Mastery Over Memory: The Future Of Learning With Tony Wagner

 

Why do students become less engaged the longer they are at school, which greatly diminishes their critical thinking skills? Tony Wagner, Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute, is advocating for a complete education reform and vastly revamping the future of learning. He joins Gary Schoeniger to discuss how to reinvent learning approaches to make school less boring and disengaging for young people. He also talks about what it takes to move beyond grades and credentials to pay more attention to fostering curiosity, creativity, and purpose. Discover how to restore agency to learners and meaning to education, ultimately leading to highly empowered entrepreneurial thinking.

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Mastery Over Memory: The Future Of Learning With Tony Wagner

My guest is Tony Wagner, a leading voice in education reform and senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute. Before that, Tony spent over twenty years at Harvard, where he co-founded the Change Leadership Group and helped launch the Harvard Innovation Lab. His new book, Mastery: Why Deep Learning is Essential in an Age of Distraction, makes an urgent case for reinventing how we think about learning and work, an idea that deeply connects to our work in entrepreneurial discovery learning.

One of the things that really brought my attention to Tony’s work is that it’s informed by the fact that he hated school. Bored, disengaged, and ready to drop out, until one teacher gave him a real sense of agency. That moment changed everything and set him on a lifelong quest to understand how to reignite curiosity in our classrooms.

In this episode, we talk about what it takes to move beyond grades and credentials towards curiosity, creativity, and purpose. We explore how entrepreneurial thinking and the courage to learn by doing can prepare young people not just for work, but for life. This is a hopeful conversation about restoring agency to learners and meaning to the classroom. Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Tony Wagner.

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Tony, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Gary. Great to be with you again.

Looking Back To Tony’s Career Journey

You were one of my early heroes in this journey and I want to talk about that a little bit because I think you were the first person, like a credentialed author, Harvard lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education, whatever your credentials, who had a similar experience, an experience similar to mine where you started out in school like not really loving school. You’re a longtime multi-decade critic of education. You’ve written so eloquently about this, but can we just start and talk about that? What put you on this path from the beginning?

Sure. You’re absolutely right about us having that disaffection for school in common. I hated school, not just some school, some of the time, but pretty much the whole thing. I was bored first for starters. I found the work tedious, boring, irrelevant, and there was nothing there to stir me, to interest me. The ‘60s came along and I was very much influenced by the ‘60s. I first of all, I dropped out of high school in my senior year, finally got back into another last-chance school, dropped out of college the first time in 1964 to go write the great American novel. It turns out I’m not a novelist. I’m something else.

I went back to college a second time and dropped out of that because I became very involved in the civil rights movement. The Dean of Men at what is now Virginia Commonwealth University called me into his office. This was two months into the semester and I was actually enjoying learning for the first time, had a couple courses I liked. He made me sit down in front of his desk and he said, “Son, we know all about your communistic homosexual drug activities.” that’s all he said. I was living with a girl at the time. I couldn’t wait to vote and other than a little bit of pot smoking, dabbling, there was nothing there, but I freaked out. I dropped out for the second time.

Long story short, I ended up at a small experimental Quaker college called Friends World, where we studied social problems. We traveled different places. I spent a year living in Mexico, studying in Mexico. I was infused with the ‘60s spirit, Gary. I became very active in the anti-war movement. I was a conscientious objector. When it came to deciding what to do with my life, I decided maybe there’s a way I can try to figure out how to be a better teacher than most of the ones I had ever had. Could I make a difference? That’s how I came to choose teaching out of those two very different strands of influence.

What’s interesting to me about that, Tony, is how did you maintain any sense of agency in the system that kept not working for you? You know what I mean? I feel like I interpreted that like, “There’s something wrong with me.”

I did too, absolutely. I thought, “What is wrong with me?” These other people seem to be managing school very nicely. Why can’t I do this? I did not have an answer, but I was driven in a different way. There was one teacher who gave me agency, who made a critical difference. If I hadn’t had that teacher, might I have gotten off the rails even more? I don’t know. He was in this last-chance boarding school. It was a horrible place, run by a German-Austrian couple who were like ruthless dictators. Sadistic, actually.

That’s redundant.

Exactly. I have long been interested in writing. I had one English teacher in my 9th-grade year, the 11th grade as well, that had kindled my interest in literature. I read a book a week all through school. Not just trash books, but all of Hemingway, all of Steinbeck, all of the rest. Just not the books that were assigned, or read them out of sequence, so I didn’t have to have a teacher ruin them for me.

At any rate, I wanted to be a writer. I went to this one teacher in this little school. He was not my teacher. I didn’t have him in any classes. He was an Englishman, but he seemed very nice. He was one of the English teachers. I said, “Will you teach me to write?” he answered, “I’d be delighted.” we set up a once-a-week event where he would propose a genre. He said, “Why don’t you try a childhood reminiscence or maybe just a dialogue.” I’d slave over it and work on it and bring it in the next week and he’d go through it all very carefully and he would always be sure to praise one thing.

It wasn’t made up. He said, “I really like this word choice here,” and then make a couple of suggestions. No more than that. It went through the whole semester that way. It saved me. There was nothing much else in school for me, but I worked very hard. I really enjoyed it. The amazing thing happened, Gary. By the way, all of this is in my memoir. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read it, called Learning by Heart: An Unconventional Education.

I have not read that one, I’ll confess.

I think you’d enjoy it. Anyway, it’s about this journey. Come graduation from this horrible little school, I didn’t even want to go to graduation, but my parents made me. I’m sitting there in this horrible folding steel chair and listening to adults drone on. This teacher gets up on the podium and he said, “I am proud to announce the recipient of the first-ever creative writing prize for this school.” he called me up and he gave me a book.

The book he gave me, Gary, it was really about a very different education. He opened one door and then really, in a sense, opened another. Summerhill. That’s the title of the book and also the name of the school. Very famous ‘50s book about a very different school where students pursued their interests, learned what they were interested in when they were ready. Those two things, I think, saved me as a near-crash victim of school.

Yeah, but I think there’s another idea in here. What I love about your work is that you’re coming from that place, because too often, the people that become educators are the ones that had straight a’s, always had the right answer.

Exactly, and they love school.

I’ve got a cousin who’s a surgeon, he’s brilliant, I love him, he’s my age, we grew up together. Whenever I critique education, he just says, “I don’t know, I had a pretty good education.” I’m just like, “You got 180 horsepower engine in there. You floated through the Ivy League. For you, it was like floating down a river.”

It’s hard to understand. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who liked or tolerated school very decently, reasonably, and many of them did, in fact, become educators because they didn’t ever want to leave school, Gary, and then there are those of us who were outliers. It’s very interesting to me when, many years later, you mentioned Creating Innovators, interviewed the teachers who had made the greatest difference in the lives of a number of young innovators whom I’d previously interviewed. They were all outliers. They were all teaching in ways that were radically different than their peers, and most of them had come up into education by unconventional paths.

That’s super interesting to me. I’m in the middle of E.O. Wilson’s book right now on Consilience and he’s talking about complexity theorists, saying that evolution happens when you brush up against chaos. I think that’s related to what you just said, like the people that make the impact are the people that are out on the fringe.

On the edge, yeah.

Writing The Book Mastery And Critizing Education

Let me use that as a segue into a question I have for you. You’ve written over decades and criticized education. I love Creating Innovators. That book really spoke to my heart. I read Learning by Heart. I don’t have a copy in my hand right now. Why Mastery? Why this book now? Can you talk me through the evolution of this?

I credit my co-author Ulrik Christensen for the birth of Mastery. I really didn’t want to write another book. I didn’t think I had anything more to say. At the very beginning of the pandemic, Ulrik and I became very good friends and we were walking one day. I was interested in he’s a CEO of a really interesting learning company called Area9 that works with companies to develop adult learning systems. American Heart Association is one of his biggest clients. He’s a physician by training.

At any rate, I said, “How can I help the mastery movement?” at the time, we were both on the board of the Mastery Transcript Consortium. I was very taken by the whole concept. He said, “Tony, you’ve written many great books offering critiques of our education system, but I think it’s time for you to put it all together and outline what a completely different learning system would look like.” I said, “Okay, I got it. Will you help me?” we became co-authors and that was the birth of the book. It took us much longer than we ever thought, but I think together, we did manage to describe an architecture of a completely different set of learning experiences and learning parameters, the shorthand for which is really Mastery.

I want to shout this book from the rooftops. There’s an urgency here. I was working on an essay I sent to you and we don’t need to get into it, but part of what I’m saying is that what is the socio-economic-political ramifications of pushing kids through learning systems that predictably stifle? We could obscure that in the past because you could drop out in the eighth grade and still make a decent living, have some modicum of dignity.

Exactly right, Gary. Get a good union job and be fine.

You could read, write and count, you could have some modicum of dignity and a family. I think there’s an urgency to your message that I hope the world picks up.

I think there’s a double-edged urgency, Gary. On the one hand, it’s everything you described. Jonathan Haidt, I think has also done a brilliant job of outlining and making more widely known, and that’s the damage both school and the substitute for school for many kids, which are their screens, are doing. Increased rates of anxiety, depression, boredom. Did I say boredom? Boredom, tremendous. At any rate, that’s one cost you might say of our learning system.

The other is what our schools are not preparing our kids for. We make the case at the very beginning of the book. The purpose of education is threefold. One, preparing all kids for productive work. Two, preparing them for active and informed citizenship. Three, personal health and well-being. The education system is failing at all three jobs. Kids are graduating with no skills, fundamentally because we have an academic system that is more than 100 years old.

The purpose of education is threefold: preparing kids for productive work, fostering active and informed citizenship, and personal health and wellbeing. But the education system is failing at all three jobs. Share on X

It goes back to the Committee of Ten in 1892, that’s basically created a schema of learning that’s all about siloed content knowledge, academic content knowledge acquisition. Here’s the problem, a lot’s changed in that century and a quarter. The world simply no longer cares how much you know. First with Google and now AI, information is at your fingertips. What the world cares about is not what but what you can do with what which is a completely different learning challenge.

I love that. That’s one of my favorite quotes of yours, by the way. I repeat it often.

Thanks. At any rate, if you say first, that’s the real touchstone. It’s not about content knowledge anymore because information’s all in your phone and it changes constantly. Now, we have AI. You say, “What are the kinds of skills that are truly important?” You ask people over and over again, whether they’re corporate ceos or civic leaders, you get the same basic answers. It’s critical thinking, it’s collaboration, it’s communication skills, all of that implies, and it’s a creative problem solving. The fifth I would add, and that we discuss at length in the book, is character. These are the five skills, cognitive and character skills.

The interesting thing is the skills you need increasingly for all forms of work, especially in the age of AI. If you can’t think critically, if you can’t be a creative problem solver and a collaborator, there’s no longer any space for you. There’s no longer a job for you in hardly any domain. When you talk about active and informed citizenship, Gary, we have a crisis of citizenship.

We have so many fundamentally, profoundly uninformed people because they don’t trust the news, they don’t read, watch or listen to the news except the feed on their phones that tells them what they want to hear. There’s no critical thinking. There’s less and less civic engagement. For personal health and well-being, we have an epidemic of obesity, anxiety, and depression because of smartphones. Our argument is there’s sets of skills here that are widely agreed upon that are neither tested nor taught. That’s the first problem we have to solve.

This might sound like a simple fundamental question that boggles my mind, why do we keep doing this? The data, you’re familiar with Gallup’s student engagement data. The longer kids stay in school, the less engaged they become.

We’ve known that for decades.

Why, Tony? Help me understand why do we keep doing this? What is going on here?

One of the reasons, I think, is the reason you mentioned at the beginning of the show. You were talking about who became teachers, those who were good at the game of school and loved school. Guess what? It’s the same for policymakers, isn’t it? Policymakers who make education policy, they did fine in school and their attitude is it was good enough for me, why isn’t it good enough for you?

That’s one reason one. Reason two is people look at education now and think that’s the way it has always been. They can’t imagine an alternative. You cannot ask people to move from something that is known, that has been considered reliable in the past, to something that is completely untested and unknown. One of the things we try to do is explain how this new, so-called learning system isn’t new at all.

You look at scouting, all about merit badges, mastery-based learning. You look at how a plumber, a pilot, or a physician gets a license, they have to show competence, mastery learning. In fact, it is really the heart of learning since the dawn of human civilization. Hunter-gatherers taught their children by example. They started out as apprentices, if you will, and then learned how to hunt, to gather, and so on.

In the medieval guild system, that’s all formalized as going from an apprentice to a journeyman to a master. This has been learning, in fact, through the ages until this very abrupt, annoying, failed experiment, I would argue. Finally, I think educators are very risk-averse, Gary. It goes back to how they’re prepared as educators. I’m not blaming educators, it’s a profession that actually now has suffered a lot of punitive damage from the accountability systems we’ve developed in the last 25 years, all of which is to only make educators even more risk-averse than they were before.

Curiosity As The Engine Of Learning

That’s such a hard one. Moral injury is a term my friend Stephen Post uses to talk about that. It’s putting teachers in these positions. One of the questions I want to ask you, Tony, is what can a parent do? What can a teacher do within the system that we have? You’ve put forth a lot of great ideas and examples of other systems. What can a teacher do now?

I’m asked that all the time. In a way, that was the problem I dealt with for twelve years as a high school English teacher. I was teaching in a radically different way and I had to try to figure out what I could do within the parameters of the existing system. A couple of things, for example. The same with parents here, but we’ll get to the community as the second part of the question.

I suggest that every teacher ask every student, no matter what the age, to keep a curiosity journal. Have kids write down questions that occur to them, concerns, thoughts, ideas, things they’re curious about. Why? It’s because curiosity is the engine of learning. It’s the engine of innovation too, Gary, as you well know.

Curiosity is the engine of learning and motivation. It is also what gets killed in our current learning system. Share on X

It is also what gets killed in our current learning system. The longer you’re in school, the less curious you become. That’s well documented. Why? It’s because you’re not able to ask your own questions, you have to answer their questions. You become very adept at getting the right answer as opposed to asking a good question. Although AI now flips that on its head because what’s the most important skill with AI? Asking the right questions, writing the right prompts.

Anyway, back to the point. Every kid keeps a learning curiosity journal. I say to every teacher, “Once in a while, sit down with every student, five minutes. Ask the student to circle the question or the concern that keeps coming back. You warn them ahead this is what you’re going to do. You give time, devoted time, at the end of the semester, a couple of weeks.”

“You’ve gone through the prescribed curriculum, you’ve rendered unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Take a couple of weeks. It’s a small risk, small gamble, and allow students, either individually or in groups, to pursue their interest and to do real research. Not for a grade, very important. Credit, no credit. You get a credit for this research by presenting it to the rest of the class, in effect teaching a little mini-class.” I’ve done this.

Which is super potent. Peer-to-peer learning, mixed-age learning, that’s evolutionary. That’s Peter Gray all day long. Yeah, I love that.

That’s what something every single teacher can do starting tomorrow. Something I did with tremendous impact on kids. No question.

Understanding The Impact Of Intrinsic And Extrinsic Motivation

That’s in alignment with what I’ve advocated in my book about entrepreneurial discovery learning. This is the same thing. What we need to get around to is talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. I’ve said to a dear friend of mine whose wife is a lifetime schoolteacher, I said, “Rob, I think a lot of teachers don’t understand intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.” He said, “Yes they do.”

No, because school is all about extrinsic. There are no intrinsic motivations in school.

It’s all about carrots and sticks, as you’ve said so eloquently. That blows my mind, Tony.

It’s the only system they know, Gary. We can’t blame them. Back to the point, I want to get into intrinsic for a minute because if we say that today’s learning is all about mastering cognitive and character skills, then two things in the system have to change radically to enable that to happen. One is we need to stop measuring learning by units of time like 180 school days, Carnegie units, credit hours. These are all units of time that we use as a proxy for learning. They mean absolutely nothing because people learn at different rates and you cannot possibly say everybody’s going to learn the same set of skills at the exact same time. Some of us get the driver’s license on the first try, some take five tries. Who cares?

Yeah, same with the bar or anything else.

Exactly. Who cares how long it takes? The point is the standard remains the same. It’s a performance standard. Not what you can do with what you know. You may vary either the amount of time or support people need to make it. We know from research, nearly everyone can make it. That’s the first thing you change. You change how we measure learning.

The second thing is exactly what you say, Gary, motivation. School motivates kids to do the absolute minimum required. What do I have to do to get an A? More frequently, what do I have to do to just to pass? Tell me the minimum. What is the minimum compliance that I can get by with? If you’re going to really motivate for mastery, for proficiency, you have to use a completely different set of incentives. It’s not all about doing the minimum. It’s about meeting the standard.

To do that, you have to individualize learning. You have to give people lots of different ways to say they’re proficient in a research paper, for example. You don’t mandate the topic. You give kids the choice of a topic. You let them have both voice and choice. That’s what ends up as agency. Giving kids voice and choice enables them to put more of their heart and soul into learning and to discover much more about who they really are and what they care about.

Giving kids a choice allows them to put more of their heart and soul into learning. They can discover much more about who they really are and what they care about. Share on X

That ties to something I heard you say about a teacher, I forgot what the subject was, but it was a writing journal in the ‘80s and the kids were writing for the teacher. When the teacher figured out like no, they have to write for their peers or write for their community, and I think you’ve connected those dots really well. There’s a purpose component when we activate that.

That’s what I learned as a teacher. I was an English teacher. I learned as a teacher. You have kids write for the teacher and teacher fills the paper full of red marks and it goes in the trash, immediately. Kids don’t care. They look at the grade at the top of the sheet, they don’t look at the comments, they don’t look at the correction, it goes in the trash. Waste of everyone’s time, teachers and kids. Whereas what I did was create a writer’s workshop in my class.

It was really based on that wonderful experience with that teacher who saved me in senior year. I’d have kids try a different writing every week and I told them, “Look, this is the equivalent of an artist’s sketchbook. You’re going to try a bunch of things, and then when you you’ll take a few things and really perfect them.” we had this writer’s workshop where every week they would come in and read their work aloud to one another in small groups or sometimes as a whole group. They learned from each other and they learned how to offer, and with coaching from me, how to give good constructive criticism, going right back to what that teacher did for me.

He didn’t overwhelm me with twenty criticisms. He didn’t start with criticisms. He started with one thing he thought I’d done pretty well and 2 or 3 things to think about for next time. I coached my students to do the same thing for one another. Writing was transformed in that class, Gary. It wasn’t my brilliance as a teacher. It was creating a different learning system and moving from extrinsic to intrinsic.

That’s the whole thing right there. I’m a huge fan of Jaime Casap’s idea, like stop asking kids what they want to be when they grow up and start asking them what problems they want to solve and what do they need to learn in order to solve them? I think that’s the shift. When my new book came out, I got invited to do a book talk at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard. I was in the Psychology building. That’s for all my peeps are. I was struck by this quote when I walked in the lobby. You’re probably familiar with the quote from William James.

Yes, I’ve been there.

He said, “The community needs the impulse of the individual, but without the sympathy of the community, the impulse will die away.”

That’s a great quote.

It has profound implications, and I think that’s what is missing. There’s also the connection to the teacher. The guy that taught you how to use an ax at summer camp. I had a wood shop teacher that kept me from dropping out of school, essentially. The example was writing, of course. You could take writing out of there and insert any subject matter in there. I don’t think the solution is that difficult.

It does, though, require the teacher’s role to be radically different and that’s another element that we just discussed in the book. The teacher has to move from being the stage on stage to guide on the side from sources of information, sources of inspiration. The short version is I think a teacher has to become a performance coach. Much like the coach on athletic field or in the arts, a teacher who coaches students to a higher performance standard. That’s a radically different role for teachers and that’s not an easy transition for some teachers to make.

The question I asked when I’m among educators is, I’m curious to know, a lot of educators don’t understand the ways in which extrinsic rewards or threat of punishment undermines the intrinsic desire to learn. That’s a profound idea that’s well-established in the literature. I’m sure you’re familiar with Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory. It’s mind-boggling to me.

I rewatched and Pink’s TED Talk based on a bookDrive and it’s all about extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. He just describes decades of research to show if you had a reward system to anything other than the most mundane routine tasks, a reward system to anything requires any degree of ingenuity or creativity, or thoughtfulness, you’re going to actually ruin performance versus making it fun.

Yes, it undermines intrinsic motivation.

It distracts people. I’m worried about how to get the reward, not the more interesting problem of how to solve this puzzle.

I think where our work intersects is well part of what I’m trying to say to folks is pause for a minute. The desire to learn is innate and the desire to contribute is also innate. Those are part of like self-actualizing Tendencies but they can be easily thwarted.

They frequently are in many men.

Difference Between Unemployment And Under-Employment Rates

They usually are. The squandering of human potential in the process is what’s mind-boggling to me. Tony, I got a whole bunch of questions here that I’m never going to get around to. Your book you talked about a lady from Warrensville Heights. I live in Cleveland. That’s a suburb of Cleveland. You talk about kids coming out of college without marketable skills. Can you dig into that a little bit? I think the college for all thing is everybody’s mind. You start to poke holes in that in important ways.

The first thing that people need to understand, I believe, is the very simple difference between the unemployment rate and the under-employment rate. The unemployment rate for college graduates right now is about 4.5%, higher than it’s been for a while but comparatively low. For very recent college grads, it is actually creeping up towards 10% because of AI. That’s another conversation. The under-employment rate, Gary, since the 1990s has been 45% to 50%.

Under-employment is defined as kids who have a BA degree but are not earning BA wages. They’re Uber drivers, they’re Starbucks baristas. They’re graduating with an average of $35,000, $40,000 worth of debt. They’re barely even making enough money to pay the interest on the debt, let alone think of anything like buying a house.

I tell the story of this young African-American woman who went to a 100% minority African-American school where very few people want to college, but she did. She was very driven. That’s what her parents wanted more than anything. She went to a good private school, had a partial tuition break. Graduated and got a job in customer service. That was her slot for twenty years and she could not get out.

Her debt, went up and up because she was in forbearance. She’s now a 50-year-old woman, Gary, with a $95,000 college debt. She was talking to therapist at some point and together, they were exploring this program that teaches predominantly minority IT skills. It’s an intensive ten-week boot camp. She signed up, it’s a non-profit and was no cost.

She said she learned more in 10 weeks than she had in 4 years of college. That’s what struck out to me, that line right there. She called her college degree as certificate of attendance, because she punched her card. Now she has a great job with a startup, doing IT threat analysis and is just flourishing, finally, after many years depression and anxiety because of her debts.

I think that’s happening a lot. Going back, maybe back to the intrinsic, extrinsic thing. There’s a guy in New York Times named Kevin Roost at writes about AI. He’s not a gloom and doom guy. He came to Cleveland. He came to Case. Karen and I went to hear him give a talk and a lot of the comments in the Q&A were about, like, “Kids are cheating with AI.” I practically wanted to stand up on my chair and shout like, “Why are they cheating? They’re cheating because they’re in a system of punishment and rewards.”

It’s the least you could do for the most reward and AI is a shortcut.

Deep Learning In An Age Of Distraction

You said it a minute ago. Kids are like, “What do I got to do to get the A?” That’s an extrinsically motivated student. Tony, in your book, in Mastery: Why Deep Learning is Essential in an Age of Distraction, can you talk to me about that subtitle a little bit?

Initially, it was proposed by someone else and I was a little uncertain until I began to fully understand that we live in what many people now call an attention economy. We are bombarded with information and infotainment and alerts every day to an overwhelming degree and it becomes harder and harder for people to understand what’s important or even what’s true. Learning in today’s AI era means really trying to discern what is true and what is important.

That really requires deeper learning. It requires essential skills. If you don’t have skills, I think you can’t really cope very well with the economy of attention because everything and everybody’s competing for your attention and it all looks the same after a while. It all becomes simply overwhelming, you just want to turn it off, tune it out.

Distinguishing Entrepreneurial Vs. Non-Entrepreneurial Thinking

One of the things I’m intrigued with is I’ve been trying to figure out for several decades now what distinguishes entrepreneurial thinking from let’s say non-entrepreneurial thinking, for lack of a better term. It’s only occurred to me fairly recently, Tony, that I think probably the most important distinguishing factor is that the entrepreneurial-minded person has a resonant future-oriented vision in their head, what neurologists might call transcendent thinking, like, “I’m seeing beyond what is currently here.

Part of my theory, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, is that the compelling nature of the goal is acting on the individual. It’s Newtonian. It looks like it’s the individual. Martin Seligman has written about this. He calls it Prospections Theory. The cognitive abilities that become available to you only when you have this positive future-oriented thing. What I’m trying to get back to, Tony, is I think that having a goal that you feel like you have a modest modicum of control over makes you less distractible.

I think that’s right because you’re, in a sense, using a set of internal criteria or an internal gyroscope, if you will. You’re oriented to a certain goal, a certain direction, a certain purpose. Living with purpose is what you’re talking about.

That’s exactly what I’m getting to. It’s what Csikszentmihalyi called autotelic. You just become less, I don’t want to say distraction-proof, but I think that’s an important part.

Although we know entrepreneurs can get distracted by the newest shiniest thing and go off the rails. If you say the end goal is to live a life of purpose and to give back, and that’s a heart and soul of very much a part of the entrepreneurial mindset, but look at the sets of skills I think that are required to be able to have that capacity.

First of all, you have to have agency. We highlighted a wonderful elementary school startup in San Francisco called Red Bridge, started by Orly Friedman. It’s all about agency, giving kids a sense that they can do something with what they know. Choice and voice. Those are critical elements, I think, that are foundational for the entrepreneurial mindset. If you don’t have agency, you’re not going to believe that there’s any way you could achieve a vision, accomplish a purpose. The agency there, does that come from an internal drive for some people? Maybe. Can schools absolutely strengthen it? No question about that.

They can certainly weaken it. They can certainly undermine it.

Yes, no doubt. There’s the creative problem-solving piece and that is all about questioning assumptions, questioning premises, looking at alternative perspectives and points of view. To me, that’s a critical element of what you’re calling the entrepreneurial mindset. You can’t come to really think about something better unless you’re able to critique the existing and imagine something different. I’m intrigued by the entrepreneurial mindset as you’ve described it. It was actually thinking to myself when knowing we were going to talk about the crossover between the kinds of things I’m describing as essential changes in learning and your important work.

Thank you, Tony. My big struggle is people hear that word entrepreneur and they just shut down. They make this binary reaction. I think what’s happening in the world, and we need to talk about the hidden curriculum, but I think the big shift that’s happening is away from other-directed learning and work to self-directed learning and work. What I have the most anxiety about and your book Mastery you know helped assuage the anxiety like maybe there’s some solutions coming here but if you don’t like to learn, you’re screwed. Let me just say it.

No question about it. Lifelong learning is skill one, especially in the age of AI and the time of rapid change and the time of social upheaval, lifelong learning is absolutely job one. If you grow to hate learning, you’re doubly screwed.

Lifelong learning is an essential skill in the age of AI and the time of rapid change. If you grow to hate learning, you are screwed. Share on X

I meet people in my travels, I meet bar backs in restaurant, in airports and Uber drivers and so on. People that are smart, that are capable, that are hustling, that are hardworking people, I think they’re languishing under an underlying assumption that because I don’t have a degree, I don’t have permission to go any further. Manager at the bar in the airport and maybe Uber on the side like I think you called it marginal labor.

That’s what they’ve been told, Gary, isn’t it? The smart kids get the degrees.

Yes. They haven’t been told explicitly.

That’s the social message.

That’s the hidden curriculum.

“The better ones are the ones with degrees, and the best ones are the ones with the best degrees.” That bias is beginning to crumble and it began with Google under Laszlo Bock more than a decade ago where he did a study and realized that these very high-falutin’ kids from a name-brand college with the highest test scores were not the best performers at all. He eliminated a degree as a requirement for employment at Google. He eliminated test scores and so on. He started hiring young people on the basis of a series of synchronized interviews, in-depth interviews looking for evidence of problem-solving and collaboration skills, resilience.

What can you do with what you know?

Exactly. What happened was their workforce became much more diverse and much more productive. That’s now beginning to be replicated everywhere. More and more employers are saying, “I don’t want to see your credential. I want to see evidence of competence, not credential.” that is beginning to change, but you’ve got decades and layers and layers of if you haven’t gone to college you’re a nobody. That explains I think a measure of what’s going on in our political sphere, Gary, which we haven’t touched on.

We have a lot of very angry people. They’re angry because they feel like they’ve been neglected, or at worst, abandoned and disrespected. We really have a very fundamental bifurcation now between those who’ve in some way benefited from globalization and those whose economic and social and even spiritual lives have been destroyed by it.

They’re furious, Gary. Unless and until we figure this out and give people everyone back their sense of dignity, their sense of self-respect, their sense of meaning and purpose without their having to go to college, if we can’t figure that out, if we can’t make blue-collar work more noble than it is now, we’re going to I think continue to have profound increasing social upheaval.

The end of democracy.

I think so. I do.

Teaching Kids About Agency And Adaptability

Let me use that as a segue. I don’t want to draw attention to myself here, but the book, Who Owns The Ice House?, Tony, it’s been out in the world now for years. It’s been adopted in ways and people and places we could have never imagined. What I want to bring to the conversation, like what that book exposed is this extraordinary ability of ordinary people who, to your point, have been overlooked or underestimated or ignored.

There’s a joke in in entrepreneur parlance that goes something like this. The A students wind up teaching the B students how to work for the C students. It’s all funny but there’s an element of truth to it. What I’m really getting to is I think there’s a different dimension of human ability intelligence. I’ve read some of Gardner’s work around multiple intelligences. There’s another dimension of intelligence capability that you were not going to get to with Carnegie units.

That’s what’s lingering here. I want to come back to the idea of agency and the hidden curriculum. I stumbled across a couple of scholars at Johns Hopkins that are working in in studying agency. I don’t know if enough people, and you can comment on this. I just don’t think you can teach agency like, “Kids need agency and adaptability.” that’s something like Astro Teller is saying at Google now. Those are the fundamental skills, and that’s more or less in alignment with what you’re saying. It’s maybe a slightly simpler version, agency and adaptability. Okay, so we need to have a course on agency and adaptability. It’s absurd.

No, it’s not a course. It’s fundamentally a different way of looking at who a student is and what he or she can do and how do you liberate that student through giving him or her increased senses of agency. Fascinating, at Orly Friedman’s Red Bridge school, they call it increased levels of autonomy. The more you can show that you’re resilient and adaptable and agile and also have mastered basic skills like reading, the more you can apply for the next level of autonomy. Agency in this case equals autonomy, being able to be a fully independent human being.

This is great. We’ve identified, let’s say, for heuristic agency and adaptability as these essential skills. I don’t think we can have a meaningful conversation about that until we start talking about the hidden curriculum, which are the ways in which the unspoken message in standardized industrial Carnegie unit type education is actually stifling agency.

You might say that our education system is first and foremost teaching people to be passive consumers.

Compliant, yes.

Compliant, passive consumers. They sit and get all day, they follow instructions, they march from one boring thing to another. That’s the opposite of agency. If you can’t give people choice and voice, that’s the beginning of agency. Choice and voice. If you can’t give people a choice of things they want to learn and then a sense of a voice that they can talk about what they’ve learned or even more, create some form of new knowledge, that’s where agency begins, I think.

Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

I think that’s really the crux of your work, ultimately. I land the plane here, Tony, but I’m so grateful to you for all the work you’ve done. It’s just occurring to me talking to you that I came out of school thinking there’s something wrong with me. I can’t learn, I’m stupid, like the train left, the teacher doesn’t care. If it wasn’t for my woodshop teacher I probably would have dropped out. Through entrepreneurial experiences, I figured out I love to learn.

You’re an incredible learner.

That’s really the dog I have in this fight. How many kids come out of school who have lost interest in learning and what is the cost of that to us as a society?

I think you’ve summed it up beautifully. That’s the key question going forward, because if you’ve lost the ability to learn, increasingly, you’ve lost the ability to survive in today’s world.

That’s what I see this as, like how do we design an intervention in spite of the system? Tony, thanks so much for being a part of this. I can’t wait to share this episode with the world.

Gary, thanks so much for having me on your show. It’s been great to reconnect. A wonderful conversation.

Awesome. Thank you, Tony.

My pleasure. Thank you, Gary.

 

Important Links

• Tony Wagner
• Mastery: Why Deep Learning is Essential in an Age of Distraction
• Learning by Heart: An Unconventional Education
• Creating Innovators
• Consilience
• Drive