Motivating Today’s Students—and Tomorrow’s Workers
WHAT DOES IT take to bring out the best in young people today, both in school and in the workplace? Although business leaders and educators rarely agree on anything, they have one unexplored concern in common: Both groups are worried about the decline of the work ethic among young Americans. Apprehension about young people’s lack of work ethic was a frequent theme in many of the interviews I conducted with business leaders. It has also been the subject of several Wall Street Journal articles in the last year, which decried the hunger for praise and impatience for promotions that the authors of these articles claim are far more prevalent among 20-somethings today than was the case in previous generations.1 Similarly, one of the biggest stresses of the educators I talk to is how to motivate their students to do the required work and memorize the material they need to know to pass the state tests.
Here are some of the most frequent kinds of comments I hear from middle and high school teachers:
“Kids today don’t read, and they don’t do homework. I cover all the content standards in class, but if they don’t read the textbook, they’ll inevitably do poorly on the tests.”
“They don’t proofread their papers. It’s as though they think spell-check will catch all the errors. They just don’t seem to care very much about their work.”
“Young people today have no respect for authority. They talk to each other in class, as though the teacher wasn’t even there. And if they get into trouble, their parents are all over me with phone calls and e-mails—and even complaints to the school board. The problem with these kids is that many of them are growing up kind of spoiled. They have everything they could ever want or need—except some adult discipline in their lives.”
Echoing the concerns of many educators whom I’ve interviewed, Mark Maddox, human resources manager at Unilever Foods, is very worried about people coming into the workforce today. “There’s a failure of work ethic in the younger employees,” he said. “They don’t want to work weekends, or long hours—they’re disgruntled with putting in 110 percent. They don’t see it like we used to see it.”
Susan, the woman from the large retailing chain whom I highlighted in the first chapter, echoed Maddox’s concern. “The work ethic is definitely not as strong as it was five years ago,” she said. “There are much more job hopping and attendance issues—and parents even calling in excuses for their kids when they don’t come to work!”
Annmarie Neal saw the problem of young people’s lack of work ethic in terms of how they performed their actual tasks while on the job at Cisco: “They have three web pages open at once and bounce back and forth, while chatting with all their friends. . . . It creates the appearance of a sloppy work ethic.”
Clay Parker from BOC Edwards is worried about the competition this younger generation will face, but he sees young Americans’ poor work ethic as resulting from the quality of teaching. “Most of my travels are in Asia where people are incredibly dedicated and hard-working. The poor work ethic in the U.S. is one of my biggest concerns about the future. And I think it starts in schools. My wife and I have seen that there’s a tendency of some teachers to accept mediocrity, a low level of performance from students.”
John Abele, recently retired chairman and co-founder of Boston Scientific Corporation, an international $6 billion company that has pioneered new approaches to less invasive medicine, told me in a recent conversation that “the work ethic issue in this country is one of the greatest concerns of corporate leaders today.”
While these views represent the majority of the educators and executives whom I interviewed, I did speak with a number of individuals who disagree that there is a work ethic problem among young people today. Ellen Kumata, the managing partner at Cambria Associates, said, “The people making up the new workforce are quite different from more senior employees. They don’t have less of a work ethic. They have a different work ethic.” Colonel Rob Gordon, recently retired from the Army and currently serving as senior vice president for Civic Leadership at CityYear (a national youth service nonprofit organization), shared Kumata’s view. “The work ethic issue is way over-blown,” he asserted.
Some educators I’ve interviewed agree with Kumata and Gordon. Rob Fried, a former teacher and school principal, is a keen observer of schools and author of three books on schooling in America. In his most recent book, he describes how school is a kind of “game” for many students who are bored in classes and so give the adults only the minimum required to get a good grade, while craving opportunities to do more intellectually challenging or creative work.2 Denis Littky, co-founder and co-director of The Big Picture Company, which sponsors a national network of very successful high schools that serve mostly at-risk students, is adamant about the importance of what he calls “interest-based learning.” “These kids can do amazing things when you build the learning around what interests them,” he explained. We’ll see how this philosophy plays out in classrooms in the next chapter.
So, are today’s students—and tomorrow’s workers—less motivated or just motivated in ways that may be unique to their generation? Both my classroom experiences and my discussions with many young people and the adults who work with them have convinced me that the 20-somethings (and younger) are differently motivated today—very differently motivated. And bringing out the best in young adults—motivating them to be productive and to aspire to excellence in school and at work and in their communities—will require both an understanding of these differences as well as new kinds of relationships between the younger generation and the adults in their lives.
Growing Up Digital
To better understand how young people today are differently motivated, we need to see that they’re growing up in an environment that is radically different from previous generations. In the simplest terms, they are coming of age while tethered to the Internet, as well as to a host of instant communication devices that were unimaginable twenty years ago. The Net Generation, as they are often called, is “growing up digital”—a phrase that forms the title of an influential article by John Seely Brown.3
One of the first (and most astute) observers of the impact of new technologies on this younger generation, Brown is perhaps best known as an interpreter of change and innovation to the corporate world, having served as Xerox’s chief scientist and director of its Palo Alto Research Center for more than twenty years. He’s written several books and articles on corporate strategy, but what I have found especially interesting in his writing and our conversations are his thoughts on growing up in the digital age. Brown’s view is that the Internet will have as transformative an effect on how future generations learn, work, and play as the introduction of electricity had on daily life in the nineteenth century. He argues that we’re just beginning to see the full effect of the World Wide Web and other technologies on our lives—and most especially on the lives of the young people who’ve grown up with new and radically different communication, information, and creativity tools.
In a just-released book, Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation, Larry Rosen cites some stunning data that show just how pervasive the use of these new technologies is among the Net Generation today. According to Rosen’s research:
• 87 percent of teens are online, increasing from 60 percent of 12-year-olds to 82 percent of 13-year-olds and 94 percent of 16- and 17-year-olds.
• Teens are online an average of five days a week, two to three hours a day.
• 67 percent of teens and 40 percent of preteens own a cell phone, spending an average of an hour per day talking. Two-thirds of tweens and teens who own or have a cell phone send text messages daily.
• 87 percent of 8- to 17-year-olds play videogames, the vast majority of them on a daily basis.
• 75 percent of online teens use instant messaging (IM), chatting with an average of thirty-five people per week, for three hours total.
• 75 percent of adolescents spend two to three hours per day downloading or listening to music online.
• 80 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds use MySpace weekly.4
While there is still a digital divide between different races and ethnic groups in terms of Internet access, a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that it is closing rapidly. “Over the past five years there has been an increase of nearly 40 percentage points in home access among children whose parents have a high school education or less (from 29% to 68%), compared to an increase of just under 20 percentage points among those whose parents have a college or graduate degree (from 63% to 82%).”5
Judging from the articles in Educating the Net Generation, an online book edited by Diana and James Oblinger, it would seem that use of computers both accelerates and changes once young people enter college. Teens do use computers for research and other schoolwork, but their primary use of their computers is for entertainment—in effect, as a more engaging and interactive form of TV. In college, however, the computer becomes more important as a tool for learning and communication, as we see in this vignette:
A junior at the university, Eric wakes up and peers at his PC to see how many instant messages (IMs) arrived while he slept. Several attempts to reach him are visible on the screen, along with various postings to the blog he’s been following. After a quick trip to the shower, he pulls up an eclectic mix of news, weather, and sports on the home page he customized using Yahoo. He then logs on to his campus account. A reminder pops up indicating that there will be a quiz in sociology today; another reminder lets him know that a lab report needs to be e-mailed to his chemistry professor by midnight. After a few quick IMs with friends he pulls up a wiki to review progress a teammate has made on a project they’re doing for their computer science class. He downloads yesterday’s chemistry lecture to his laptop; he’ll review it while he sits with a group of students in the student union working on other projects. After classes are over he has to go to the library because he can’t find an online resource he needs for a project. He rarely goes to the library to check out books; usually he uses Google or Wikipedia. Late that night as he’s working on his term paper, he switches back and forth between the paper and the Internet-based multiplayer game he’s trying to win.6
As many of us know if we’re the parents of young adults or if we work with them, this isn’t just an example of the typical routine of a “computer geek.” Indeed, this stereotype is long gone. I interviewed Carie Windham, a 2005 college graduate who is now a freelance journalist, and asked her how she uses technology in her life, now that she’s out of college. “Wow . . . I’m talking to you now on my laptop on Skype,” she told me. “And I sleep with my laptop underneath my bed. I do that because as soon as my alarm goes off—before I brush my teeth or do anything—I’m checking CNN, people.com, my e-mail, and celebrity blogs. These are the things that get me up in the morning.
“And then, throughout my day, the Internet and that connectivity is vital. If I need directions, I go online. Same for my banking—I haven’t written a check since I opened the account. If I need a word, I’m going to go to Google or dictionary.com. All my basic tasks are influenced by the web. I use iTunes all the time—and I’m hooked on watching TV online. I can watch it when I want, with or without commercials, and pause it when I want. I listen to a lot of podcasts—NPR and things like that. I also use Facebook. I look for people from high school—who’s getting married, who’s still talking to whom. I don’t think I could live without Internet access.”
Young people also use the Internet as a serious tool both for creating and for disseminating their artistic work. Carie’s 18-year-old brother is a case in point. “He is in a band,” Carie told me. “And it’s amazing to me that instead of thinking ‘we’re going to go play some shows and we’re going to get picked up by a record executive,’ he and his friends go out to our barn and they record their own mp3s and put them up on their band’s MySpace page, where people download them. He totally understands that the Internet is this great platform for getting noticed. And he promotes all his shows and sells tickets online.”
Fueled in large measure by the Net Generation’s use of the Internet, the growth of some of their favorite websites has been exponential. MySpace, for example, first came online in 2003. By August 2006, it had grown to 100 million users. One year later, there were over 200 million, and 230,000 new accounts were being established every day.7 Because the vast majority of users are adolescents, Larry Rosen refers to young people growing up today as the “MySpace Generation.” The growth of YouTube, which debuted on the Internet in 2005, has been even more spectacular. By January 2007, the site boasted 150 million visitors a month, a nine-fold increase from one year prior.8 And, according to Nielsen’s 2006 NetRatings Report, visitors between 12 and 17 years of age are nearly 1.5 times more likely than the average web user to go to YouTube.9
Researchers are just beginning to explore the impact of the use of technology on how today’s young people work and learn, but certain patterns are already quite clear. Young people who have grown up using the web relate to the world and to one another in ways that are very different from those of their parents’ generation.
Multitasking and Constantly Connected
In 2001, John Seely Brown decided that he would begin to hire 15-year-olds to join him and his colleagues as researchers at the Xerox lab to better understand the impact of media and technology on young people. He invited them to design their ideal work and learning spaces and studied what they created and how they worked. The first thing he observed is how young people multitask and are constantly connected. They rarely—if ever—did just one thing at a time. Moving back and forth among multiple open web pages while listening to music and talking on their cell phones or responding to friends’ instant messages was clearly the common culture of young people today and the typical way they interact with the world around them.
Former Microsoft executive Linda Stone, whom I first met some years ago when I gave a talk on the Microsoft campus, sees multitasking or what she calls “continuous partial attention” as the way many of us work today, often out of necessity. But it also captures how young people in their tweens to 20s want—or even need—to relate to the world:
Continuous partial attention describes how many of us use our attention today. . . . To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention—CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.10
The connections that young people long for today are not just with the information and games that the Internet provides. They also crave a constant connection to others. Young people are growing up today with an astounding number of tools for communicating with friends and making new ones. As we’ve seen, they use all of them every day, often in nuanced ways. In Educating the Net Generation, Diana and James Oblinger effectively capture this hunger to connect through an ever-expanding variety of technologies:
Prolific communicators, they gravitate toward activities that promote and reinforce social interaction—whether IMing old friends, teaming up in an Internet game, posting Web diaries (blogging), or forwarding joke e-mails. The Net Gen displays a striking openness to diversity, differences, and sharing; they are at ease meeting strangers on the Net. Many of their exchanges on the Internet are emotionally open, sharing very personal information about themselves. The Net Gen has developed a mechanism of inclusiveness that does not necessarily involve personally knowing someone admitted to their group. Being a friend of a friend is acceptable. They seek to interact with others, whether in their personal lives, their online presence, or in class. . . . Although technology can’t change one’s personality, introverts, for example, use the Internet as a tool to reach out. These social connections through e-mail might not have happened before. Extroverts can make their circle of friends even larger.”11
Explaining the popularity of MySpace, Rosen writes, “Somehow, in a few short years, MySpace has become an American teen hangout. Not unlike Arnold’s Drive-In of Happy Days fame, where Richie and Fonz spent their afternoons, MySpace is the ultimate mall where teens can meet and chat. . . . They post their thoughts in bulletins, comment on other people’s bulletins and journals, instant message, email, blog, and, most importantly, collect friends.”12 Rosen interviewed Anastasia Goodstein, author of Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens Are Really Doing Online, who told him that young people’s use of the Internet is “less about using technology to transact—find a plane ticket, look up a movie time, send an e-mail—and more about using technology to interact.”13
Instant Gratification and the Speed of Light
Accustomed to broadband Internet speeds that allow for .005-second Google searches, young people thrive in a world of ever-changing images, constant updates, and immediate access to whatever information they may want. They take as a given instant messages to and from friends, who are also always available by cell phone. In dozens of interviews I’ve done with 20-somethings about the impact of new technologies on their lives, their first comments are almost always about how they’ve become captivated by what they, themselves, call “instant gratification.” I recently conducted a focus group with students at a New England college, where one young man said: “It’s made us less patient, more demanding. We don’t want to have to wait for anything.” Others agreed, and a young woman described how a friend of hers had become upset because she hadn’t replied until the following morning to her friend’s cell phone call from the night before. “There was no crisis or even anything special that she wanted to talk about—she was just upset that she couldn’t get in touch with me when she wanted to. She couldn’t understand that I just didn’t feel like talking.” And Carie Windham confessed, “When I go to my grandparents’ house and have to use their dial-up Internet, I feel so disconnected from the world.”
The authors of Educating the Net Generation provide a related insight: “Whether it is the immediacy with which a response is expected or the speed at which they are used to receiving information, the Net Gen is fast. They have fast response times, whether playing a game or responding to an IM.”14
The desire to multitask and be constantly connected to the net and to friends as well as the hunger for immediate results influence how young people today interact with the world—whether in school or at work or at home or while traveling—and must be taken into account by both educators and employers. However, the ways in which young people are different today as learners may be the most fundamental change we need to understand as we consider how to close the global achievement gap. The use of the Internet and other digital technology has transformed both what young people learn today and how they learn.
Learning Through Multimedia and Connection to Others
Young adults who’ve grown up on the net are habituated to multimedia learning experiences, as opposed to merely interacting with text. According to the Oblingers, “Researchers report Net Gen students will refuse to read large amounts of text, whether it involves a long reading assignment or lengthy instructions. In a study that altered instructions from a text-based step-by-step approach to one that used a graphic layout, refusals to do the assignment dropped and post-test scores increased.”15 My interviews with students, as well as with their high school and college teachers, confirm that students are increasingly impatient with the lecture style of learning and the reliance on textbooks for information and crave more class discussions.
The Net Generation much prefers doing research on the Internet rather than in stacks of library books—in part, because of the very different experience it offers. “Prose is supplemented by song. Photographs are accompanied by video. Issues are even turned into online polls and discussions. For the Net Gen, nearly every part of life is presented in multimedia format,” writes Carie Windham. “To keep our attention in the classroom, a similar approach is needed. Faculty must toss aside the dying notion that a lecture and subsequent reading assignment are enough to teach the lesson. Instead, the Net Generation responds to a variety of media, such as television, audio, animation, and text.”16
Once they’re on the Internet looking for information, Net Gen students develop a vital proficiency in what John Seely Brown calls “information navigation.” According to Brown, “The real literacy of tomorrow entails the ability to be your own personal reference librarian—to know how to navigate through confusing, complex information spaces and feel comfortable doing so. ‘Navigation’ may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st century.”17
And as UCLA’s Jason Frand observes, today’s college students want to be connected to others, as well as to different kinds of information sources, while they learn: “Students with an information-age mindset expect education to emphasize the learning process more than a canon of knowledge. They want to be part of learning communities, with hubs and spokes of learners, rejecting the broadcast paradigm of television (or the note-taker in the lecture hall.)”18
Learning as Discovery
The experience of learning or conducting research on the web is radically different from that of classroom learning or library research. As we’re all now aware, on the Internet you type a search string, the results of which show you hundreds or thousands of potential information sources—not just text but also video, audio, and graphics. You click on links that, in turn, have other links you can follow. You may find the name of a person or book or issue that you want to learn more about, and so you conduct a new search, which leads you to a new treasure trove of information and images, with countless additional links. It is an active, dynamic, nonlinear, discovery-based process—more like traveling along a spider web than moving in a straight line from point A to point B. As John Seely Brown writes: “Most of us experienced formal learning in an authority-based, lecture-oriented school. Now, with incredible amounts of information available through the web, we find a ‘new’ kind of learning assuming pre-eminence—learning that’s discovery based. We are constantly discovering new things as we browse through the emergent digital ‘libraries.’ Indeed, web surfing fuses learning and entertainment, creating ‘infotainment.’”19 Confirming Brown’s observation, one young woman in the focus group I mentioned earlier confessed that she Googles topics for fun: “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t Google something—anything. It’s not even just when I have to Google something for school. I Google everything. If I’m bored, I’ll Google something about my life.”
John Beck and Mitchell Wade have studied the “gamers”—as the young people who play videogames are called. In their book The Kids Are Alright, they report that gamers (who, according to their research, represent 92 percent of the teenage population), “learn differently. Their game experience . . . emphasizes independent problem solving and the rapid acquisition of technical skills, as opposed to sustained attention to the subtleties of Shakespeare or calculus.”20 James Paul Gee has also studied gamers, and in What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, he writes that “video games make players think like scientists. Game play is built on a cycle of ‘hypothesize, probe the world, get a reaction, reflect on the results, reprobe to get better results,’ a cycle typical of experimental science.”21
When PJ Blankenhorn directed the Boston Center for Adult Education, she was discussing proposals for new courses with a young staff member. “A few people have asked for a class on how to use PDAs,” PJ said. “What do you think?” The staff person, a young woman in her 20s, stared at my wife in astonishment, finally saying, “Why would anyone need to take a course to learn that?”
John Seely Brown’s observations help us to make sense of this interaction. “My generation tends not to want to try things unless or until we already know how to use them,” he writes. “If we don’t know how to use some appliance or software, our instinct is to reach for a manual or take a course or call up an expert. Believe me, hand a manual or suggest a course to 15-year-olds and they think you’re a dinosaur. They want to turn the thing on, get in there, muck around, and see what works. Today’s kids get on the Web and link, lurk, and watch how other people are doing things, then try it for themselves.”22
Learning by Creating
New developments on the web are giving young people a set of experiences that create a hunger for more than merely learning through discovery. Web 2.0—as it is often called to differentiate web use today from early Internet use, which was primarily as a source of information—provides an extraordinary number of opportunities to exercise one’s passion to create. Today, anyone who has even a rudimentary understanding of how the Internet works can fashion new web content that will be seen by all users.
Whether it’s creating your own web page on MySpace or Facebook or uploading your band’s music or sharing your photo album or posting a video you just shot with your cell phone on YouTube or contributing to a Wikipedia entry or writing a blog about what you think or what you’ve experienced or reviewing a movie, an album, a product, a service, or a restaurant, web 2.0 is a vast and ever-expanding palate for personal creativity and self-expression—especially for young people growing up today. According to Rosen’s research, the most common activity of MySpace users involves posting new photographs and videos on their personal web pages. An astonishing 88 percent of MySpace users have added photo or video content to their pages.23
None of what I have described above is necessarily meant to suggest that these developments in how young people today interact with the world and learn are all positive. For every upside, there is an equally important caution or concern. Let’s review some of the concerns that have been raised regarding the trends noted above:
• Multitasking and Constantly Connected. While multitasking may be a useful skill and a pleasant diversion while performing routine tasks, the practice appears to come at a cost. According to Russell Poldrack, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, who co-authored a study that examined multitasking and brain activity: “Multitaskers may not be building the same knowledge that they would be if they were focusing. While multitasking makes them [college students] feel like they are being more efficient, research suggests that there’s very little you can do that involves multitasking that you can be as good at when you’re not multitasking.”24 Linda Stone agrees: “Like so many things, in small doses, continuous partial attention can be a very functional behavior. However, in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible.”25 Indeed, young people’s connectedness through sites like MySpace and Facebook can sometimes be used in ways that are deeply hurtful. Cyberbullying has become a growing concern for school administrators. Adult cyberpredators are another concern. As I talked to young people who have collected hundreds of new friends electronically through Facebook or MySpace, I wondered to what extent they differentiate between an electronic friend, whom they have never met and who may pass out of their lives in a nanosecond, and an in-person friend, with whom one builds trust and shares experiences over time.
• Instant Gratification and the Speed of Light. You’ll recall the young man I highlighted earlier in this chapter who observed that use of fast technologies has “made us less patient, more demanding. We don’t want to have to wait for anything.” Later during the same focus-group session, several students expressed concerns about how over-reliance on cell phones and instant messaging may be eroding social skills. “People don’t talk as much face-to-face,” one young woman said. Another added: “You know, when you go to someone’s house for dinner with their family, you have to know how to talk to them, to interact. I worry that we may be losing our ability to relate to people who are different than we are.”
• Learning Through Multimedia and Connection to Others. The Oblingers, quoted earlier in this chapter, have noted young people’s impatience with text-based learning. Tracy Mitrano, who works in the Office of Information Technologies at Cornell University, worries about the ways in which “this generation has been entertained to death.” And Susan Metros, who holds a similar position at the University of Southern California and is also a professor in visual communication, told me that college students today “are media-stimulated, but not necessarily media-literate.” These researchers are concerned that young people may be avoiding book learning because they’ve been raised on multimedia that is more entertaining. Metros went on to point out that being a consumer of multimedia doesn’t necessarily mean that one has developed the ability to really understand the media and think critically about what one is experiencing. Young peoples’ preference for learning with peers may also become problematic when they need to work on something alone—such as a research paper—for long periods of time in order to get the best result.
• Learning as Discovery. This style of learning is much more engaging than other ways of learning, and there is a great deal of research showing that it leads to a deeper understanding of basic concepts in math and science when compared to simple rote memorization.26 However, not everything can be learned through discovery. We don’t “discover” the times tables, for example. We have to memorize them. And while we will better understand the concept of an ecosystem through observation and experimentation, we must first know something about basic processes such as photosynthesis. Similarly, some basic knowledge in geography and history, essential for informed citizenship, can be gained only through memorization. Finally, the desire to constantly “do” and interact often comes at the expense of contemplation and reflection—essential aspects of both learning and growth.
• Learning by Creating. Quality is also a question in these times, when anyone can throw anything up on the Internet. Flooded with an ever-expanding torrent of “creative” work coming at them from thousands of websites, how do young people learn to discern the difference between impulsive forms of self-expression versus works of art that are the product of training and discipline? This is an aspect of what Metros meant by being “media-literate.” And Carie Windham worries about the impact of all of the creative shortcuts young people take when they IM each other. “I’ve seen some of my brother’s messages to his friends, and I have absolutely no clue what he’s writing—which is maybe the point anyway. But he doesn’t know how to spell. When I try to tell him that’s not the way the word is spelled, he just says, ‘Well, it is in IM.’ I was an English major, and I worry that he’ll never know how to use the language correctly.”
Here is a list of some popular IM terms:27
Researchers do not agree on the long-term consequences of these trends—especially about the impact of the increasing amount of time tweens and teens spend playing Internet games. John Seely Brown sees gamers as having more than just the skills most needed by corporations today. He told me that they have what he calls the “critical dispositions” that are essential for thriving in a highly competitive world of constant change. “First, the gamer disposition is incredibly bottom-line-oriented. These kids want to be measured. Second, there’s a mantra among the gamers: If I ain’t learning, it ain’t fun. Third, they understand the power of a diverse team. Fourth, gamers thrive on change—they embrace it and they generate it. Finally, gamers marinate on the edge. They are constantly searching for better ways to play the game, even after having reached mastery level in the game.”
Beck and Wade come to similar conclusions in their book The Kids Are Alright, but they also cite research suggesting that we ought to be concerned about the amount of violence in videogames: “The Harvard Center for Risk Analysis found that of fifty-five games awarded an E rating (where E stands for ‘everyone,’ the G rating of the game industry), thirty-five contained intentional acts of violence. These violent acts ranged from 1.5 percent of total game play in a hockey game to 91 percent of the time in an action game. Twenty-seven percent of the games showed people dying from some form of violence.”28 And Tracy Mitrano, who is both an academic and a parent, worries that habituation to gaming will require schools to adapt in fundamental ways, and that they may not be able to meet this new challenge: “If we don’t figure out how to deliver more learning in a game format, we’ll lose a lot of the boys. . . . My 11-year-old spends every minute of his free time online playing a game with someone in South Africa.”
There are some early indications that Internet gaming may have even darker consequences for some. Indeed, the “web obsession” in South Korea illustrates the extent to which this gaming may be putting the lives of an entire generation at risk. Ninety percent of Korean households have high-speed Internet access, and for many young people there, the web is the only place to be. But a recent article reported that up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18 are at risk of Internet addiction: “It has become a national issue here in recent years as users started dropping dead from exhaustion after playing online games for days on end. . . . Dr. Jerald J. Block, a psychiatrist at Oregon Health and Science University, estimates that up to nine million Americans may be at risk for the disorder, which he calls pathological computer use.”29
Interactive Producers or Isolated Consumers?
I believe that younger generations have enormous potential either to become lost in an endless web of fantasy and entertainment or to use their skills with these new technologies to make significant contributions to our society as learners, workers, and citizens. What is needed to tip the balance to the positive is an older generation that better understands what drives the younger generation and has learned how best to harness and focus its energies.
Growing up in this era of remarkable abundance (for many, at least) and with a vast array of new toys at their fingertips, young people want lives that are different from the ones they see their parents living. Whether they are hardcore gamers or just Googlers off in MySpace, whether at school or in the workplace, young people hunger for a more creative and interactive relationship with the world. The older they get, the more they disdain TV in favor of the net, because it is a two-way medium. There is much that they are willing to put up with in school or the workplace—not all the conditions I’ve outlined above have to be in place for them to be engaged. But one thing does, I believe: They have to be interactive producers, not isolated consumers. They want to neither passively consume information at school nor just go through the motions at work—which is why many employers worry about their apparent lack of work ethic. They long to interact—with the net, with ideas and problems that need solving, with friends and colleagues—and even with older adults—but in new ways, as we’ll see. Wherever they are, they long to learn and to create in a collaborative, collegial environment.
John Seely Brown described this fundamental difference between the Net Generation and their parents in this way: “The older generation defined itself by what they wear and own; this generation defines itself by what it creates and co-creates with others, and others build on.” Louisa Brown, a recent Penn grad (no relation to John Seely Brown), put it slightly differently when she told me that “what matters most to my generation isn’t money or conventional success—it’s our reputation, what we’re known for, what we’ve contributed.” Carie Windham echoed this idea: “We want to find the occupation that fulfills us—we don’t want to work just for money. We want to make a difference.” Andrew Bruck, currently enrolled in law school at Stanford, describes his former Princeton classmates as “kids walking around with briefcases—working 24 hrs a day, but for different things. They dream of founding a start-up or working on climate change or global health or political reform.” Ben McNeely, who graduated from North Carolina State in 2005 and now works as a journalist, told me: “We have a different work ethic—we’re not out to secure the bottom line for the corporation. From their perspective, my job is to improve the bottom line. My job, as I see it, is to inform my community first and foremost.”
If the members of this generation are to be truly engaged as students, workers, and citizens, they must be given new challenges at school and in the workplace, as well as have different kinds of relationships with the authorities in their lives. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” The Net Generation needs a new kind of support transitioning from the cyber world to the real world and constructing a lasting foundation for its dreams. As Tracy Mitrano observed, “If we want to tap into what’s creative and exciting with this generation, we have to find a way of translating from entertainment into work.”
Producers at School
It isn’t just the need to teach the Seven Survival Skills that compels us to rethink much of our instructional methods and curricula. Motivating young people to do their best in school today requires teachers to rethink what and how they teach as well. Susan Metros at the University of Southern California sees clearly what high school teachers must do differently. “We knock creativity out of kids, with our focus on memorization, teaching to the test, and making them learn things that they don’t have to. Because of the web, they don’t have to memorize all of what we used to memorize. . . . Also, we need to teach subjects in a broader context. For example, social studies isn’t just the study of war and politics. It is also about food, music, culture. We have the ability to bring all of this into classrooms now. Finally, young people need to analyze and interpret new media; they need to produce and create, and they need to understand the ethical implications of their work and the new technologies.” In other words, in order for young people to respect learning and school, we need to think more carefully about what we’re asking them to learn—to ensure that schoolwork is not busy-work or make-work but real, adult work that requires both analysis and creativity.
In interviews and in numerous focus groups I’ve conducted over the last five years, I’ve asked young people to share with me the advice they would give to high school educators about how to make school a more productive, engaging experience. Taken together, their responses create a clear mandate for change—and one that is consistent with what Metros told me.
Matt Kulick, a 2007 Cornell graduate who now works at Google, observed the following: “School is boring for kids today because it hasn’t caught up with what kids can do outside of school. I see that young people are apathetic because of a gap between what exists in the real world—what kids can pursue outside of school—versus what they are made to do in school.” Again, for Kulick, a teacher’s passion can be a bridge across this divide. “I loved the impassioned teachers,” he told me. “I had a history teacher who challenged me by the questions he asked. He asked college-level questions, not just ones about names and dates, and he made you feel proud when you got them right. He made us write lots of essays as well.” Unfortunately, as we saw in Chapter 2, this teacher is one of the few exceptions that prove the rule.
Carie Windham talked about how much anxiety had dominated her earlier school experience. “Since middle school, I’ve had the fear that if I wasn’t at the front of the pack, I’d end up with a horrible job—the fear that I had to be Number One or I wouldn’t amount to anything. And it didn’t come from my parents. Looking back on school, I was always preparing and competing for the next step. I wondered if it would ever stop. I can’t think of any classroom that did anything but prepare me for tests. I did well because I knew how to take tests—but now I can’t recall a thing.
“It’s not about memorizing, but rather critical thinking through authentic learning,” Windham continued, as she contrasted the work she was asked to do in college versus high school. “High school teachers need to have kids do real research and experiments. Instead of being receivers of knowledge, they need to be participants. Let them be a scientist, a historian. Wouldn’t it be great to see more interaction and engagement? More chances to work in a team and tackle a problem for which there’s no easy solution?”
Ben McNeely was similarly concerned about the negative impact of testing on teaching and learning in schools now. “Teachers aren’t allowed to engage kids in learning. In North Carolina, because of pressures for more testing, teachers have to produce higher scores and students who can pass standardized tests—not learners. . . . But if you tap into kids’ interests, they’re very motivated.”
Having an opportunity to pursue a real interest made all the difference for Stanford law student Andrew Bruck. He contrasted his high school classroom learning with his learning outside the classroom, which he found far more exciting and engaging. “I learned the most in my extracurricular activities,” he said. “I learned about how organizations work by editing my school paper, and I learned more about editing and writing there than I did in my English classes. It was more exciting to have projects to work on than a curriculum I had to follow. We could use our own creativity to find things of interest to us.”
The pattern seems to be still holding true for Bruck in law school, where, for the last year, his passion has been focused on founding and growing a new organization, called Building a Better Legal Profession. The organization researches data on law firms’ hiring of minorities, women, and gays, as well as firms’ percentage of pro bono work, and then compares and grades them on these criteria as a way to give law school graduates better choices—and to pressure firms to change. The fledgling organization has already received very positive coverage in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Henry Rutgers, one of America’s founding fathers for whom Rutgers University is named, is alleged to have advised: “Don’t let your studies interfere with your education.” Judging from the stories related above, some in this generation are, indeed, learning the Seven Survival Skills—but more often in spite of their high school classes than because of them.
As I suggested in the first chapter, education ministries in other countries are beginning to understand the importance of bringing thinking and creativity back into the classroom—or, in some cases, into the classroom for the first time. John Seely Brown chairs the International Advisory Board for the Ministry of Education in Singapore. He believes that the Singapore educators are on the right track toward reinventing their education system for the twenty-first century. “Their new mantra is ‘teach less, learn more,’” Brown told me. “Schools need to focus more on projects and the inquiry method. They need to engage students with passion.”
Rethinking Teacher and Parental Authority
When I spoke with Cornell University’s Tracy Mitrano, she was concerned about the need for teachers to work with students in different ways: “We truly have to reorient the concept of who a teacher is and what a teacher does: the teacher as facilitator versus information dictator. Teachers also have to model the behaviors they’re trying to teach. They need to show critical thinking and problem solving. Finally, they have to really listen to what kids do in their free time and then try very hard to figure out how to get students from where they are to where they need to be.”
Ben McNeely also sees the role of the teacher as needing to be different than it has been. “In high school, kids are starting to figure out who they are, their interests, and what careers may interest them. The job of a high school teacher should be to encourage kids to explore their interests and to help them make sense of the world as they explore.”
In focus groups with high school students—from wealthy suburban enclaves to struggling inner-city schools—the most frequent comment from students has to do with their longing for a different kind of relationship with their teachers. “I need a teacher I can really talk to,” many have said. “And not just about school things, but things going on in my life.” “I want to know that a teacher cares about me,” others have said. In addition, several students in my college focus groups told me that what was most important was having a teacher “who didn’t talk down to you—who was someone you could relate to.”
Several of the young adults I spoke with also offered advice to parents that, overall, reflects this generation’s unease with “helicopter parents” who hover and constantly fret about their children’s future. Andrew Bruck said that “parents need to respect the extraordinary capabilities of students. Our generation wants to do things. They don’t want to be stymied by hierarchy or authority. It’s important to nurture children’s creativity. There’s so much pressure to succeed and to go to a brand-name school. There’s no need for parents to pile on the stress.”
In college focus groups, young adults have mentioned that parents need to encourage their real interests and trust them to succeed. “Parents need to support children in their dreams—even if it’s wanting to be an artist,” one young woman said. Another agreed, saying, “Parents shouldn’t worry so much about how their children are doing in school. They should find out more about what their extracurricular interests are.”
Matt Kulick was also concerned that too many parents try to manage their children’s future, instead of letting them explore and discover for themselves. “A lot of my friends never had a good idea of what they liked or wanted to do,” he observed, “because their parents said ‘you’re going to be a doctor’ or . . . And it doesn’t help to tell your kids to do more homework or to always ask them what grade they got or to always be worrying about whether they’re ‘normal.’” Parents need to find out what their kids like. . . . My parents motivated me to do well—not to get A’s but to give my best effort. . . . They trusted me.”
Producers in the Workplace
Schools aren’t the only institutions that will have to change if we are to bring out the best in the Net Generation. In order to fully engage young people coming into the workplace for the first time now, we need to understand how they are differently motivated and to consider the implications for employers. Describing the different work ethic of these young people, Ellen Kumata told me that “they don’t see coming into a company as being a career experience. They don’t want to climb the corporate ladder and make more money and please the boss. And so you can’t manage them the same way—you can’t just put them into a cubicle and expect them to perform.” Tracy Mitrano agreed: “You have to make the work more interesting and allow them to work in different ways. They are prepared to work just as much and just as hard—but not at a desk eight hours a day.”
Susan Metros’s comments echoed these themes. She has observed this generation’s differences firsthand, having supervised both young people and older adults who work at college computer help desks. Metros advises employers to really get to know the particular skills and strengths of young people today. “They bring a lot to the table,” she thinks. “They can connect in new ways, they collaborate, they are visual learners, and they have great spatial awareness. Why put them in a room where all they do is staple reports? Why insist on a 9-to-5 schedule every day? They’re likely to get more work done at home. Put them in teams with traditional workers where they can learn from each other.”
The longing for more meaningful work and the desire for a different kind of relationship with adults were recurring themes among the young people I spoke with as they told me what advice they would give to employers. In fact, their descriptions of the ideal workplace and supervisor were strikingly similar to what they wanted from schools and teachers. In both environments, they wanted to engage as active learners and creators, and they longed for adults to be coaches and mentors.
Andrew Bruck, who has talked to law students all over the country as he’s recruited members for his nonprofit organization, observes that “we want to feel ownership. We have a craving for an opportunity to do something really important. People in my generation have been in a constant state of training. Now they’re excited to go do something. That’s why we’ve gotten such a phenomenal response to Building a Better Legal Profession. The problem with big law firms is that you have maybe seventy attorneys on project. The younger ones will never go into a courtroom or interview a witness. But they can contribute so much more than just document review or due diligence. The more responsibility you give people, the better they produce. . . . There are more and more recent law school grads who are willing to take a lower salary in return for an opportunity for more meaningful work.”
Ben McNeely described to me the difference between his former employer and his current one. “At the paper where I worked previously, the publisher would kill stories if they portrayed an advertiser in a negative light. At the paper where I work now, I have an opportunity to contribute something in a growing community. I was brought in to cover the new bio-tech research campus under construction nearby, where the Canon towel factory used to be, and to cover health care issues as well. I have support from the editor and publisher, who both have strong journalistic ethics. I like it that the editor pushes us to dig deeper.”
In addition to work that’s more meaningful and creative, John Seely Brown notes that this generation “craves dignity,” and he sees this need as being in conflict with trends in many workplaces. “As the corporate world moves more and more to barely reachable efficiency levels, they’re stripping all dignity from jobs. They say they want creative, innovative thinkers, but then they benchmark them for speed. In the U.S., a lot of service jobs have no dignity. By contrast, in start-ups, even secretaries get stock options.” What Brown has observed is that many companies do need workers who can innovate, but in many cases they have not yet created the working conditions and incentives that encourage employees to give their best. In effect, they are trying to play a new game by the old rules.
The need for dignity was a strong theme in my focus group with college students. Many of them have worked part-time in service jobs during the school year and through the summers to make money for college, and their experiences echoed Brown’s observations. “I want my boss to take the time to get to know me and to treat me more like an equal,” one young woman said with passion, and there was a chorus of agreement around the room. “Treat us like we’re human, instead of someone who just does a job,” another woman added. She went on to describe how her Dunkin Donuts boss recently told her to speed up getting the coffees for customers. “I was working as fast as I could. . . . This guy owns twenty stores and is probably a millionaire,” she said. “But what does he know about serving coffee? I’d like to see him get behind the counter and see if he can serve people faster than I can.”
Carie Windham describes the best boss she’s ever had. “He asked me where I want to be in ten years. He talked to me about creating the experience I want to have. He understood I wouldn’t be there forever. . . . Mentoring is a huge motivational tool, someone showing an interest in you and giving you feedback.” Her next comment echoed Brown’s observation about the importance of dignity for this generation: “We want to feel we have a creative, individual role—that we’re not just working on an assembly line. We want to feel like we have ownership of an idea.”
Employers Who Meet the Standard
Is it realistic to think that work can be about learning and creating and collaborating—as well as about the bottom line? Will our young people end up disillusioned or settling for less, as they grow older and pressures to earn a decent living in order to buy a house or support a family become more intense? Or might this generation exert a positive pressure on employers to change in order to attract the best talent? Indeed, that seems to be what’s happening in the legal profession as a result of the work of Bruck and his colleagues, who report that law school grads around the country are making different decisions about which job offers to accept based on the data his group has publicized.
Whether it’s to attract the best talent or create a better product, some companies are consciously restructuring work in ways that better meet the needs and interests of the Net Generation—often with stunning results. Google, for example, is one of the most successful and fastest-growing companies today. It is also the number-one pick of a place to work for many people in the Net Generation. In 2006, Google had nearly 1 million applications for 5,000 jobs!30 Some in the older generation might assume Google’s popularity is due to the extraordinary job perks there, such as its eleven gourmet restaurants and gym facilities that include volleyball, swimming, and rock climbing—all onsite. Or the free massages, shuttles, and laundry services. Yet, as Matt Kulick pointed out: “I was blown away the first month on the job at Google, but now the work I do is the main attraction.”
I asked Kulick, who is 22, to describe what he did at Google. “I’m an associate product manager here,” he explained. “Being a product manager means being an entrepreneur in the company—an advocate for a product that you’re working on, which is very important to the company. You’re responsible for the product vision; you’re responsible for coordinating with the engineering team on the project and getting buy-in and agreement on your vision of what the product will be and what features it will have. You’re responsible for coordinating with Legal, setting expectations with your managers and securing the necessary resources to be successful. The position is entrepreneurial because you’re not controlling the means of production and the other teams you impact resemble external stakeholders. You have to reach out and evangelize for your team’s product. You’re the connector for everyone, the ‘go-to’ guy.”
Kulick told me that he ultimately chose to work at Google for several reasons: “First, they share ideals that I believe in—open source software. And their products are solving important problems for people—doing good in the world. I believe in what they’re doing—these values are very important to me. I wanted to help out, to make a contribution. The second reason I came to Google is because they give me the resources I need to accomplish major things that will really make a difference in the world. The third reason is the responsibility they give you from the day you start. It is a winning combination. It makes me happy to go to work every day. . . . It’s kind of like the hobby I had as a kid—taking apart computers. I feel that same kind of passion and excitement.”
But what about other kinds of jobs outside of the dot com world? What about assembly-line work, for example?
Toyota has managed to earn a significantly higher profit on the cars it manufactures, while simultaneously developing a reputation for high quality. The secret of its success is something it calls the Toyota Production System. One key element of the system is the development of a lean, “just-in-time” manufacturing process. The parts needed to build a car arrive from suppliers as they are being used, rather than being stockpiled. Another is the company’s emphasis on the development of every employee’s ability to be a critical thinker and a problem solver. Teruyuki Minoura, who is senior managing director and chief officer of the Business Development Group & Purchasing Group, explained that “[a]n environment where people have to think brings with it wisdom, and this wisdom brings with it kaizen (continuous improvement). . . . Perhaps the greatest strength of the Toyota Production System is the way it develops people. . . . There can be no successful monozukuri (making thing) without hito-zukuri (making people). To keep coming up with revolutionary new production techniques, we need to develop unique ideas and knowledge by thinking about problems in terms of genchi genbutsu (hands-on experience). . . . This means it’s necessary to think about how we can develop people who can come up with these ideas.”31
John Seely Brown has spent a good deal of time studying Toyota, and has observed work on its assembly lines. “Every single person on the line in Toyota has a tremendous sense of dignity. Why? Because if you look carefully at the Toyota Production System, it is almost identical to what the gamers do. They are constantly experimenting, trying things out. And they are doing it in a very methodical way. They are constantly expecting to be measured. It is continuous R & D [research and development] at the personal level. They are organized around five-person teams, and every team is a problem-solving, creative group. They are constantly figuring out if they can do something better. They are what I might call a Respectful Organization. Workers there are willing to earn respect, and to deliver on it. And in return they want respect.”
There are also some schools that “meet the standard” and are successfully engaging all students, harnessing their extraordinary potential to problem-solve and to collaborate and to create. We’ll spend time exploring three such schools in the next chapter. But before I take you to visit them, we need to better understand both the similarities and the differences in what motivates subgroups of students and what they need to succeed.
The Overachievers and the Unengaged
The overwhelming majority of students today want learning to be active, not passive. They want to be challenged to think and to solve problems that do not have easy solutions. They want to know why they are being asked to learn something. They want learning to be an end in itself—rather than a means to the end of boosting test scores or a stepping stone to the next stage of life. They want more opportunities for creativity and self-expression. Finally, they want adults to relate to them on a more equal level.
Understanding these new conditions for motivating real learning and productive engagement in classrooms is essential if we want to close the global achievement gap and help all students master the Seven Survival Skills. But closing the other achievement gap in this country—the gap between white middle-class students’ achievement and that of poor, predominantly minority students—requires a better understanding of each group and their needs. While this gap is mostly about race and class, it can also be defined as the gap between students who are, in a sense, driven to succeed—the Overachievers—versus those who have very little hope of success—those whom I call the Unengaged. As a way to make sense of these differences—as well as to understand why so many of my interviewees stressed the importance of having adults in their lives who will help them to discover what most interests them—let me introduce you to two 20-year-olds: Kate and Juan. They are real students whom I’ve known (but whose names I’ve changed.) Their struggles are similar to those faced by many students—though certainly not all—of their race and class.
Kate’s Story
Since she was born, Kate has been programmed for success. Ballet classes, riding lessons, piano—she’s had it all and, for the most part, enjoyed it. Having been read to every night for as long as she can remember, and with a house full of books, she began reading to herself at an early age and so naturally did very well in the good suburban public school she attended. In high school, she was a whirlwind of constant motion: Enrolled in a total of six AP classes in her sophomore and junior year, while playing two varsity sports and serving on the staff of the yearbook, she often stayed up until one or two in the morning just to get all her homework done and to study for tests. By her senior year, Kate was feeling a little burned out. The pace and pressure were almost too much. The college obsession was totally out of control, with everybody going around fretting that if they didn’t get into an Ivy, then they wouldn’t have much of a life. She hadn’t done that well on her SATs, so she’d had to attend Saturday SAT-prep sessions, on top of everything else.
Both of her parents went to Ivy League schools and had high-powered careers—one was a doctor, the other a lawyer. More than anything, they wanted Kate to attend one of the colleges they’d attended and to have a successful career. When she didn’t get into her first-choice school, they were shocked and disappointed. The mood in the house was dark for months. Eventually they got over their disappointment, however, as they saw how happy Kate was in her freshman year at a small liberal arts college in Maine. And it was a well-known and highly regarded college, after all, though a Harvard or Yale sticker would have looked much better on the back window of the station wagon.
But tensions with her parents came to a head again in her sophomore year. In addition to having worked with kids in summer-camp jobs for her last two years of high school and first year of college, Kate had begun taking an education course at college. And it was that class she looked forward to the most. Over Christmas break, she finally confessed to her parents that she was seriously thinking of being a teacher.
“You mean, go into Teach for America for two years before you choose your career?” her father asked, hopefully.
“No Dad, I mean being a teacher as a career,” she replied.
“Teaching isn’t a real career,” her mother now chimed in. “How would you ever be able to afford the lifestyle you’ve grown up with—the nice house, all the vacations, the good clothes and car? And what about your friends? Practically all of them are pre-med, or planning on going to law or business school.”
The “success” that Kate was carefully groomed for all her life, she discovers, has limits. At one level, she’s always known that her parents wanted her to have a high-powered job. They used to joke about Kate supporting them in their old age, claiming to have spent their money on lessons and tuitions, instead of saving for retirement. But what they don’t know is that she’s always dreamed of teaching. She even used to play teacher, with her younger sister as the student. It’s her passion—which became all the more real with summers spent working with kids and finding that she loved it!
How will she manage this? Kate wonders. Her mom was right about her friends. And the money part, too, probably. Maybe she wouldn’t be that good a teacher, anyway. She’s not the most patient person in the world, she knows. Kate wishes there had been a way to explore her interest in teaching back in high school. And, more than anything, she wishes she’d had a teacher she could have really talked to about what she was thinking. But so many of her teachers seemed just as worried about her getting into a name-brand college as her parents were. None of them knew her—not really.
Juan’s Story
Juan’s parents moved to the United States from El Salvador when he was very young, seeking a better life for the family. His dad got work with a landscaping company, and his mom found a job cleaning offices at night, so that she could be home with the kids during the day. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a rough neighborhood, with Juan and his two younger siblings sharing a bedroom. Ever since he was old enough he’s had a job after school, in order to help pay the rent.
School has always been hard for Juan. He never really learned to read all that well, and none of the teachers seemed to notice. Or maybe they just didn’t care. He felt invisible in high school. He always sat in the back of the room, so that he wouldn’t be called on. It wasn’t that he didn’t study. He tried—he really did—because he knew what it would mean to his parents for him to graduate from high school. His dad was always saying, “Juan, the way to get ahead in this country is to get a good education. You have to study hard and to finish high school.” And his mom would nod in agreement. But he’d come home from his afternoon job in the auto body shop, totally exhausted. And trying to find a quiet place to study in the tiny, cramped apartment was practically impossible.
And the stuff he was supposed to study—that was the worst part. The textbooks were hard to read and really boring. Why did he have to learn all that stuff—like algebra? No one ever explained how he’d ever use it in real life. He wished he could learn more about cars—that was his passion. He was always buying car magazines, with what little money he had. He was fascinated by how the manufacturers created shapes that would allow cars to go faster—and to burn less gas at the same time. How did they do that? And what would cars look like in the future—ones that ran on electricity or bio-fuels? He’d been reading in his magazines about “green” cars: They were going to have to be very different, he thought. Wow, what a puzzle. . . .
Juan had graduated from high school—just barely. His parents came to the graduation, and they were so proud, beaming and clapping wildly when he walked across the stage to take his diploma from the principal, who didn’t even know his name. But now, two years later, he was still living at home and working at the auto body shop. It seemed like running that sander across the bare skin of a newly straightened quarter panel was as close as he would ever get to his dream of designing cars.
He wished he’d known back in 9th grade what he knew now—what it would take to get into a technical school or college. His parents didn’t know. All they knew was that they’d come to the land of dreams, and that their dreams—such as owning a house—weren’t any closer to coming true, no matter how hard they worked. He wished somebody had told him that he might someday be able to earn a living designing cars. Or that he could have learned how to use a CAD/CAM program if he’d transferred to another high school. But no one had said anything to him. No one sat him down and explained that to make it in this country—to get a good job—a high school diploma isn’t enough. No one had even noticed how much difficulty he had reading. None of that ever happened. So long as he passed his classes and didn’t get into trouble, he was just another number in the computer.
Why, he wondered? Was it his dark skin? Or were the teachers just too busy to notice—overwhelmed with the huge numbers of kids in their classrooms needing some kind of help, just like Juan? And now what? What would he do with the rest of his life? He was taking a night school course, but . . . there were so many more he’d have to take just to pass the entrance test to get into a community college. It seemed like an impossible mountain to climb.
What Did They Need?
There are, of course, many students of color who are very successful, just as there are white students who struggle. My intention in sharing these vignettes is not to reinforce stereotypes but, rather, to explore some of the significant differences, as well as important similarities, in what Kate and Juan—and many students like them—needed in high school to become happy, productive adults.
Kate suffered from too much of the wrong kind of adult authority. She was overmanaged for success—success being narrowly defined as getting into a college her parents and teachers considered to be topnotch and having a high-paying job. Juan, on the other hand, did not have enough of the right kind of authority. He needed an adult advocate in his life—a mentor who could help him see the possibilities the world might offer him and coach him in the skills and the courses that he would need in order to take advantage of those possibilities. Both needed opportunities in high school to explore their real interests. Both needed adults in their lives who would ask, “What most interests you? What are you excited about learning or doing?”
Michael Jung, senior consultant at McKinsey & Company, believes that “there are only three reasons why people work or learn. There’s push, which is a need, threat, or risk, but this is now a less plausible or credible motivating force [in the industrialized countries] than it has been, even for the disadvantaged. There’s transfer of habits—habits shaped by social norms and traditional routines. But this, too, is becoming weaker now, because of the erosion of traditional authority and social values. That leaves only pull—interest, desire, passion.” I understand Jung to be talking about three kinds of human motivation. Physiological need is one—the need for food and shelter and so on. But he suggests that with high rates of employment and government safety nets, this is less of a motivational force in many young people’s lives than it once was. The desire to adhere to social norms is another human motivation that is weaker than it used to be, because traditional sources of authority, religion and family, have less influence on young people today. Jung believes that it is the third motivational force—interest, desire, and passion—that increasing numbers of young people are seeking and responding to in school and at the workplace.
Colonel Rob Gordon understands that nurturing passion is the job of adults who work with young people today. “At City Year, our charge is to help people find their passion and to mentor them,” he said. “And when they do, they work very hard at it. They’re passionate about a lot of things, and when you give them opportunities to pursue their passions, they step up to the plate.”
This is not to suggest that adults should make things easier for the younger generation. Rather, the point is that young people who have discovered their passion are far more likely to have the will and discipline to learn and do the difficult things that school and work often require. John Abele, you’ll recall, is the retired chairman and co-founder of Boston Scientific. He currently serves as chairman of the nonprofit national after-school program FIRST, founded by inventor/entrepreneur Dean Kamen, who has sought a new way to inspire adolescents’ interests in science, math, and engineering—through robotics competitions. Abele told me that he worries most about “this generation’s loss of opportunity to struggle. . . . So in the robotic competitions, we build in frustrations. And to win, [the kids] have to master many skills, besides just the ability to build a robot that can compete. They learn teamwork, fundraising, project management, strategy. . . . But having an adult mentor makes the critical difference—the difference between productive and unproductive struggle.”
Both FIRST and City Year have learned that the way to bring out the best in young people is to give them the right mix of challenge and support, combined with thoughtful adult mentoring.32 In the next chapter, we’ll spend some time in schools and with teachers who work to motivate students in similar ways—schools that teach the Seven Survival Skills by engaging students’ passions to learn and to create.