Last week Seth Godin published a 30,000-word manifesto titled Stop Stealing Dreams. It’s free and available as an eBook or in several other electronic forms. I recommend you get a copy, read it, and forward it to a friend.
Seth lays out the case for overhauling our current educational system. Not just fixing the current system, but radically overhauling and creating a transformed, new system that is aligned with today’s world and tomorrow’s needs. It makes use of technologies that are now available. It jettisons many of the ideas and practices that still exist today by relying on the old argument: But that’s the way we’ve always done it. Stop Stealing Dreams doesn’t present a full solution, but it lays a foundation for a needed discussion on educating our future workers.
Here is the premise of Stop Stealing Dreams.
Stop Stealing Dreams postulates that our current education system, which was designed more than one hundred years ago, was intended to produce compliant workers for the industrial age. With the industrial age already long over… and the information/experience/connection age in full swing, we need an education system that better prepares future generations for doing the work of today and tomorrow. What we don’t need is to continue educating future workers to do work that is no longer being done.
One critical outcome of the current education system is that it kills creativity, stifles one’s ability to dream freely, and fosters compliancy. The industrial age required lots of compliant workers, so the system as original designed worked perfectly. But today’s world requires creativity. It requires individuals to be able to dream big. It requires people to think, to connect dots, and to invent new ways of doing things.
The boss is no longer smart enough to tell others what to do. There are too many variables. There is too much information. And there is too much creative work that needs doing.
Compliant workers will continue to be necessary but they will fill the low-wage jobs of yesterday.
Creative dreamers, people who can get things done, individuals who know how to create value by figuring things out are in demand. There will continue to be a greater need for creative thinkers and big dreamers in the future.
Thinking is high paying. Doing what you’re told is a low paying.
Seth Godin is a thinker and a man not afraid to dream big. He has put forth a big idea to change education. It’s a conversation that I believe should start taking place. Today.
Do you think the current educational system is working?
Do you think we (as a society) have become too compliant and too complacent?
Have your dreams been stolen?
With no restrictions … how big is your dream?
Next Blog Title: Thinking is Hard Work
Next Blog Date: March 8, 2012