Fishing For The Right Message

Quote of the day, courtesy of an age-old saying: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

Back in March, this Monday note highlighted the compelling Flood the Zone with Normalcy SOTU response delivered by Senator Elissa Slotkin. Last Thursday, she delivered a remarkable Economic War Plan to revive America’s middle class — a message that can help the Democratic Party recapture millions who voted for an America-destroying President. As one person noted, “YES, YES and YES. Almost forgot what it sounds like to have an adult problem solver in the room focused on the problems.”

Slotkin focused on the three future-defining topics.  Education, jobs, and innovation. Her home state of Michigan tells the story. Over five decades, innovation (e.g., the automobile invention) built the middle class. Then over five decades, innovation (e.g., robotics, outsourcing) gutted Michigan’s middle class. Innovation giveth, innovation taketh away. 

Now, AI has arrived. Growing explosively in power. Poised to surpass human intelligence in a decade. Restructuring all cognitive-skill jobs. Flat-out eliminating millions of jobs – particularly those for fresh college grads. Far more disruptive than robotics, over a compressed time frame. A code-red crisis that begs for an Economic War Plan.

So, how does education fit in?

A few years ago, education expert Tony Wagner and I co-authored Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era. For those curious, its premise-setting opening pages are at the bottom of this note. The key point? America still educates students with a model dating back to 1893. A model that explicitly rewards students for tasks that AI does perfectly. A model that intentionally crushes out human curiosity, creativity, and audacity. Despite the urgency to modernize education priorities, America has counterproductively doubled down on obsolete. Hold schools, kids, and teachers accountable to high-stakes math and reading tests. Math you never use. Dumbed-down reading passages with formulaic multiple-choice questions. A standardized, test-driven college-obsessed K12 system that’s made no progress on the wrong goals.

Slotkin’s Economic War plan calls for placing more weight in school on career-based learning. Stop treating Career and Technical Education as that last-ditch option for ‘those’ kids who can’t cut the academics. Dispense with the false dichtomy of career or college. For context, a long-time tenured MIT professor produced this two-minute video to demonstrate his conclusion that these grads haven‘t learned real science or engineering. Insight into Kirchoff’s Law would come from shadowing a master electrician — not memorizing a formula. College and career.

AI’s skyrocketing power puts civil society in double jeopardy. Poised to inflict economic hardship on millions, it’s now producing jaw-droppingly authentic fake videos. But fact-checking skills are MIA in our schools. Instead, we train kids to read and regurgitate whatever is in front of them. So millions of Americans believe the earth is flat, vaccinations cause autism, and space lasers affect elections. And in a nation that elects compulsive liars, fact-checking has become a political hot potato.

AI’s looming impact begs for a Slotkin’s War Plan. We’ve failed to prepare generations of Americans for the career and citizenship demands of the 21st Century. As Slotkin explains, “When you can’t provide for your kids, you feel anger, you feel shame, you lose your dignity, and you look for something, or someone, to blame.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. In visiting hundreds of schools across America, I’ve seen the poweful learning experiences that foster what makes us human — creativity, curiosity, an entrepreneurial spirit, our intrinsic desire to make our world better. Education priorities that turn AI to our advantage.

I’ll close by contrasting Slotkin’s message with the shiny penny that many Democrats are chasing this week — NYC primary winner and declared socialist Zohran Mandami. My advice? Put our highest priority on the wholesale reimagination of U.S. education. Back to that age-old saying — America needs education resources that teach us ‘how to fish.’ Otherwise, no amount of redistributed money will hold civil society together.

Nervously, 

Ted