization, just-in-time process that embeds personalization, creativity and innovation can we really expect to create students who embed these same traits of personalization, creativity and innovation?
