Today’s graduates face a new breed of challenges as they enter the workforce. They will confront messier, intractable problems such as climate change, global terrorism, antibiotic resistant diseases and persistent market weakness. The same technologies that empowered them as learners at the same time also multiplied the potential for global havoc.
And this has changed the definition of an appropriate education.
Teachers know this
Teachers appreciate that handling the new, intractable problems requires a new skill set. They require empathizing, imaginative citizens –in touch with their own creative impulses, confident individuals who can imagine totally new solutions. Teachers want to facilitate their students’ growth as artists. But teachers know something else as well.
Tomorrow’s managers must also be literate and numerate. As well as being creative leaders, reaching out and finding fresh answers to the problems of the future, they need to know everything we graduated knowing. And they need to be firmer in their foundations than we were. The stakes are higher for them and the competition for jobs is more fierce.
Inside most classrooms today you find teachers taking an iterative approach, balancing the advantages of constancy and routine with their necessity for experimentation and adaptation. You find teachers who are doing the best they can with the resources they have. The demands on teachers have never been greater. And they know it.
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This is the third time I have sat down to write this post. I keep deleting it.
I watched a documentary this week in Sweden and I can’t put it out of my head. It was about a group of mountain climbers attempting to summit the second highest mountain after Everest (K2). I’m not going to ruin the story for you, but the documentary is called “Disaster on K2.” It didn’t go well.
Watching this made me angry.
A lot of people (maybe most people?) say they would never skydive because it’s too dangerous. And yet, the casualty rate of sky dives is 0.001%. 1 death every 100,000 jumps. Climbing K2 is another level of risk entirely, 25% of those who climb K2 die. (Everest has a casualty rate of 9%). I just can’t understand an adult being prepared to risk so much to get to the top of a stupid mountain.
So, what is wrong with mountain climbers?! (There are those who cheer on all kinds of risk-taking, like Chris Guillebeau, but I’m not one of them).
Adventure holidays have increased in popularity by 17% in recent years. So there is a trend here. Maybe we crave danger the more we get the rest of our lives in order. Maybe we want to feel all-powerful. We want to be fearless. What bothers me is that the climbers who died in this documentary were smart people. They weren’t kids. They had experienced success in their lives. They should have known better.
This goes back to my theory that goals can ruin your life. We don’t know our limits.
David Zald, at Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, believes the reason is dopamine. “There appear to be fewer dopamine-inhibiting receptors,” he says, “— meaning that daredevils’ brains are more saturated with the chemical, predisposing them to keep taking risks and chasing the next high” (Source).
So there you have it, folks. Clear as day. Mountain-climbing is a mental problem.
Information is empowering, but too much can it can also be debilitating. Information Overload costs the U.S. economy $900 billion per year. In this interesting video a few of the world’s leading managers discuss the problem. In Defense of Distraction discusses how our brains are adapting to make the most of the new information-rich environments we live in:
More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi (the brain region for memory and spatial processing)—a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly.
However, for those of us still struggling to keep up, the article suggests meditation:
Neuroscientists have become obsessed, in recent years, with Buddhists, whose attentional discipline can apparently confer all kinds of benefits even on non-Buddhists. (Some psychologists predict that, in the same way we go out for a jog now, in the future we’ll all do daily 20-to-30-minute “secular attentional workouts.”) … attention is a limited resource… our moment-by-moment choice of attentional targets determines, in a very real sense, the shape of our lives. Rapt’s epigraph comes from the psychologist and philosopher William James: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.”
