The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (26 page)

So ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and the most complex forms of communication are cognitive areas where people still seem to have the advantage, and also seem likely to hold on to it for some time to come. Unfortunately, though, these skills are not emphasized in most educational environments today. Instead, primary education often focuses on rote memorization of facts, and on the skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic—the ‘three
R
s,’ as Tory MP Sir William Curtis named them around 1825 (incidentally, it’s unlikely that a machine would have given them a moniker as memorable, if technically inaccurate, as the ‘three
R
s’).
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To Switch the Skills, Switch the Schools

Education researcher Sugata Mitra, who has showed how much poor children in the developing world can learn on their own when provided with nothing more than some appropriate technology, has a provocative explanation for the emphasis on rote learning. In his speech at the 2013 TED conference, where his work was recognized with the one-million-dollar TED prize, he gave an account of when and why these skills came to be valued.

I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire].

What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. . . . They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.
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Of course, we like this explanation because it describes things as computers and machines. But more fundamentally, we like it because it points out that the three
R
s were once the skills that workers needed to contribute to the most advanced economy of the time. As Mitra points out, the educational system of Victorian England was designed quite well for its time and place. But that time and place are no longer ours. As Mitra continued:

The Victorians were great engineers. They engineered a system that was so robust that it’s still with us today, continuously producing identical people for a machine that no longer exists. . . . [Today] the clerks are the computers. They’re there in thousands in every office. And you have people who guide those computers to do their clerical jobs. Those people don’t need to be able to write beautifully by hand. They don’t need to be able to multiply numbers in their heads. They do need to be able to read. In fact, they need to be able to read discerningly.
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Mitra’s work shows that children, even poor and uneducated ones, can learn to read discerningly. The children in his studies form teams, use technology to search broadly for relevant information, discuss what they’re learning with one another, and eventually come up with new (to them) ideas that very often turn out to be correct. In other words, they acquire and demonstrate the skills of ideation, broad-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication. So the “self-organizing learning environments” (SOLEs) Mitra observed seem to be teaching children the skills that will give them advantages over digital labor.

We probably shouldn’t be too surprised by this; SOLEs have been around for a while, and have produced many people who have excelled at racing with machines. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Italian physician and researcher Maria Montessori developed the primary educational system that still bears her name. Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales).

These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.” As a
Wall Street Journal
blog post by Peter Sims put it, “the Montessori educational approach might be the surest route to joining the creative elite, which are so overrepresented by the school’s alumni that one might suspect a Montessori Mafia.” Whether or not he’s part of this mafia, Andy will vouch for the power of SOLEs. He was a Montessori kid for the earliest years of his schooling, and agrees completely with Larry Page that “part of that training [was] not following rules and orders, and being self-motivated, questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a little bit differently.”
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Our recommendations about how people can remain valuable knowledge workers in the new machine age are straightforward: work to improve the skills of ideation, large-frame pattern recognition, and complex communication instead of just the three
R
s. And whenever possible, take advantage of self-organizing learning environments, which have a track record of developing these skills in people.

Failing College

Of course, this is easier said than done. And it appears that it’s not being done very well in many educational environments. One of the strongest bodies of evidence we’ve come across that suggests students aren’t acquiring the right skills is the work of sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and summarized in their book
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
and subsequent research.
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Arum and Roksa made use of the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA), a recently developed test given to college students to assess their abilities in critical thinking, written communication, problem solving, and analytic reasoning. Although the CLA is administered via computer, it requires essays instead of multiple-choice answers. One of its main components is the ‘performance task,’ which presents students with a set of background documents and gives them ninety minutes to write an essay requiring them to extract information from the materials given and develop a point of view or recommendation. In short, the performance task is a good test of ideation, pattern recognition, and complex communication.

Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues tracked more than 2,300 students enrolled full-time in four-year degree programs at a range of American colleges and universities. Their findings are alarming: 45 percent of students demonstrate no significant improvement on the CLA after two years of college, and 36 percent did not improve at all even after four years. The average improvement on the test after four years was quite small. Consider a student who scored at the fiftieth percentile as a freshman. If he experienced average improvement over four years of college, then went back and took the test again with another group of incoming freshmen, he would score only in the sixty-eighth percentile. The CLA is so new that we don’t know if these gains would have been bigger in the past, but previous research using other tests indicates that they were, and that only a few decades ago the average college student learned a great deal between freshman and senior years.

What accounts for these disappointing results? Arum, Roksa, and their colleagues document that college students today spend only 9 percent of their time studying (compared to 51 percent on “socializing, recreating, and other”), much less than in previous decades, and that only 42 percent reported having taken a class the previous semester that required them to read at least forty pages a week and write at least twenty pages total. They write that, “The portrayal of higher education emerging from [this research] is one of an institution focused more on social than academic experiences. Students spend very little time studying, and professors rarely demand much from them in terms of reading and writing.”

They also find, however, that at every college studied some students show great improvement on the CLA. In general, these are students who spent more time studying (especially studying alone), took courses with more required reading and writing, and had more demanding faculty. This pattern fits well into conclusions by education researchers Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini, who summarized more than twenty years of research in their book
How College Affects Students
. They write that “the impact of college is largely determined by individual effort and involvement in the academic, interpersonal, and extracurricular offerings on a campus.”
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This work leads directly to our most fundamental recommendation to students and their parents: study hard, using technology and all other available resources to ‘fill up your toolkit’ and acquire skills and abilities that will be needed in the second machine age.

Tools to Help You Stand Out

Acquiring an excellent education is the best way to not be left behind as technology races ahead. The discouraging news is that today many students seem to be squandering at least some of their educational opportunities. The good news, though, is that technology is now providing more of these opportunities than ever before.

Motivated students and modern technologies are a formidable combination. The best educational resources available online allow users to create self-organized and self-paced learning environments—ones that allow them to spend as much time as they need with the material, and also to take tests that tell them if they mastered it. One of the best known of these resources is Khan Academy, which was started by then–hedge fund manager Salman Khan as a series of online doodles and YouTube video lectures intended to teach math to his young relatives. Their immense popularity led him to quit his job in 2009 and devote himself to creating online educational materials, freely available to all. By May 2013, Khan Academy included more than 4,100 videos, most no more than a few minutes long, on subjects ranging from arithmetic to calculus to physics to art history. These videos had been viewed more than 250 million times, and the Academy’s students had tackled more than one billion automatically generated problems.
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Khan Academy was originally aimed at primary-school children, but similar tools and techniques have been also applied to higher education, where they’re known as massive online open courses, or MOOCs. One of the most interesting experiments in this area came in 2011 when Sebastian Thrun, a top artificial intelligence researcher (and one of the main people behind Google’s driverless car), announced with a single email that he would be teaching his graduate-level AI course not only to students at Stanford but also as a MOOC available for free over the Internet. Over 160,000 students signed up for the course. Tens of thousands of them completed all exercises, exams, and other requirements, and some of them did quite well. The top performer in the course at Stanford, in fact, was only the 411th best among all the online students. As Thrun put it, “We just found over 400 people in the world who outperformed the top Stanford student.”
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In chapter 9, we described the growing gap in earnings between those with and without college degrees. Our MIT colleague David Autor summarizes the research by writing that “large payoffs from schooling are increasingly associated with the attainment of four-year and postcollege degrees. . . . Workers with less than a college education cluster relatively closer together in the earnings distribution while the most educated groups pull away.”
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College graduates are also much less likely to be unemployed than the less educated. Economics reporter Catherine Rampell points out that college graduates are the only group that has seen employment growth since the start of the Great Recession in 2007, and in October of 2011 the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree holders, at 5.8 percent, was only about half that of those with associate’s degrees (10.6 percent) and a third that of those who stopped after high school (16.2 percent).
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The college premium exists in part because so many types of raw data are getting dramatically cheaper, and as data get cheaper, the bottleneck increasingly is the ability to interpret and use data. This reflects the career advice that Google chief economist Hal Varian frequently gives: seek to be an indispensable complement to something that’s getting cheap and plentiful. Examples include data scientists, writers of mobile phone apps, and genetic counselors, who have come into demand as more people have their genes sequenced. Bill Gates has said that he chose to go into software when he saw how cheap and ubiquitous computers, especially microcomputers, were becoming. Jeff Bezos systematically analyzed the bottlenecks and opportunities created by low-cost online commerce, particularly the ability to index large numbers of products, before he set up Amazon. Today, the cognitive skills of college graduates—including not only science, technology, engineering, and math, the so-called STEM disciplines, but also humanities, arts, and social sciences—are often complements to low-cost data and cheap computer power. This helps them command a premium wage.

However, another part of the college premium is less encouraging. More and more employers are requiring college degrees, even for entry-level jobs. As Rampell writes, “The college degree is becoming the new high school diploma: the new minimum requirement, albeit an expensive one, for getting even the lowest-level job. . . . Across industries and geographic areas, many other jobs that didn’t used to require a diploma—positions like dental hygienists, cargo agents, clerks and claims adjusters—are increasingly requiring one.”
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This ‘degree inflation’ is troubling because a college education is expensive and causes many people to go into debt. By the end of 2011, in fact, student loan debt in America was greater than either total outstanding car loans or credit card debt.
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We hope that MOOCs and other educational innovations eventually provide a lower-cost alternative to traditional colleges, and one that is taken seriously by employers, but until that time comes a college degree remains a vital stepping stone to most careers.