Prepare Our Kids for Life, Not Standardized Tests | Ted Dintersmith | TEDxFargo

this started anak you ously when my kids were in middle school I got an email from the school saying we're having a session next week explaining to you what we're doing to teach your children important life skills and as a parent that's irresistible but that was the essence of the communication teach your kids important life skills and if it had been more descriptive I wouldn't be here today but because it was so concise and so vague I spent a week saying what will they cover what in fact should schools be doing to teach his important skills that are useful in life and I started making my list and my list included things that were skills like inventive problem-solving or communication or teamwork or figuring out complex situations or characteristics and character traits like determination and perseverance and resourcefulness being able to stand up to failure being bold or appreciating the Wonder in nature and human achievement or capabilities we all need like setting bold goals for yourself learning how to learn being able to persevere through difficulties finding your passion and purpose in life and figuring out how you can make your world better so I made that list I put it on a piece of paper but I left a lot of blank space on the paper because I knew I would hear way more than that and I wanted to take notes I wanted to learn from this session and I expected to be surprised and I was surprised so the session consisted of the initiative that they were unleashing was 45 minutes a month these middle school kids would go to a presentation run by the gym teachers and they would pick the problem or the challenge of the month and so if you didn't want kids to ever smoke we would show the most grisly gruesome videos of tar infested lungs and the advanced stages of tongue and mouth cancer and somehow that would be transformational transformational to our kids and so I left that session and and somehow felt vaguely dissatisfied and so when I came home I started to think about my kids in their education I'd always cared about their education but I think like most parents I really focused on two things I focused on how my kids were doing what grades they were getting and I focused on how much they were doing were they buckling down and doing their homework but I never had stepped back and said what are they doing let alone how does it relate to life so I made a great big sheet I divided into two columns that I said over here I'm going to track things they're doing in school that help prepare them for life and over here I'm going to track things that are irrelevant and I'm just gonna pay attention and watch this over a matter of days or weeks or months and see what pattern emerges and a bit to my surprise the column on the right the irrelevant column was full and then some in less than a week and when I say the names of things were on it you will immediately associate them with school and the reason is because that's the only place you ever used them things like factoring polynomials or gerunds or Coulomb's law the left the column of what's preparing kids for life I was doing my very best to get things a benefit of the doubt but that column remains stubbornly empty but that wasn't what really concerned me what concerned me was that I ended up having to add a third column and that third column was things that would jeopardize or impair a kid's prospects in life and I knew something about that because I spent my career in innovation and and as a career venture capitalist backing some of the top for-profit but also social entrepreneurs people that want to make this world better I knew two things with the utmost clarity one was that innovations sprinting forward in a way none of us can even imagine every structured job in the economy if it hasn't disappeared already will disappear and so kids coming through education simply trained to follow instructions and jump through hoops our kids that are gonna be marginalized or chronically unemployed and that's not ten kids and a hundred kids that's millions of kids but the second thing I knew is that this was a time of incredible opportunity and if you look at the characteristics you see in every five-year-old inquisitive old creative totally comfortable with taking risk and failing if we could just preserve those this would be the best of time for our young adults but my list of things were going on in school that jeopardized kids prospects were all around that and that we were actively in schools discouraging eliminating those types of characteristics and traits and so that changed my life I my life in many ways stopped I stopped being a person it started to being a cause much to the chagrin of my my wife and kids and and I started traveling everywhere and meeting people in reading books I watched every education documentary I could find and in the process I learned so much and one of the things I learned one of the things I thought I'd be discouraged about was the design of our schools because Here I am staring at this thing that says kids need to be good at X we're making them good at something that's irrelevant this is a big problem but our schools actually were thoughtfully designed by very farsighted people people that anticipated a world that was changing so in 1893 the committee of 10 said the world is going to move from agriculture to manufacturing there will be millions of opportunities for young kids that can do the same task over and over efficiently and without error at the same time Henry Ford does not need creative bold innovative assembly line workers so let's organize a school to promote efficiency and routine execution of operations and lists discourage creativity and that's a school system we change too over the course of about a 20 year period from 1893 to the early 1900s and it worked and America became the most important country on Earth and we created a robust and strong middle class and we were the envy of the world we saved the world in in World War two but then what happened was fast-forward is it the same characteristics we would hope for from the committee of 10 somehow didn't materialize in the 20th century and by by the time we got to even the 1980s it was clear our education model had run out of steam so there was a report done in 1983 about education called a nation at risk and that report had this telling sentence it said if our education system had been imposed on us by a foreign country we would declare it an act of war think about that an act of war but what did our equivalent of the Committee of 10 the philanthropists and policymakers and business people who can really influence education do did they step back and say we are making a transition from manufacturing to innovation and just as in the last century we changed our model we need to change it again that's not the path we took that's not the choice we made and so instead we said let's take the same obsolete system and make it better by doing more of it more intensely and let's test and measure more carefully and let's not really give any thought to how relevant it is to life but let's just put the pressure on our schools to catch up with South Korea and Singapore on these standardized test measures and the results I think you all know have been catastrophic and you would think that being immersed in that for this period of time I would be incredibly discouraged but I wasn't because at the same time I was visiting schools they were doing the most incredible things it's not that we don't know what we should be doing with our schools it's not that we haven't figured out how to prepare our kids for a very different world that we as adults grew up in we know that it's just that those are isolated pockets of great innovation and practices and so what I said is my contribution to this should be how can I spread that message how can I share that vision of schools that are schools of possibility and hope instead of placement and percentile measurement on standardized tests and so the vehicle I chose to do it I am NOT by any stretch of filmmaker but I'm a believer in the power of film and so I did a six-month search and I found a documentarian that I think is the best in the country I supported him and his team for two years to film across the country in all sorts of situations all demographics all geographies all age groups and all types of schools public private charter has it captured the story show our audience what schools are capable of show our audience what students and teachers can do if we trust them and let them engage and inspire and things that are authentic and that's film called most likely to succeed premiered in January at Sundance since then we've been to more than a dozen major film festivals we've been at every important education conference we've had more than a thousand schools request that film because when you're there and I've been to 50 these QAS now there were responsive an audience when they see school situations that are aligned with life preparation they are so enthusiastic and so committed and and people over and over again are saying this is what we need to do and so what I'm doing going forward is I actually am taking this film to all 50 states and so I called my wife last night she couldn't be here but here's what I said it was a very short phone call because I did between things I said Elizabeth Fargo is awesome and said we are coming back here and I said we're coming back here soon but when I bring this film to a community I can only do a small amount myself I can be here I can bring the film but I have to in the words of Blanche DuBois from streetcar named desire I have to rely on the kindness of strangers and so what I'm asking this community to do and I'm asking it in all 50 states is to find the people who share this vision of what schools are capable of and pull together an audience that includes teachers and parents and students but also includes your communities your state's own equivalent of the committee of 10 the people that make the most important decisions about the future of your kids and let's communicate to them this important message our country is the most innovative and determined on the face of the planet in a time that begs for those skills let's educate to our strengths instead of chasing Shanghai and South Korea on standardized tests let's change the center of the universe and education from accountability and failed test measures and make the center of education be inspiration and engagement and trust and purpose and let's carry the message forward to all schools that what we want you to do is to prepare our kids for life so thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 443,807

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Achievement, Activism, Early education, Education reform, Parenting, Students, Teaching

Id: Rvhb9aoyeZs

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2015