The railroad did not have to battle a stagecoach union. The automobile did not have to get past the lobbyists of the horse and buggy industry. The electric light did not have to run a gauntlet of regulation and litigation.
If all these organized and entrenched interests had been around in the late nineteenth century, then not only the light bulb but the entire breakout that produced the modern world might never have happened, or at least have been considerably delayed.
The leaders of the twenty-first-century breakout find themselves acting in a historic drama that was unknown to their predecessors. We don’t know yet if that drama will be a comedy—in the classical sense of having a happy ending—or a tragedy. What we do know is that every American has a role to play. Most of us are neither heroes nor villains in the breakout drama. But as citizens and voters, we are part of a large supporting cast. One reason I wrote this book is convince you how important those supporting roles are—for good or for ill. In the chapters that follow, as we explore the different facets of the next breakout, you will get to know the cast of characters in the great drama of our time, and you will have to choose your own role.
The Cast of Characters
There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all of those who would profit by the new order … [because of] the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had experience of it.
—NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE
Although Machiavelli wrote these words five centuries ago, they describe the four main characters in the drama now playing out around us as well as they described the actors in the palace intrigues of Renaissance Florence.
The defining struggle for America in the next few decades is a political struggle, but it is a fight between the future and the past, not the Right and the Left. If the American people do not dethrone the protectors of the past, the breakout we could achieve will be delayed beyond our lifetimes and perhaps even killed.
The great struggle between those who are creating the future and those who want to keep us trapped in the prisons of the past is happening every day all around us, whether we realize it or not.
The Pioneers
Across America there are citizens pioneering the future, developing an amazing range of breakthroughs. They are creating opportunities for greater prosperity, more jobs, lower costs, more choices, healthier and longer lives, and greater national security. One at a time, they offer us pieces of a better world.
We know the names of some pioneers, men and women like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Sheryl Sandberg, and Marissa Mayer. Most pioneers of the future, however, are not famous. In fact, thousands of them are working on medical and biological research, developing apps that solve problems, engineering a future of energy abundance, and fighting to revolutionize education. You will meet a few of them in this book.
People with new ideas about how we can do something better or cheaper—or do something we never even thought of—change the world. They can lead breakout.
The Prison Guards
Wherever the future is happening, however, there are opponents who want to stop it—“those who profit by the old order,” who protect themselves and their privileges. These are the prison guards of the past.
A breakthrough in learning? The teachers’ unions and the mandarins of the academy will discredit it, insisting that they alone can be trusted with the welfare of our youth.
A breakthrough in energy? The extreme environmentalists will invoke an ecological catastrophe, accuse the pioneers of poisoning the wells, and try to regulate and litigate the breakthrough into oblivion.
A breakthrough in medicine? With a compliant administration in Washington, the Food and Drug Administration and the bureaucrats in both public and private insurance can make sure it never sees the light of day.
It has been said that the future has a publicist, but the past has lobbyists. And sometimes the future doesn’t even have a publicist.
The prison guards—politically powerful, well funded, savvy, and brutally determined—have enjoyed a lot of success lately. Ask yourself why forty-five years after landing a man on the moon, the United States has no spacecraft capable of carrying men into orbit. Ask yourself why so many public schools never improve despite our spending more and more money on them, and why millions of families have no alternative to these hopeless holding pens. Ask yourself why a college education costs as much as buying a house in an age when information has become virtually free. Ask yourself why practically every doctor expects the next medical breakthroughs to be available in China and Europe before the United States.
Despite all the remarkable changes in information technology in recent years, the prison guards have kept us trapped in the past in most other fields. In fact, our fascination with high-tech consumer electronics may blind us to our prison bars. Our devices lend an appearance of the future to otherwise old ideas and institutions of education, medicine, government, and more.
The Prisoners
Those who are tricked into believing that these outmoded models are the best we can do are prisoners of the past—in Machiavelli’s version, those “who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had experience of it.” The ranks of the prisoners include most of the news media, most members of Congress (in both parties), and sadly, most people, period.
A dose of skepticism about bold promises is natural, of course, even healthy.
But prisoners think the only solutions to our current problems are more or less of the same solutions that are not working now. Believing our current challenges represent a new normal, they close their minds to the possibility of a better future.
If schools are performing badly, the prisoners debate spending more or less money on the same teachers teaching the same way.
If you have a medical condition that is debilitating or killing you, the prisoners smile sympathetically as they explain that you cannot have the most advanced treatment, because it has not been certified by the bureaucrats who will take fifteen years to approve it.
If government is spending far more than it takes in, the prisoners recoil from cutting back or cutting out any of the bureaucracy. The choice, they assume, is between raising taxes and cutting essential services that people depend on—and that’s no choice at all.
The prison guards, who make it their business to ensure that the status quo is inviolable, have managed to convince the prisoners that this is the best we can do.
The prisoners are not the villains of this drama. They’re the victims, trapped in bad schools, enduring a dysfunctional healthcare system, paying the unnecessarily high price for energy, and suffering under historic unemployment. The prisoners suffer while the prison guards profit.
The prisoners are, however, the enablers of their own captivity. The guards can succeed only with the consent of those who refuse to “truly believe in anything new until they have had experience of it.” They are trapped in the mindset that we can’t do better. Yet if we can break enough prisoners out of that mindset, the guards will soon be overwhelmed by popular demand.
The Breakout Champions
To awaken the prisoners from the spell of their guards is the task of the final group: the breakout champions, those who believe that we can break out. They are often surrounded by people trapped in the past, skeptical about any new idea. This discouraging environment leaves pioneers of the future with “only lukewarm defenders” instead of true champions.
It is up to the champions—to the American people, to us—to be not lukewarm defenders but real advocates. It is up to us to assert that this is not the best we can do, that there is a dramatically better future just ahead, and that we can overcome the prison guards of the past and break out.
If you want to be a breakout champion, this book is f
or you. In the coming pages, you will read a report from the frontiers of the future. You will see the prison guards—often the self-styled arbiters of “enlightened” opinion—desperately defending the old order and keeping America trapped in the past. Finally, you will learn what we together must do in order for America to break out.
The fight will be to modernize our institutions, our laws, and our regulations so we can see a genuine breakout in our lifetimes. That is the job of the breakout champions. That is the job I hope to convince you to take on.
CHAPTER TWO
BREAKOUT IN LEARNING
Caitlin Pierce is a normal teenager from Arkansas. In May 2013 she graduated from high school at the age of eighteen. The very next week, she graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. Caitlin was homeschooled and had spent her junior and senior years of high school earning real college credit in courses coordinated through a Texas-based company called CollegePlus. Its average student earns a degree in two years at a cost of about fifteen thousand dollars.1 Like her high school peers who will spend the next four years in college, Caitlin will begin her working life with a degree from an accredited institution. But unlike most of her friends, she won’t be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Caitlin will be better off because of the income she will earn during the four years her friends are in college and because of the money she won’t spend over the next thirty years paying off student loans. CollegePlus offered Caitlin a win-win proposal.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Caitlin’s achievement is that in 2013, her story is still unusual.
We are on the edge of a dramatic transformation from bureaucratic education to individualized learning. The technologies of communications, information, and learning are evolving so rapidly that they could soon overpower the prison guards of the past, who have been fighting desperately to sustain the education bureaucracy even as it fails to serve our children’s and our country’s needs.
In the last generation, almost everything about how we communicate information and knowledge has changed. The mail we receive from the postal service is most likely junk since important communication now happens by email. We have fewer reasons to go to the library now that we have Kindles and iPads for reading and Google for researching. We don’t buy expensive encyclopedias because an infinitely richer online version, Wikipedia, is free and constantly updated. In fact, expensive encyclopedias are going out of business. Fewer and fewer of us subscribe to print newspapers because we generally read our news online or maybe just absorb it from tweets and Facebook posts.
Everything about transmitting knowledge has changed. Everything, that is, except our schools and universities. The cinderblock classrooms with thirty-five desks and nine-pound textbooks, spiral-bound notebooks and number 2 pencils are still much the same as they were in 1970, or, for that matter, in 1930.
It’s true that most schools and universities now have computer labs, and some even provide student email addresses and class websites, but we have failed to fundamentally rethink learning in a world where information is increasingly free, searchable, and available on demand.
If anyone can learn to play the piano from an application on a tablet propped on the music stand, or take exercise classes on YouTube instead of going to the gym, or even learn online how to build a backyard deck, then why do students today still have to sit shoulder-to-shoulder, staring at chalkboards in stuffy classrooms in order to learn multiplication?
If learning on demand is becoming the norm in the real world, why is education on schedule still the bureaucratic norm?
The prison guards of the past who lead the opposition to change from education to learning have forestalled the kind of transformation we’ve seen in every other information industry.
Despite the layers of prison guards (teachers’ unions, education bureaucracies, state curriculum rules, etc.), a few pioneers are beginning to break through the resistance.
Khan Academy
Ten years ago Salman Khan was working as an analyst for a hedge fund. If you had told him one of his projects would soon receive a $1.5 million investment from Bill Gates, he probably would have assumed you were talking about some creative new financial product.
It certainly would have been hard to imagine Bill Gates funding the primitive web videos that Khan was making in his free time to tutor his younger cousins. Less than a decade later, however, his Khan Academy has grown to encompass almost the entire curriculum from kindergarten through high school in thousands of short online videos. It is one of a handful of pioneering projects that are on the verge of revolutionizing general education.
When Khan began posting his math lessons on YouTube, he thought of them as supplements to the live tutoring sessions he gave to his cousins remotely over the internet. But as he recalled in a talk to the TED conference in 2011, “As soon as I put those first YouTube videos up … a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.”
At first Khan was perplexed as to why his cousins preferred the recorded videos to the live tutoring. Then he thought about it from the perspective of a struggling middle schooler: “Now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they’re wasting my time,” he realized. “If they have to review something they should have learned a couple of weeks ago or maybe a couple of years ago, they don’t have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin.”
Something else surprised Khan about the YouTube videos he had started posting. Although he had made them for his cousins, the videos started getting lots and lots of views. People from all over the world left comments on Khan’s postings telling him they were finally grasping concepts for the first time.
There’s no doubt that the effectiveness of the videos is due in part to Khan’s talent as a tutor and the personality that came through. His disembodied voice is reassuring; it sounds young and upbeat, like he’s smiling as he teaches you math. He also has a knack for simplifying complex concepts—a quality you might not expect from a guy who holds three degrees from MIT and a Harvard MBA.
There is no flashy animation or fancy graphics in Khan’s videos. While he speaks, he writes equations and sketches diagrams on a graphics tablet connected to his computer. Watching the lessons, you listen to Khan as his notes show up on your computer screen. At no point do you actually see him, so your brain spends no time analyzing the subtleties of a human face. Each video is short—about ten minutes—and much easier to digest than an hour-long lesson during the school day.
Khan soon realized these videos were reaching tens of thousands of people. “Here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund,” he recounted. “It was very strange for me to do something of social value. But I was excited so I kept going, and a few other things started to dawn on me.” First, he recognized, “this content will never go old.… If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn’t have to!” He was beginning to see how potentially disruptive the technology was in the hands of a good teacher. Millions of students could have access to the best tutor around.
Still, Khan thought of his videos as a supplement or a remedy for students who had missed something in the classroom. It had not occurred to him, he said, that teachers might adopt his work. To his surprise, however, he began hearing from them. “I started getting letters from teachers.… saying, ‘We use your videos to flip the classroom. You’ve given the lectures, so now what we do is … assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, [we] now have the students doing in the classroom.’”
The “flipped” classroom let students learn at their own pace, repeating material they didn’t understand or jumping ahead when they already knew where Khan was going. Students could then do practice problems (“homework”) independently while at school and get help from teachers—or better yet, peers—when they got stuck.
By 2010, Khan had quit his job at the hedge fund and gone to work full-time on the videos, whi
ch had received tens of millions of views. Khan Academy added exercise modules alongside the videos to test students’ understanding. Instead of testing once and moving on regardless of the results, as traditional schools have done, Khan Academy could ensure that each student mastered the important skills before trying to build on them. Once a student got ten questions in a row correct, the academy promoted them to the next lesson.
Khan realized there was a chance to implement this revolutionary model of “flipping the classroom” on a massive scale, making the former financier a co-teacher in thousands of schools.
Within a few years, Khan Academy approached the public schools of Los Altos, California, about integrating the content into their math classes. The schools agreed, “flipping” two fifth grade and two seventh grade classes.
This was a radically different approach to education. At Los Altos, students now worked independently through a long series of Khan Academy lessons as teachers kept tabs on their progress through a dashboard that showed where each child was in the curriculum. Khan Academy flagged students who were falling behind or stuck on particular lessons. Teachers could find out which problems were stumping students without having to ask them to their face what they didn’t understand.
With such rich data about students’ learning, teachers could help clear up targeted areas of confusion or even pair up peers to help each other. The progress they saw exceeded their expectations and challenged much of the traditional approach to education.
“In every classroom we’ve done, over and over again, if you go five days into it there’s a group of kids who have raced ahead and a group of kids who are a little bit slower,” Khan reported in his TED talk. “In a traditional model, if you do a snapshot assessment, you say, ‘These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes.’”
Breakout: Pioneers of the Future, Prison Guards of the Past, and the Epic Battle That Will Decide America's Fate Page 3
