RTCrawford’s Weblog

Reference: High School’s Worst Year?; For Ambitious Teens, 11th Grade Becomes a Marathon Of Tests, Stress and Sleepless Nights. Jonathan Kaufman. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: May 24, 2008. pg. A.1

I often wonder whether the “Life-Long Learner” is a conceptual myth. It isn’t that we can avoid intellectual growth as we age – it is all but compelled by the speed of change. Nor is it sustaining the love of learning that has me uncertain about whether the life-long learner remains viable. Instead, as the father of a high school junior, a teacher of undergraduates and graduate students, and as a consultant working with physicians, I see the problems from several informing perspectives.

My neighbor’s son is an honors student, taking three advanced placement classes in addition to his all-honors schedule. His girlfriend (until recently) is the same. Their coursework, the five or six hours of nightly homework (weekends included), the compelled extra-curricular activities expected for college admissions, and, in his case, part-time work as a bus boy at a local restaurant fill their lives. Collectively, the normal traumas of that age seem more pronounced today than when I experienced high school in the 1970s. These great kids are stressed and efficient time managers. They are more mature and intelligent, and this young couple (together a year) simply don’t have time for each other or the ability to keep their personal stresses from adding to the stress of the other. So, they are now “single” – by choice. Good luck to the Mr. or Miss. Right who gets them — inexperienced with real relationships, myopically focused on external deadlines, and burnt out. Perhaps we should adopt the practice of arranged marriages to avoid the inefficiencies of dating.

My undergrads, on the other hand, are great. If you assign it, they will submit it – even if the quality of work has its problems. Few write with flare, creativity, or editing – there simply isn’t time under deadline pressure. This may seem normal for undergraduate business classes, but ask Jack Welch, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or the other successes of business whether attention to detail, quality, innovation, or creativity are nothing more than nice to have attributes.

So, I design assignments that compel creativity. I’m told that this makes my classes an oddity and, while disconcerting at first, is fun, informative, compelling, and infuriating. It is infuriating because it is impossible to schedule creativity, and college, it seems, is all about time management for students who haven’t the time for more than rote memorization and regurgitation on command. For me, the bigger question is, why is mine the rarity where these skills are expected – especially, for students who are more prone and capable of innovation and creativity than when the Old Dog, New Tricks mentality kicks in. Thomas Kuhn, in the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” notes that the great innovations of history more often than not were authored by the young.

My executive students can be enormously creative but are flummoxed by assignments that require it or provide flexibility. Give them a complex case study and no time-limit for the oral presentation (allowing them to teach the case and make choices between brevity and thoroughness), and it is as thought they were ladder-borne gutter-cleaners during an earthquake. They were once creative and innovative but it takes weeks to recall how and what it felt like, and what they really want is to play to their long-cultivated strength of time management- where they can balance trade-offs between quality of work (i.e., the likely grade) and the time available.

As a consultant, most of my work involves projects where insufficient time and creativity are deployable to resolve “intractable” problems within the contracting organization. Innovation, it seems, is viewed as an outsourced commodity. Current success is viewed as a function of delivery on deadline, and future success is dependent on who can hire the best consultants. There simply isn’t time for another model. Unfortunately, most consultants confront the same time-management and deadline challenges – often because the client has waited to hire the outsourced innovator.

Interestingly, a brilliant former student raised this problem in a paper addressing the problem of physicians adopting quality improvement. She concluded that successful organizations are more often than not those that achieve a critical mass of learning – a la Peter Senge’s the “Learning Organization.” Technology, markets, economies, laws, and customer expectations change too rapidly to do otherwise, she argued. The problem, however, is one of available time – where, professionally, physicians are like hamsters on a wheel … never quite getting to wherever “there” is but too absorbed and stressed to jump off.

My former student (a hospitalist) went further, looking at the psychology of the practitioner. Compelled to excel at every stage of schooling and confronting the burdens of work and staying abreast of each new medical advance, burn-out follows for many. They saw graduation from Med School or achieving board certification in a specialty as a definable end goal, from which predictable and rewarding careers of helping patients would follow. Life-long learning was assumed, but at a predictable and manageable pace. The reality, however, has been markedly different, and some have chosen alternative paths – boutique and self-pay practices (i.e., no insurance or CMS filings), pursuing MHAs to become full-time administrators, or, until the sub-prime mess, leaving health care and pursuing careers in real estate.

Interestingly, the common theme to all of this is not that we are too overworked and on deadline to exercise innovation and achieve excellence. The common theme is that we have cultivated a system designed to produce no other result and have allowed it to creep into high school … and it isn’t stopping there. When my son was in middle school, the compelling need to get into “good” schools and confront advanced materials was strong. I once heard a parent comment to a middle school guidance counselor that she thought it a shame that trigonometry wasn’t offered in 6^th grade because it “held back” the students who were ready for it. What next? Astro-physics in kindergarten?

The perversity and persistence of unintended consequences is a common theme throughout human history. The ecological problems of today (including the scarcity of oil and the problems associated with its earlier abundance) were predicted and predictable. We chose to ignore them, but that was a choice. Lacking time and cultivated creativity seems likely to further remove choice from the arsenal of solutions. Innovation is not so common or epidemic that it can be produced on demand or without practice, and it is largely the province of youth. Innovation is a function of thought and time. It requires the presence of a frustrating challenge, time to research its causes, and the ability to take a nap – where the subconscious mind pesters the problem into capitulation, before the Eureka moment arrives during the morning shower. Kuhn described it, and Stanford’s Albert Bandura proved it. Advances do not arrive on deadline, when exhausted beyond mental tolerance, or when creativity was never learned.

And this leads us to two key realizations. First, the self-inflicted problems and schedules that prevent the practice of innovation deprive us of the only solution to those problems. Persistently crowd out the ability to practice innovation because other challenges are more compelling and the innovation necessary to best those challenges goes away.

Second, no one on their death bed will consider theirs a life well lived for having met a lifetime of deadlines. Can the same be said of creators and innovators?

Well, we have two opposing models – the goal-driven Donald Trump and the contemplative Henry Thoreau. Neither seems a compelling paradigm – all accomplishment without lasting advancement, on the one hand, and all thought and little action on the other. The key is in the balance between them, with time sufficient to cultivate both – where learning creativity and innovation are a function of freedom rather than schedule.

What are the chances of a change in the near future? None. Economic recessions are anathema to the excess capacity required for innovation. Instead, they promote the opposite for the employed and deprive the unemployed the opportunity to implement innovation.