The Element

CHAPTER ELEVEN Making the Grade

MANY OF THE PEOPLE we’ve met in this book didn’t do well at school, or at least didn’t enjoy being there. Ofcourse, many people do do well in their schools and love what they have to offer. But too many graduate or leave early, unsure of their real talents and not knowing what direction to take next. Too many feel that what they’re good at isn’t valued by schools.

Too many think they’re not good at anything.

Sometimes, getting away from school is the best thing that can happen to a great mind. Sir Richard Branson was born in England in 1950. He attended Stowe School, and he was very popular there, making friends easily and excelling at sports. He was so good at athletics, in fact, that he became the captain of the soccer and cricket teams. He also showed an early flair for business. By the time he was fifteen, he’d started two enterprises, one selling Christmas trees and the other selling small Australian birds known as budgerigars. Neither business was particularly successful, but Richard had an obvious aptitude for this kind of thing.

What he didn’t seem to have an affinity for was school. His grades were poor, and he disliked the whole business of attending classes. He tried to make a go of it, but it just wasn’t a comfortable fit. At the age of sixteen, he decided he’d had enough and left, never to return.

Richard’s experience at school confounded those who taught him. Clearly he was bright, clearly he was industrious, clearly he was personable and capable of putting his mind to good use—but equally clearly, he was completely unwilling to conform to the school’s standards. Commenting on Richard’s decision to drop out, his head teacher said, “By the time he is twenty‐one, Richard will either be in jail or be a millionaire, and I have no idea which it will be.”

Out in the real world now, Richard needed to find something to do with his life. Sports were not an option; he wasn’t skilled enough to be a professional athlete. However, something else stirred his passions at least as much, and he had a strong feeling that he was very good at this—he would become an entrepreneur.

Richard Branson soon started his first real enterprise, a magazine called Student. He followed this in 1970 with a mail‐order business selling records. The mail‐order business ultimately became a chain of record stores—you might know them now as Virgin Megastores. This was the first of his enterprises to carry the Virgin name. But it was hardly the last. Not long after he launched the stores, he started Virgin Records. Then, in the 1980s, he took on an entirely new business with Virgin Atlantic Airways, starting the airline with virtually no cash outlay and one 747 that he leased from Boeing. Today, his empire also includes Virgin Cola, Virgin Trains, Virgin Fuel, and, one of his most ambitious ventures, Virgin Galactic, the first commercial endeavor to send people into space. His decision to forgo school and become an entrepreneur was inspired. And his head teacher’s prophecy did turn out to be true—at least the part about his becoming a millionaire by the time he was twenty‐one.

Branson eventually learned that one of the reasons for his poor academic performance was dyslexia. Among other things, this caused him to have serious difficulties understanding math. Even now, in spite of the billions he is worth, he still can’t navigate his way around a profit‐and‐loss sheet. For a long time, he couldn’t even grasp the difference between net and gross income. One day, in exasperation, his director of finance took him aside after a Virgin board meeting and said, “Richard, think of it this way: if you go fishing and throw a net into the sea, everything you catch in the net is yours to keep. That’s your ‘net’ profit. Everything else is the gross.”

“Finally,” Richard said, “I got the difference.”

Branson’s flamboyant style of entrepreneurship and huge success in so many fields earned him a knighthood in 1999. None of this seemed remotely likely when he was struggling to make passing grades at school. Perhaps it should have been, though.

“The fact is,” he told me, “all the great entrepreneurs of my generation really struggled at school and couldn’t wait to get out and make something of themselves.”

Paul McCartney didn’t find school nearly as uninspiring as Richard Branson did. In fact, Paul actually considered becoming a teacher until he decided to become a Beatle instead. Still, one subject that left him entirely unengaged was music.

“I didn’t like music at school because we weren’t really taught it. Our class was just thirty teenage Liverpool lads. The music teacher would come in and put an old LP of classical music on this old turntable and then walk out. He’d spend the rest of the lesson in the common room having a cigarette. So as soon as he’d gone, we turned the gramophone off and posted a guy at the door. We got the playing cards and cigarettes out and spent the whole lesson playing cards. It was great. We just thought of music as card‐playing lessons. Then when he was coming back, we put the record back on, right near the end. He asked us what we thought, and we’d say ‘It was great that, sir!’ I really can’t remember anything else about music at school. Honestly. That’s all we ever did.

“The music teacher completely failed to teach us anything about music. I mean, he had George Harrison and Paul McCartney in his classes as kids and he couldn’t interest us in music. George and I both went through school and no one ever thought we had any kind of musical talent at all. The only way it would ever show then was if you were in a little band or something. Sometimes people would get guitars out at the end of term. John was in a band like that in his school. But otherwise, no one would ever notice you were interested in music. And nobody taught us anything about it.”

Finding our Element is essential for us as individuals and for the well‐being of our communities. Education should be one of the main processes that take us to the Element. Too often, though, it serves the opposite function. This is a very serious issue for all of us. In many systems, the problems are getting worse.

What do we do about this?

This Looked‐Down‐Upon Thing

I receive many e‐mail messages from students around the world. This is one from a seventeen‐year‐old student in New Jersey who watched the speech I gave at the TED Conference in 2006 (TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design):

Here I am sitting quietly unable to sleep in my room. It’s currently 6:00 a.m., and this is the period of my life that is supposed to change me forever. After a few weeks, I will be a senior and colleges seem to be the main topic of my life right now… and I hate it. It’s not that I don’t want to go to college, it’s just that I had thoughts of doing other things that wouldn’t suppress my ideas. I was so dead confident about something I wanted to do and devote my time with, but to everyone around me it seems like getting a Ph.D. or some boring job is key to being successful in life. To me I thought that spending your time on something boring and meaningless was a bad idea. This is the one opportunity in my life… heck it’s the one life I’ll ever get and if I don’t do something drastic, I will never get a chance to do it. I hate it when I get some funny look from my parents or my friends’ parents when I tell them I want to pursue something completely different than the trite old medical‐ or business‐related job.

Somehow, I stumbled upon a video with a guy talking about ideas I’ve had in my head for some time now and it utterly shook me to euphoria.… If everyone wants to be a pharmacist, in the future, a job in the medical field won’t be such a prestigious profession. I don’t want money, I don’t want some lousy “expensive” car. I want to do something meaningful with my life, but support is something I rarely get. I just want to tell you that you’ve personally made me believe once again that I can follow my dream. As a painter, a sketcher, a music writer, a sculptor, and a writer, I truly thank you for giving me hope. My art teacher always gives me stares when I would do something odd. I once poured my paintbrush cleaning water on top of a painting my teacher said was “completed and ready to be graded.” Boy, would you have loved the look on her face. These boundaries are so clearly set in school and I want to break free and create the ideas that come from my head at three in the morning. I hate drawing plain old shoes or trees and I don’t like having this “grading” of art. Since when should someone “grade” art? I bet if Pablo Picasso handed in one of his pieces to his old art teacher, she’d absolutely flip and fail him. I asked my teacher if I could incorporate sculpture with canvas and have both intertwined together and have my sculpture give the illusion that the painting was alive and coming towards the viewer.… Her response was that it wasn’t allowed! I am going to take an AP art studio class my senior year and they tell me that I can’t do three‐dimensional art? It’s insane and we need people like you to come down to New Jersey and give a speech or two about this looked‐down‐upon thing called creativity.

It pains me when the minute I say I want to be an artist when I grow up, all I get are laughs or frowns. Why can’t people do the things they love to do? Is happiness a mansion, some big‐screen television screen, watching numbers scroll go by as you cringe when S&P goes down a point?… This world has turned into an overpopulated, scary, and competitive place. Thank you for those nineteen minutes and twenty‐nine seconds of pure truth. Cheers.

This student is railing against two things that most people eventually discover in their education. One is the hierarchy of disciplines in schools that we discussed in the first chapter. The other is that conformity has a higher value than diversity.

Conformity or Creativity

Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform. Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism. In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support. This is especially true in high schools, where school systems base education on the principles of the assembly line and the efficient division of labor. Schools divide the curriculum into specialist segments: some teachers install math in the students, and others install history. They arrange the day into standard units of time, marked out by the ringing of bells, much like a factory announcing the beginning of the workday and the end of breaks. Students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market. I realize this isn’t an exact analogy and that it ignores many of the subtleties of the system, but it is close enough.

This system has had many benefits and successes. It has done well for many people whose real strength is conventional academic work, and most people who go through thirteen years of public education are at least moderately literate and capable of making change for a twenty. But dropout rates, especially in the United States, are extraordinarily high, and levels of disaffection among students, teachers, and parents are higher still. Increasingly, the structure and character of industrial education are creaking under the strain of the twenty‐first century. A powerful symptom of the problem is the declining value of a college degree.

When I was a student, my contemporaries and I repeatedly heard the story that if we worked hard and did well—and certainly if we went to college and received a degree—we’d have a secure job for the rest of our lives. Back then, the idea that a person with a college degree would be out of work was preposterous. The only reason that a college‐educated person would not have a job was if he or she didn’t want a job.

I left college in 1972 and I, for one, did not want a job. I’d been going to school since I was five, and I wanted a break. I wanted to find myself, so I decided to go to India, where I thought I might be. I didn’t get to India, as it happens. I only got as far as London, where there are a lot of Indian restaurants. But I never doubted that whenever I decided to get a job, I would just go out and get one.

It’s not like that now. Students leaving college are no longer guaranteed a job in the field for which they may be qualified. Many graduates leaving top universities are finding themselves doing relatively unskilled work or heading home again to figure out their next move. In fact, in January 2004, the number of unemployed American college graduates actually exceeded the number of unemployed high school dropouts. It’s difficult to believe that this would be possible, but in fact, it is.

Problems for college graduates exist in many places in the world. A report from the Association of Graduate Recruiters in the UK noted that 3.4 percent fewer college‐level job openings were available in 2003 than in the previous year. An average of forty‐two people applied for each of these jobs, as opposed to thirty‐seven the year before, meaning that the scramble for good jobs is becoming more frantic, even with a high‐level education. China, which boasts the world’s fastest‐growing economy, has seen huge numbers of college graduates (some estimates have it at 30 percent of the more than three million who graduate annually) going unemployed. What will happen when their economy slows down?

It is still true, though, that anybody starting out in the job market is better off having a college education than not having one. A recent U.S. Census Bureau report indicates that college graduates can expect to earn in excess of $1 million more than people with only high school degrees over their lifetimes. Those with professional degrees can earn greater than $3 million more.

But the plain fact is that a college degree is not worth a fraction of what it once was. A degree was once a passport to a good job. Now, at best, it’s a visa. It only gives you provisional residence in the job market. This is not because the standards of college degrees are lower than they used to be. That’s very hard to judge. It’s mainly because so many more people have them now. In the industrial period, most people did manual and blue‐collar work, and only a minority actually went to college. Those who did found that their degree certificates were like Willy Wonka’s golden ticket. Now, with so many people graduating college, four‐year degrees are more like the shiny paper in which they wrap the chocolate bars.

Why are there so many more college graduates? The first reason is that, in the developed world at least, the new economies of the twenty‐first century are driven more and more by innovations in digital technologies and information systems. They depend less on manual work and more and more on what my uncle used to call “head work.” So higher levels of education are essential for more and more people.

The second reason is that there are simply more people in the world now than ever before. The population of the world, as I noted earlier, has doubled in the last thirty years from three to six billion and may be heading for nine billion by the middle of the century. Putting these factors together, some estimates suggest that more people will be graduating from higher education in the next thirty years than the total number since the beginning of history.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD), in the decade from 1995 to 2005, the graduation rates of the countries with the most powerful economies grew 12 percent. More than 80 percent of young Australians graduate from college now, while nearly the same percentage of Norwegians do. More than 60 percent of American students get college degrees. In China, more than 17 percent percent of college‐age students go to college, and this percentage is increasing rapidly. Not long ago, it was closer to 4 percent.

One of the results of this huge growth in higher education is that the competition to get into many universities—even those beyond the vaunted first tier—has become increasingly intense. This pressure is driving a new profession of commercial coaches and college preparatory cramming programs. This is especially true in Japan, where “cram schools” exist all over the country. There are actually chains of them. These operations teach pre‐schoolers, sometimes even one‐year‐olds, to prepare for entrance exams to prestigious elementary schools (the necessary first step toward placement in a high‐level Japanese university). There, small children perform drills in literature, grammar, math, and a wide variety of other subjects to gain an edge on their “competition.” So much for recess and arts and crafts. It’s a common belief that a potential Japanese executive’s future is largely determined by the time he or she enters first grade.

This is also the case in the United States and in other parts of the world. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, there is fierce competition for places in particular kindergarten schools. Children are being interviewed at the age of three to see if they are suitable material. I assume that earnest selection panels are thumbing through the résumés of these toddlers, assessing their achievements to date—“You mean this is it? You’ve been around for almost thirty‐six months, and this is all you’ve done? You seem to have spent the first six months doing nothing but lying around and gurgling.”

Cram schools exist all over the globe. In England, cram schools focus on getting kids through college entrance exams, as do SAT prep courses in the United States. In India, cram schools known as “tutorials” help students drive through competitive tests. In Turkey, the dershane system pushes students toward getting ahead, with extensive programs for students on weekends and after school during the week.

It’s difficult to believe that an education system that places this kind of pressure on children is of benefit to anyone—the children or their communities. Most countries are making efforts to reform education. In my view, they are going about it in exactly the wrong way.

Reforming Education

Nearly every system of public education on earth is in the process of being reformed—in Asia, the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. There are two main reasons. The first is economic. Every region in the world is facing the same economic challenge—how to educate their people to find work and create wealth in a world that is changing faster than ever. The second reason is cultural. Communities throughout the world want to take advantage of globalization, but they don’t want to lose their own identities in the process. France wants to stay French, for example, and Japan wants to stay Japanese. Cultural identities are always evolving, but education is one of the ways in which communities try to control the rate of change. This is why there’s always such heat generated around the content of education.

The mistake that many policymakers make is to believe that in education the best way to face the future is by improving what they did in the past. There are three major processes in education: the curriculum, which is what the school system expects students to learn; pedagogy, the process by which the system helps students to do it; and assessment, the process of judging how well they are doing. Most reform movements focus on the curriculum and the assessment.

Typically, policymakers try to take control of the curriculum and specify exactly what students should learn. In doing this, they tend to reinforce the old hierarchy of subjects, putting greater emphasis on the disciplines at the top of the existing hierarchy (the back‐to‐basics drive we discussed earlier). In practice, this means that they push other disciplines—and the students who excel at them—even further to the margins of education. In the United States, for example, more than 70 percent of school districts have cut back or eliminated arts programs because of No Child Left Behind.

Next, they put greater emphasis on assessment. This is not wrong in itself. The problem is the method used. Typically, reform movements rely increasingly on the proliferation of standardized tests. One of the principal effects is to discourage innovation and creativity in education, the very things that make schools and students thrive. Several research studies show the negative impact of unrestricted standardized testing on student and teacher morale. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence too.

A friend recently told me that his eight‐year‐old announced in October that her teacher “hadn’t done any teaching” since the school year began. She said this because her school insisted that the teacher focus on preparing for the upcoming statewide standardized tests. My friend’s daughter found the endless review in preparation for these tests boring, and she would have preferred that her teacher “teach” instead of doing this. Interestingly, when my friend and his wife had their semiannual meeting with the teacher, the teacher complained bitterly that she gets to spend much less time on a reading program she loves because the school administration forces her to prep her students for the district‐wide tests that come up every marking period. Good teachers find their own creativity suppressed.

Third, policymakers penalize “failing” schools. In the case of No Child Left Behind, schools that fail to meet guidelines five years in a row, regardless of circumstances such as socioeconomics, face the termination of teachers and principals, school closures, and the takeover of schools by private organizations or the state. These schools struggle to conform to the hierarchy and the culture of standardization, fearfully eschewing nearly all efforts at creativity or adaptation to the specific needs and talents of the students.

Let me be clear here. I’m not against standardized tests in principle. If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I want to know what my blood sugar and cholesterol levels are in comparison with everybody else’s. I want my doctor to use a standard test and a standard scale, and not ones that he thought up in the car on the way to work. But the tests in themselves are only useful as part of a diagnosis. The doctor needs to know what to make of the results in my particular case, and to let me know what I should do about them given my particular physiology.

It’s the same in education. Used in the right way, standardized tests can provide essential data to support and improve education. The problem comes when these tests become more than simply a tool of education and turn into the focus of it.

Whatever its educational effects, standardized testing is now big business. There’s a considerable profit motive associated with increasing reliance on standardized tests. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), in the United States individual states will spend in the range of $1.9 billion and $5.3 billion each between 2002 and 2008 to implement the tests mandated by No Child Left Behind. This number includes direct costs only. Indirect costs could make these figures ten times larger. Most of this money goes to private testing companies that create, administer, and grade the tests. Standardized testing has become a booming industry. Using the GAO figures, these testing companies may generate considerably more than $100 billion in business over seven years.

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet mentioned teaching. The reason is that policymakers, for the most part, don’t seem to understand its fundamental importance in raising standards in education. My own extremely strong belief, based on decades of work in the field, is that the best way to improve education is not to focus primarily on the curriculum, nor on assessment, important though these things are. The most powerful method of improving education is to invest in the improvement of teaching and the status of great teachers. There isn’t a great school anywhere that doesn’t have great teachers working in it. But there are plenty of poor schools with shelves of curriculum standards and reams of standardized tests.

The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions. The key is to embrace the core principles of the Element. Some of the most invigorating and successful innovations in education around the world illustrate the real power of this approach.

Transforming Education

In the first part of my career, I worked particularly in the field of drama education. I did this because I was always deeply impressed by the power of drama to invigorate the imaginations of children and to promote a strong sense of collaboration, self‐esteem, and community feeling in classrooms and schools. Children learn best when they learn from each other and when their teachers are learning with them. As I mentioned earlier, when I met my wife and partner, Terry, she was teaching drama in an elementary school in Knowsley, a low‐income and difficult part of the city of Liverpool. Nonetheless, the school was achieving remarkable results. The reasons were simple. First, the school was led by an inspirational head teacher who understood the lives the children were leading. He also understood the real processes by which they could be excited to learn. Second, he hired staff members, like Terry, who were passionate in their disciplines and gifted at connecting with the children. This is Terry’s account of the school’s approach:

“I passionately believe that, when it is properly integrated into the curriculum, drama can transform the culture of a school. I know this from my own experience as a teacher in one of the poorest areas of Liverpool. We actually kept clean clothes at the school for some of the kids to wear while attending classes. They would change into them in the morning and change out of them to go home. We discovered that if they were just given the clothes, within a week, they would be in just as a bad a state as the rest of their things, or they would mysteriously disappear.

“Some of the children lived in terrible circumstances at home. I remember that in one of our creative writing classes, one of the girls wrote a story about dead babies. We were struck by the vividness of this story, and the school contacted social services to check what was happening at home. They discovered that her premature baby sister’s body was rotting under her bed. We had overcrowded classrooms and every imaginable social problem, but we also had a world‐class group of committed teachers and a visionary headmaster.

“He believed in playing to our strengths and that teaching should be child‐centered. He called a staff meeting to discuss how we could redesign the school day and asked each of us to talk about our subject specialization and what we loved to teach best. At that time it was usual for children to stay with their class teacher all day. Over the course of a few months of meetings we came up with a plan. In the mornings, we would teach our class reading, writing, and math, and then in the afternoon we would teach our favorite subject. This meant that over the course of a week each teacher was teaching the whole school.

“As a drama teacher, my job was to look at the topics each year group was studying in all subjects and to bring them to life in the hall. Another teacher would take art, another geography, another history, and so on. Then we would pick the topics for each year group. When the ten‐year‐olds read the story of the French Revolution, they built a guillotine with the help of the science teacher, and then we constructed trials, held executions, and even spoke some French. We “decapitated” a few teachers, too.

“When the topic was archaeology in Roman times, we performed adapted versions of Julius Caesar. Because they had become comfortable with the process, when it came time to put on the school plays, the kids were confident and desperate to be involved, to perform, sew costumes, build sets, write, sing, and dance. They couldn’t wait to get to their lessons. It was a lot of fun, and it was so fulfilling to see how kids developed social skills and interacted.

“They were using their imaginations in ways they never had before. Kids who had never excelled at anything suddenly found they could shine. Kids who couldn’t sit still didn’t have to, and quite a few discovered they could act, entertain, write, debate, and stand up with confidence to address an entire group. The standard of all their work improved dramatically. There was great support from parents, and the governors used the school as a model. It was all because of the head teacher, Albert Hunt, a wonderful man.”

Unlike his experience with music classes, Paul McCartney had a wonderful experience with the teacher who introduced him to Chaucer because that teacher chose to do so in a way that he knew would reach the teenaged boy.

“The best teacher I had was our English teacher, Alan Dur‐band. He was great. I was good with him too because he understood our mentality as fifteen‐ and sixteen‐year‐old boys. I did Advanced Level English with him. We were studying Chaucer and it was impossible to follow it. Shakespeare was hard enough but Chaucer was worse. It was like a completely foreign language. You know, ‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,’ all that type of thing. But Mr. Durband gave us a modern English translation by Neville Coghill, which had the original Chaucer on one page and the modern version on the facing page, so you could get the story and what it was really about.

“And he told us that Chaucer was a really popular writer in his time and quite bawdy. He knew that would get us interested, and it did. He told us to read The Miller’s Tale. We couldn’t believe how bawdy it was. The bit when she pokes her bum out of the window and he talks about kissing a beard… I was hooked. He really turned me on to literature. He understood that the key for us would be sex and it was. When he turned that key, I was hooked.”

There are inspiring models of education at work throughout the world. In the northern Italian town of Reggio Emilia, a breakthrough method of preschool education arose in the early 1960s. Known now internationally as the Reggio approach, this program sees young children as intellectually curious, resourceful, and full of potential. The curriculum is child‐directed; teachers take their lessons where student interests dictate. The setting of the school is vitally important and considered an essential teaching tool. Teachers fill the rooms with dramatic play areas, worktables, and multiple environments where the kids can interact, problem‐solve, and learn to communicate effectively.

Reggio schools spend a great deal of time on the arts, believing that children learn multiple “symbolic languages” through painting, music, puppetry, drama, and other art forms to explore their talents in all of the ways in which humans learn. A poem from founder Loris Malaguzzi underscores this:

The child

is made of one hundred.

The child has

a hundred languages

a hundred hands

a hundred thoughts

a hundred ways of thinking

of playing, of speaking.

A hundred always a hundred

ways of listening

of marveling of loving

a hundred joys

for singing and understanding

a hundred worlds

to discover

a hundred worlds

to invent

a hundred worlds

to dream.

The child has

a hundred languages

(and a hundred hundred more)

but they steal ninety‐nine.

The school and the culture

separate the head from the body.

They tell the child:

to think without hands

to do without head

to listen and not to speak

to understand without joy

to love and to marvel

only at Easter and Christmas.

They tell the child:

to discover the world already there

and of the hundred

they steal ninety‐nine.

They tell the child:

that work and play

reality and fantasy

science and imagination

sky and earth

reason and dream

are things

that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child

that the hundred is not there.

The child says:

No way. The hundred is there.

Reggio teachers build the school year around weeklong short‐term projects and yearlong long‐term projects in which students make discoveries from a variety of perspectives, learn to hypothesize, and discover how to collaborate with one another, all in the context of a curriculum that feels a great deal like play. The teachers consider themselves researchers for the children, helping them to explore more of what interests them, and they see themselves as continuing to learn alongside their pupils.

For the past two decades, Reggio schools have received considerable acclaim, winning the LEGO Prize, the Hans Christian Andersen Prize, and an award from the Kohl Foundation. There are currently schools all over the world (including thirty American states) using the Reggio approach.

The town of Grangeton is very different from the town of Reggio Emilia. In fact, it isn’t technically a town at all. It’s actually an environment run by elementary school students at Grange Primary, in Long Eaton, Nottinghamshire, in central England. The town has a mayor and a town council, a newspaper and a television studio, a food market and a museum, and children are in charge of every bit of it. Head teacher Richard Gerver believes that “learning has to mean something for young people.” So when the school board hired him to turn around the flagging school, he took the dramatic approach of creating Grangeton. The goal was to inspire kids to learn by connecting their lessons to their place in the real world. “My key words are experiential and contextual,” Gerver told me.

Gerver changed around the curriculum at the school entirely— and he did it while working within the guidelines created by national testing. The students at Grange are involved in rigorous classroom work, but all of it comes to them in a way that allows them to understand the practical applications. Math means more when put in the context of running a cash register and estimating profits. Literacy and writing skills gain additional meaning when employed in the service of an original film screenplay. Science comes alive when students use technology to make television shows. Music appreciation gains new purpose when children need to determine playlists for the radio station. Civics makes sense when the council has decisions to make. Gerver regularly brings industry professionals in to help the students with technical training. The BBC is actively involved here.

The children in the upper grades hold the positions with the greatest responsibility (and their curriculum is most heavily weighted toward the Grangeton model), but younger students take an active role nearly as soon as they get to the school. “At no stage are we giving them the message that we’re teaching them to pass an exam,” noted Gerver. “They are learning because they can see how it moves their community of Grangeton onwards— exams are a way of assessing their progress to that end. It’s giving the children a completely different perspective of why they are here.”

Attendance at Grange is well above national averages. Meanwhile, the students perform in exemplary fashion on the national tests. In 2004, 91 percent of them exhibited proficiency in English (a 30‐point increase from 2002, the year before the program started), 87 percent exhibited proficiency in math (a 14‐point increase), and 100 percent exhibited proficiency in science (a 20‐point increase). “The project has had a remarkable impact on attitudes,” said Gerver. “Where pupils were de‐motivated and lackluster, particularly the boys and the potential high achievers, there is now real excitement and commitment. That ethos has fed dramatically into the classroom, where teachers have adapted and developed their teaching and learning to become more experiential and contextual. Children are more confident and as a result more independent. Learning at Grange has a real purpose for the children, and they feel part of something very exciting. The effect has also fed into staff and parents, who have begun to contribute so much to the project’s further development.”

A recent report from Ofsted, the British school inspection agency, noted of Grange, “Pupils love coming to school and talk enthusiastically about the many exciting experiences on offer, tackling these with eagerness, excitement, and confidence.”

In the state of Oklahoma there is a groundbreaking program called A+ Schools that builds on a tremendously successful program that began in North Carolina. This program, now in use in more than forty schools across Oklahoma, emphasizes the arts as a way of teaching a wide variety of disciplines within the curriculum. Students might write rap songs to help them understand the salient themes in works of literature. They might use collages of different sizes to allow them to see the practical uses of math. Dramatic presentations might characterize key moments in history, while dance movements make essential points about science. Several of the schools hold monthly “informances” that combine live performance with academic detail.

A+ Schools encourage teachers to use such learning tools such as mapping, thematic webbing (establishing connections between various subject areas), the development of essential questions, the creation and use of interdisciplinary thematic units, and cross‐curricular integration. They build the curriculum around experiential learning. They use enriched assessment tools to help students maintain an ongoing grasp of how they are doing. They encourage collaboration between teachers of different disciplines, between students, and between the school and the community. They build an infrastructure that supports the program and its distinctive way of dealing with state‐mandated curriculum. And they foster a climate where students and teachers can feel excited about the work they are doing.

The schools in the A+ program cut across wide demographic groups. There are urban schools and rural schools, large schools and small, schools in affluent areas and those in economically challenged ones. Consistently, though, the A+ schools show marked improvement on standardized tests and often exceed the test scores of schools with similar demographics that do not use the A+ program. One A+ school, Linwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City, has twice won the Oklahoma Title I Academic Achievement Award. In 2006, the school was one of only five in the country to receive the Excellence in Education Award from the National Center for Urban School Transformation.

Elemental Education

The fundamental theme of this book is that we urgently need to make fuller use of our own natural resources. This is essential for our well‐being and for the health of our communities. Education is supposed to be the process that develops all resources. For all the reasons I have set out, too often it is not. Many of the people I’ve talked about in this book say that they went through the whole of their education without really discovering their true talents. It is no exaggeration to say that many of them did not discover their real abilities until after they left school—until they had recovered from their education. As I said at the outset, I don’t believe that teachers are causing this problem. It’s a systemic problem in the nature of our education systems. In fact, the real challenges for education will only be met by empowering passionate and creative teachers and by firing up the imaginations and motivations of the students.

The core ideas and principles of the Element have implications for each of the main areas of education. The curriculum of education for the twenty‐first century must be transformed radically. I have described intelligence as being diverse, dynamic, and distinct. Here is what it means for education. First, we need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. Too many students pass through education and have their natural talents marginalized or ignored. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages, and math all have equal and central contributions to make to a student’s education.

Second, we need to question the entire idea of “subjects.” For generations, we have promoted the idea that the arts, the sciences, the humanities, and the rest are categorically different from each other. The truth is that they have much in common. There is great skill and objectivity in the arts, just as there is passion and intuition at the heart of science. The idea of separate subjects that have nothing in common offends the principle of dynamism.

School systems should base their curriculum not on the idea of separate subjects, but on the much more fertile idea of disciplines. Math, for example, isn’t just a set of information to be learned but a complex pattern of ideas, practical skills, and concepts. It is a discipline—or rather a set of disciplines. So too are drama, art, technology, and so on. The idea of disciplines makes possible a fluid and dynamic curriculum that is interdisciplinary.

Third, the curriculum should be personalized. Learning happens in the minds and souls of individuals—not in the databases of multiple‐choice tests. I doubt there are many children who leap out of bed in the morning wondering what they can do to raise the reading score for their state. Learning is a personal process, especially if we are interested in moving people toward the Element. The current processes of education do not take account of individual learning styles and talents. In that way, they offend the principle of distinctiveness.

Many of those whose stories I have told in this book would agree. For them the liberation came from meeting their passion and being able to pursue it. As Don Lipski says, “The main thing is to encourage kids to follow anything they have enthusiasm for. When I got interested in magic, I got great encouragement and support. I devoted myself to magic in the same way that I do artwork now. A kid may have a thing about baseball, not playing it but learning all the statistics of the players and knowing who should be traded to what team. It may seem useless, but maybe that kid will end up being the manager of a baseball team. If a kid is the only one in the class who’s an opera fan, that should be validated and encouraged. Whatever it might be for, enthusiasm is the main thing that needs to be developed.”

The Element has implications for teaching. Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher‐proof. The most successful systems in the world take the opposite view. They invest in teachers. The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities. This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many peoples lives. Great teachers have always understood that that real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students. Mentoring and coaching is the vital pulse of a living system of education.

The Element has implications for assessment. Education is being strangled persistently by the culture of standardized testing. The irony is that these tests are not raising standards except in some very particular areas, and at the expense of most of what really matters in education.

To get a perspective on this, compare the processes of quality assurance in education with those in an entirely different field— catering. In the restaurant business, there are two distinct models of quality assurance. The first is the fast‐food model. In this model, the quality of the food is guaranteed, because it is all standardized. The fast‐food chains specify exactly what should be on the menu in all of their outlets. They specify what should be in the burgers or nuggets, the oil in which they should be fried, the exact bun in which they should be served, how the fries should be made, what should be in the drinks, and exactly how they should be served. They specify how the room should be decorated and what the staff should wear. Everything is standardized. It’s often dreadful and bad for you. Some forms of fast food are contributing to the massive explosion of obesity and diabetes across the world. But at least the quality is guaranteed.

The other model of quality assurance in catering is the Michelin guide. In this model, the guides establish specific criteria for excellence, but they do not say how the particular restaurants should meet these criteria. They don’t say what should be on the menu, what the staff should wear, or how the rooms should be decorated. All of that is at the discretion of the individual restaurant. The guides simply establish criteria, and it is up to every restaurant to meet them in whatever way they see best. They are then judged not to some impersonal standard, but by the assessments of experts who know what they are looking for and what a great restaurant is actually like. The result is that every Michelin restaurant is terrific. And they are all unique and different from each other.

One of the essential problems for education is that most countries subject their schools to the fast‐food model of quality assurance when they should be adopting the Michelin model instead. The future for education is not in standardizing but in customizing; not in promoting groupthink and “deindividuation” but in cultivating the real depth and dynamism of human abilities of every sort. For the future, education must be Elemental.

The examples I have just given point the way to the sorts of education we now need in the twenty‐first century. A number of them build on principles that educational visionaries have been promoting for generations—principles often seen as eccentric, even heretical. And they were, then. The views of these visionaries were ahead of their times (hence my describing them as visionary). But the right time has arrived. If we are serious about educational transformation, we must understand the times and catch the new tide. We can ride it into the future, or be overwhelmed and sink back into the past.

The stakes could hardly be higher for education and for all who pass through it.