A More Beautiful Question (36 page)

19
   
Sebastian Thrun, the engineer/inventor . . .
From my e-mail exchanges with Thrun, February 2013.

20
   
Reed Hastings, was reacting to one . . .
The Netflix story has appeared in various interviews with Hastings, including Matthew Honan, “Unlikely Places Where Wired Pioneers Had Their Eureka Moments,”
Wired
, March 24, 2008.

21
   
to Pixar (
Can animation be cuddly?
) . . .
Anthony Lane, “The Fun Factory,”
New Yorker
, May 16, 2011.

22
   
New York Times
recently characterized . . .
Shaila Dewan, “To Stay Relevant in a Career, Workers Train Nonstop,”
New York Times
, September 21, 2012.

23
   
Thomas Friedman has written extensively . . .
For example, see Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a 401(k) World,”
New York Times
, April 30, 2013.

24
   
Joichi Ito, the director of the . . .
From my interview with Ito, April 2013.

25
   
“Right now, knowledge is a commodity” . . .
From my interview with Tony Wagner, January 2013.

26
   
“the value of explicit information is dropping” . . .
Tony Wagner,
Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World
(New York: Scribner, 2012). I also discussed this directly with Bottino in my interview with him, April 1, 2013.

27
   
The glut of knowledge has another . . .
Firestein,
Ignorance
.

28
   
What if we could paint over our mistakes? . . .
From the Her Story Network website http://www.herstorynetwork.com/?s=Bette+Nesmith; and Jessica Gross, “Liquid Paper,”
New York Times Magazine
, June 7, 2013.

29
   
The author Seth Godin is . . .
Godin quotes are from his free e-book
Stop Stealing Dreams
, self-published in 2012, http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/stopstealingdreamsscreen.pdf.

30
   
To navigate in today’s info-swamp . . .
Botstein’s quote appeared in Julie Flaherty, “What Should You Get out of College?,”
New York Times
, August 4, 2002.

31
   
“Computers are useless—they only give . . .”
According to the website Quote Investigator, a version of this quote appeared in William Fifield, “Pablo Picasso: A Composite Interview,”
Paris Review
, Summer–Fall 1964.

32
   
The potential is mind-boggling . . .
This is from my visit to IBM’s research facility in Yorktown Heights, New York, where the original Watson system is housed. I interviewed several people from IBM during my visit, primarily the engineer
Eric Brown.

33
   
A reporter doing an interview concludes . . .
This story is well traveled and appeared recently in an interview of Tiffany Shlain by Patt Morrison
in the
Los Angeles Times
, November 26, 2011.

34
   
Why did my candy bar melt? (And will my popcorn pop?) . . .
Drawn from the website Massmoments.org, which drew from “Percy Spencer and His Itch to Know,” by Don Murray in
Readers’ Digest
(August 1958); “Raytheon: A History of Global Technology Leadership” (Early Days link); and “Who Invented Microwaves?” from Gallawa.com.

35
   
Sugata Mitra, made just this point . . .
Mitra’s TED talk was “Build a School in the Cloud,” February 27, 2013, http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the_cloud.html. Also, see the article “Is Education Obsolete? Sugata Mitra at the MIT Media Lab,” posted on the blog MIT Center for Civic Media, May 16, 2012; as this post shows, the idea of “knowing” being obsolete was suggested by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte, in a class discussion following Mitra’s lecture at MIT.

36
   
“when someone looks at the way things . . .”
David Pogue, “A Simple Swipe on a Phone, and You’re Paid,”
New York Times
, September 29, 2010.

37
   
Gretchen Rubin showed how simple . . .
From my interview with Rubin, February 20, 2013.

38
   
the business consultant Min Basadur . . .
I am greatly to indebted to Basadur for a series of interviews he did with me in 2012, both on the phone and at Basadur Applied Creativity headquarters in Burlington, Ontario. During my visit, Basadur and his team gave me a crash course in the firm’s question-based creativity training methods.

39
   
Why aren’t the players urinating more? . . .
Douglas Martin, “J. Robert Cade, the Inventor of Gatorade, Dies at 80,”
New York Times
, November 28, 2007. Also adapted from the website http://www.cademuseum.org/museum/history.

40
   
For example, current theories of “design thinking” . . .
For more on design thinking, see my book
Glimmer
as well as Tim Brown,
Change by Design
(New York: HarperBusiness, 2009).

41
   
“even when you don’t know what . . .”
This was said to me by the designer and design-thinking teacher Bruce Mau during my interviews with him in 2008 and 2009 for
Glimmer
.

42
   
What if a car windshield could blink? . . .
Bob Kearns bio info comes from John Seabrook’s “The Flash of Genius,”
New Yorker
, January 11, 1993; story of Mary Anderson comes from Catherine Thimmesh,
Girls Think of Everything: Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women
, (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

Chapter 2: Why We Stop Questioning

  
1
   Louis C.K. can be seen performing “Why?” on YouTube at, among other uploads, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJlV49RDlLE.

  
2
   
research shows that a child asks about . . .
This research appears in Harris’s book
Trusting What You’re Told
and in Nayfakh’s
Boston Globe
article “Are We Asking the Right Questions?”

  
3
   
some of the lab’s work is featured . . .
Shlain’s ten-minute film,
Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks
, can be seen at http://letitripple.org/brain-power/.

  
4
   
As the children’s neurologist Stewart Mostofsky . . .
From my interview with Mostofsky, January 17, 2013.

  
5
   
Why is the sky blue? . . .
Drawn from Nicholas Christakis’s essay in John Brockman’s book
This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2013).

  
6
   
The physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks . . .
From the YouTube clip “Kids Are Born Scientists,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ACkc4POpaU.

  
7
   
A recent University of Michigan study . . .
“When Preschoolers Ask Questions, They Want Explanations,”
Science Daily
press release, November 13, 2009.

  
8
   
they immediately begin to ask fewer . . .
Lory Hough, “Why Do Kids Believe in God but Not Harry Potter?”
Ed., the Magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education
, May 2012.

  
9
   
The child psychologist Alison Gopnik has . . .
Alison Gopnik, “New Research Shows That Teaching Kids More and More, at Ever-Younger Ages, May Backfire,”
Slate
, March 16, 2011; Gopnik’s quote about kids being the R&D division of the human species is from her appearance on ABC’s
Nightline
, April 2, 2010; her views on similarities between children’s learning and scientific learning appear in her paper “Scientific Thinking in Young Children,” published at the University of California, Berkeley, and also appearing on the website of
Science
,
September 28, 2012,
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6102/1623.abstract.

10
   
In 2010, Professor Kyung-Hee Kim . . .
Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, “The Creativity Crisis,”
Newsweek
, July 10, 2010. Also, Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant, “The 7 Biggest Creativity Killers,”
Fast Company
, June 12, 2012.

11
   The chart on the decline of questioning as children age was provided by the Right Question Institute, based on data on question-asking gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics for the 2009 “Nation’s Report Card,” http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/main2009/2011455.pdf.

12
   
When the engagement level of students . . .
The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly a half million students in grades five through twelve from more than seventeen hundred public schools in 2012. More on the study can be found in the Gallup blog post “The School Cliff: Student Engagement Drops with Each School Year,” January 7, 2013, http://thegallupblog.gallup.com/2013/01/the-school-cliff-student-engagement.html.

13
   
The author Daniel Pink asked . . .
Daniel Pink, “Does the ‘school cliff’ matter more than the fiscal cliff?” Daniel H. Pink blog, January 7, 2013, http://www.danpink.com/2013/01/does-the-school-cliff-matter-more-than-the-fiscal-cliff/.

14
   
“I have so many state standards . . .”
Amy Harmon, “May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging,”
New York Times
, February 5, 2011.

15
   
Dominic Randolph . . . uses the corporate term . . .
From my interview with Randolph, December 2012.

16
   
Susan Engel of Williams College did . . .
Susan Engel, “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools,”
Harvard Educational Review
, Winter 2011.

17
   
Why do we want kids to “sit still” in class? . . .
Susan Saulny, “Students Stand When Called Upon, and When Not,”
New York Times
, February 24, 2009.

18
   
“Our grandfathers and great grandfathers . . .”
Godin,
Stop Stealing Dreams
.

19
   
“It seems the main rule that . . .”
Jamie Angell, “Explaining Groening—One on one with the sultan of fun,”
Simpsons Illustrated
1, no. 9 (Summer 1993).

20
   
New York’s Harlem neighborhood in . . .
I am greatly indebted to Deborah Meier for doing a series of interviews with me in late 2012 and early 2013. Material was also drawn from Meier’s blog, Deborah Meier on Education, http://deborahmeier.com/.

21
   
Meier opened the first of her schools . . .
In my description of Central Park East schools, I quoted and drew heavily from Seymour Fliegel’s excellent article “Debbie Meier and the Dawn of Central Park East,”
City Journal
, Winter 1994.

22
   
“an astonishingly rich educational program” . . .
Ibid.

23
   
But such schools still represent just . . .
From my interviews with Nikhil Goyal, April 2013; for more, see Goyal’s book,
One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School
(Bravura Books, 2012).

24
   
alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia . . .
Peter Sims, “The Montessori Mafia,”
Wall Street Journal
, April 5, 2011.

25
   
Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo! . . .
Steven Levy,
“Larry Page Wants to Return Google to Its Startup Roots,”
Wired
, April 2011.

26
   
Dan Meyer, a high school math teacher . . .
Meyer gave his talk, “Math Class Needs a Makeover,” at TEDxNYED, March 2010.

27
   
Why do movie tickets cost the same for hits or duds? . . .
Robert H. Frank, “How Can They Charge That? (and Other Questions),”
New York Times
, May 11, 2013.