I gave this talk at LXJS 2014 on June 28, 2014 in Lisbon, Portugal. It’s been a humbling experience to be back in Lisbon for LXJS and to have had so many people share their personal stories with me after this talk.
Introduction
Hi, my name is Mike Brevoort. I like many of you make my living developing software, but today I’d like to talk to you about one of my other passions: education. I work at Pearson, the worlds largest learning company, where we have a simple mission: to help people make progress in their lives through learning. As software developers, I believe we have a unique opportunity to improve peoples lives through learning.
I want to start off with a little perspective. There are 253 of us here today from 24 different countries. That’s amazing! Now imagine if all the people in this room represented the population of the world.
- 1/3 of one us would live in Portugal
- 26 of us would live in Europe
- 40 of us would live in Africa
- 28 of us have no access to clean drinking water
- 31 of us are hungry and undernourished
- only 101 of the 253 of us, just 40%, even have some access to the internet
- only 17 of us, less than 7%, have a college degree
Relative to the rest of the world, all of us here today are privileged, and if you lined up the 253 people in the room that represented in the world population from most wealthy and fortunate to the least of these, we would be in the front of that line. I say this not to make you feel guilty, but to give you perspective. In fact most of us had no choice in the matter anyway. Did you know that the most significant factor that will determine a persons’ place in this world is the place of their parents? That’s right, our parents prosperity in this world is the greatest predictor of our prosperity.
So if we are destined to follow in our parents footsteps, to follow the path of our parents before us, how do we rise above; how does one live a life more fruitful than their parents before them? And in the same but more pressing vein, how do we enable our children to lead a life that exceeds our own in prosperity? This is the desire of every parent, is it not? To see that your children are afforded the opportunities in this world that you lacked.
By far the most predictable way to outrun your destiny is through education. And Education is fundamental. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that education was a lifelong process of drawing forth the full potential that lay within.
Importance of Education
Education is the most powerful life catalyst in the world. Nearly every factor of prosperity, of people and communities, positively correlates to education. For the poor, education is the most promising routes to a better future. It prevents the transmission of poverty between generations. Children whose parents have little or no schooling are more likely to be poorly educated themselves.
Education is one of the most powerful ways of improving people’s health, and of making sure the benefits are passed on to future generations. For example, basic awareness of proper sanitation and the use of mosquito netting goes a long way to prevent the spread of disease. In the world’s poorest countries, a child born to a mother who can read is 50% more likely to live beyond the age of five.
Education promotes tolerance, trust and helps people understand democracy and motivates them to participate in politics. It plays a vital role in preventing environmental degradation, and education can empower women to overcome discrimination and assert their rights. For many looking for a way out; education is the only sustainable road to a better place.
Global Education Challenges
However, there are stark and significant gaps in access and opportunity. Worldwide there are 57 million primary school aged children who are out of school. These children are often forced to leave school due to the need to earn money to support their families. Girls are often forced into early marriage or bonded labor. The basic costs of education can easily consume a poor family’s income. And the costs only grow as students age and cost isn’t just a 3rd world problem.
For instance, between 2001 and 2011 school years the price of undergraduate tuition at public institutions in the United States rose 42%! That’s 42% adjusted for inflation! In other words the cost of a degree has nearly doubled. Also, in the United States the average student graduating with a Bachelors degree has accumulated $33,000 (or 25,000) in debt. In fact, in the US it is no longer possible to work your way through school without accumulating a significant burden of debt. Meanwhile the value of a degree is falling; the average lifetime earnings for a full time worker with a bachelors degree has decreased 1.6% annually since the year 2000.
To further complicate things, the education system of the 20th century is quickly becoming outdated. Before the “age of information,” before the web, schools and teachers were the gatekeepers of knowledge. Lecturers and the university library had a monopoly on information. For thousands of years, content and information was a scarcity, but today it is a vast, unwieldy, accessible, commodity.
The system of education developed for the industrial revolution was steeped in discipline, uniformity, standardization and memorization. Information alone was precious and regurgitating it quickly was valuable. Students were taught to respond with “the” correct answer; creativity and critical thinking were implicitly unrewarded.
The world is changing, the economy is changing. The monotonous jobs of yesterday are being consumed by technology, but conversely new opportunities emerge. The 21st century knowledge worker needs to be dynamic, adaptive, always learning and entrepreneurial. Students with a university degree are no longer “guaranteed” a job. There is a growing gap between the skills employers require and the skills of today’s graduates. In other words, new graduates are struggling to find jobs while employers are struggling to fill entry level positions.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) states in a recent report that countries need to provide a “good basic education in childhood and adolescence that equips people not just for the jobs of today, but with the ability to learn new skills for the jobs of tomorrow right through their lifetime.” In other words, it will be more important that students learn to learn, and form a disposition to learn, create, and ‘do’ to stimulate lifelong learning.
One of the interesting changes happening in post-secondary education is an unbundling of sorts. For example, an unbundling of degree programs from the research component of a traditional university. There’s also an unbundling of the degree programs themselves. Why shouldn’t a student be able to pick and choose which courses they take and from which university or instructor? Whether in person or online? What is so magical about the 4-year degree program anyway? Is a Bachelor of Computer Science degree more reputable than a list of courses with certifiable completion including data structures and algorithms, machine learning, natural language processing, web development and the like? Students should be able to choose their own learning paths and build their own portfolio and make sound investment decisions on a course by course basis, and we’re starting to see this happen!
Also, why do we frontload education? Why do we spend the first 20 years of our lives in classrooms and the next 40 in the workplace? It sounds a bit waterfall-ish doesn’t it? We’re going to spend the first third of our lives preparing for and anticipating what skills we’ll need 20 to 60 years from now! As if nothing about the world will change! We should apply agile and iterative development principles to education! We should embrace a lifelong iterative approach to work and learning.
What Can We Do?
Which brings us to the overwhelming question: what can we do? These problems are large, systemic and overwhelming! There are many policy makers and institutions searching for solutions, but I think real, meaningful, impactful change will not come from the top down but rather from the bottom up, from a ground swell of purposeful innovation.
So by now you’re probably wondering, what the hell does this have to do with Javascript? Well, in some ways, not a lot. But Javascript is the language of the web, and the web is the infrastructure for change and I believe education will be revolutionized through the web. Learning is such a pervasive, yet personal common ground. Education has impacted us all in very unique ways. I believe that most of us want to help, but we’re too busy or don’t know what to do.
Our Own Experiences
I ask you to consider your own experience for a moment. Think back over your life about what was most impactful to you about your education. What were the pivotal, life changing moments that shaped your life? What do you remember about them?
Can you think of something? For most of us, most of us, when we visualize these moments, I bet you don’t see a textbook. I bet you don’t see a school or a building or a computer screen for that matter. I bet… you see a person. And I bet you had a connection with that person, a relationship, maybe not very deep, but you had a connection. And I bet that person was instrumental in making you believe that you belonged, that you were worthy. Maybe they helped you unlock your passion, identify your purpose. And most of all, they made you believe that you could do it.
Maybe this person was a teacher, a parent, a coach, a mentor, a leader, a classmate or coworker? All of these people have one thing in common, they are just people! Like you! Seriously, we’re all just people trying to find our way through life. If you think back to that pivotal moment, I bet if you asked that person if they remember that time and if they knew how important it was to you, they may not even recall it or at least they probably had no idea of the magnitude of the impact it had on you.
Most times we think of teachers in the formal sense, but did you know that every day you are teaching? Teaching others how to interact with you; how to deal with you? Modeling for others how to deal with situations by how you deal with situations. Teaching others how to respect or disrespect each other by how you treat them. Online or in person. Do you know that you have a profound impact on the lives of others around you, in the most unpredictable and seemingly unmemorable ways? Transformation in education will happen through teachers so we must invest in teachers and remember that we all have the capacity to be teachers.
The goal for LXJS this year is to encourage new developers to learn about new tools, frameworks in technologies, becoming the leaders for that in their local area, empowering their community. Well, we’re all “new” developers, we all have something to learn and we all have something to teach. Every single one of us! The difference between those people in your lives that impacted you and everyone else, was that they invested in you. So I ask you today: Who will you invest in?
As software engineers, designers, developers, computer scientists, regardless of how you identify yourself, we are in a unique position. We are beneficiaries of education. It’s enabled our livelihood and given us incredible opportunities. But we are also creators, makers, and inventors. Like industrial manufacturing engineers who create the machines that make the machines, we can create tools that enable others to create; we can create tools for teaching and for learning. We can create new ways to disseminate information, new methods of collaboration and group work, new adaptive, personalized learning experiences, and we can help democratize education. More than any other profession, I believe we each have the power to change the world.
Salman Khan
This sounds very sensational doesn’t it!? Don’t believe me? In late 2003, Sal Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics from afar over the internet using a Yahoo Doodle notepad. Soon other relatives and friends sought his tutoring as well, and he began publishing his tutorials on Youtube. Today, Khan Academy videos have been viewed nearly half a billion times, and Khan’s goal of helping out his cousin has grown into a life mission of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.
Sal Khan was not a professional software developer, but he leveraged the tools and capabilities made possible by people like you and me and Khan Academy employs many developers today. This is one example of a person who took an interest in the learning of another, one other in fact, and is using technology to literally change the world.
Is it Salman Khan or technology that is having such a profound impact? I say it’s Salman Khan through technology that is making a difference. He’s a teacher, who wasn’t even a teacher! (he was working as a hedge fund manager). He is a teacher amplified by technology.
The true value of education is learning not instruction, teaching is irrelevant if no learning occurs, and such technology in education is irrelevant if no learning occurs. We must temper our estimations of the impact technology alone can have on learning. Technology will never replace the teacher, technology should never replace the classmate, even with fantastic advances in artificial intelligence, we as humans crave bonds with other humans, we are social beings, it is in our nature.
Serotonin and Oxytocin
As Simon Sinek describes in his book Leaders Eat Last, there are two chemicals in our body, our physiological makeup, that reinforce social behavior, serotonin and oxytocin.
Serotonin is responsible for the feeling of pride, accomplishment and fulfillment in ourselves and more importantly in others we care about. When my daughter first learned to somersault or to tumble. She would say daddy! daddy! watch! trying to get my attention, daddy! daddy! watch! And as I glanced over she throw her head down and her heels over and as she rolled through she would look back at me beaming with pride, and I, feeling proud of my daughters new accomplishment would say, good job honey! And we would both get a boost of serotonin. It was important to her that I watched her.
This sense of fulfillment and pride occurs through the lives of our kids as they graduate from preschool, graduate from kindergarten, graduate from high school and university. As they show us their report card and so on. This bond occurs with teachers and mentors and coaches as well. We share in the accomplishments, live vicariously through others, behaviors enforced by serotonin and our human physiology that technology will never replace.
Oxytocin on the other hand is released within us through physical contact, a hug or a handshake or even the image of another human being we care about. It released reciprocally with acts of human generosity and when others use their time and energy for our good.
These human bonds matter! Technology should not try to replace the human, not try to replace the teacher but instead amplify the teacher and enhance the learning experience and get out of the way.
CNA Speaking Exchange
There’s one more example I’d like to tell you about that I just love. It takes two needs, one that perfectly serves the other. The CNA Language School in Brazil has created the Speaking Exchange. It started with a simple idea, there are many young Brazilians learning English who need conversational practice, and many elderly Americans living in retirement homes who are lonely and just want someone to talk to.
Here is a glimpse of what they did.
These relationships, these bonds are actually reinforced by little boosts of oxytocin.
A Call to Action
There are two things I want you to do.
The first is invest in others, not your money but invest your time and energy. We stand near the front of the line. We are so fortunate to be able to do what we do for a living and live the way we do. Instead of clawing your way further forward, turn around, reach back and pull someone up. Whether it be family, a neighbor, someone in your community or on the other side of the world. Share what you’ve learned freely. Pouring into others is never a bad investment. Remember, we are all teachers.
The second thing is go, and create, and make, and invent new ways of connecting people that improves learning and that improves peoples lives, if only for one person at a time. Don’t expect that your government or school officials will take care of this for you! If we are to truly democratize education, we, the people, who are capable and care enough must act. You all are fantastically talented, don’t hoard your gifts, pay them forward. Imagine the impact we can make in education and the lives of people around the world if we did.
Thank You