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this edition is designed to be printed copied and shared if you d like the on-screen edition click here stop stealing dreams free printable edition 2

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if you don t underestimate me i won t underestimate you bob dylan stop stealing dreams free printable edition 3

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dedicated to every teacher who cares enough to change the system and to every student brave enough to stand up and speak up specifically for ross abrams jon guillaume beth rudd steve greenberg benji kanters patti jo wilson florian kønig and that one teacher who changed everything for you stop stealing dreams free printable edition 4

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1 preface education transformed as i was finishing this manifesto a friend invited me to visit the harlem village academies a network of charter schools in manhattan harlem is a big place bigger than most towns in the united states it s difficult to generalize about a population this big but household incomes are less than half of what they are just a mile away unemployment is significantly higher and many in and out of the community have given up hope a million movies have trained us about what to expect from a school in east harlem the school is supposed to be an underfunded processing facility barely functioning with bad behavior questionable security and most of all very little learning hardly the place you d go to discover a future of our education system for generations our society has said to communities like this one here are some teachers but not enough and here is some money but not enough and here are our expectations very low go do your best few people are surprised when this plan doesn t work over the last ten years i ve written more than a dozen books about how our society is being fundamentally changed by the impact of the internet and the connection economy mostly i ve tried to point out to people that the very things we assumed to be baseline truths were in fact fairly recent inventions and unlikely to last much longer i ve argued that mass marketing mass brands mass communication top-down media and the tv-industrial complex weren t the pillars of our future that many were trained to expect it s often difficult to see that when you re in the middle of it in this manifesto i m going to argue that top-down industrialized schooling is just as threatened and for very good reasons scarcity of access is destroyed by the connection economy at the very same time the skills and attitudes we need from our graduates are changing while the internet has allowed many of these changes to happen you won t see much of the web at the harlem village academy school i visited and not so much of it in this manifesto either the hva is simply about people and the way they should be treated it s about abandoning a top-down industrial approach to processing students and embracing a very human very personal and very powerful series of tools to produce a new generation of leaders there are literally thousands of ways to accomplish the result that deborah kenny and her team at hva have accomplished the method doesn t matter to me the outcome does what i saw that day were students leaning forward in their seats choosing to pay attention i saw teachers engaged because they chose to as well because they were thrilled at the privilege of teaching kids who wanted to be taught the two advantages most successful schools have are plenty of money and a pre-selected motivated student body it s worth highlighting that the hva doesn t get to choose its stop stealing dreams free printable edition 5

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students they are randomly assigned by lottery and the hva receives less funding per student than the typical public school in new york hva works because they have figured out how to create a workplace culture that attracts the most talented teachers fosters a culture of ownership freedom and accountability and then relentlessly transfers this passion to their students maestro ben zander talks about the transformation that happens when a kid actually learns to love music for one year two years even three years the kid trudges along he hits every pulse pounds every note and sweats the whole thing out then he quits except a few the few with passion the few who care those kids lean forward and begin to play they play as if they care because they do and as they lean forward as they connect they lift themselves off the piano seat suddenly becoming as ben calls them one-buttock players playing as if it matters colleges are fighting to recruit the kids who graduate from deborah s school and i have no doubt that we ll soon be hearing of the leadership and contribution of the hva alumni onebuttock players who care about learning and giving because it matters 2 a few notes about this manifesto i ve numbered the sections because it s entirely possible you ll be reading it with a different layout than others will the numbers make it easy to argue about particular sections it s written as a series of essays or blog posts partly because that s how i write now and partly because i m hoping that one or more of them will spur you to share or rewrite or criticize a point i m making one side effect is that there s some redundancy i hope you can forgive me for that i won t mind if you skip around this isn t a prescription it s not a manual it s a series of provocations ones that might resonate and that i hope will provoke conversation none of this writing is worth the effort if the ideas aren t shared feel free to email or reprint this manifesto but please don t change it or charge for it if you d like to tweet the hashtag is #stopstealingdreams you can find a page for comments at http www.stopstealingdreams.com most of all go do something write your own manifesto send this one to the teachers at your kid s school ask hard questions at a board meeting start your own school post a video lecture or two but don t settle thanks for reading and sharing stop stealing dreams free printable edition 6

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3 back to the wrong school a hundred and fifty years ago adults were incensed about child labor low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults sure there was some moral outrage about seven-year-olds losing fingers and being abused at work but the economic rationale was paramount factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work they said they couldn t afford to hire adults it wasn t until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place part of the rationale used to sell this major transformation to industrialists was the idea that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn t a coincidence it was an investment in our economic future the plan trade short-term child-labor wages for longerterm productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they re told large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars it was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system scale was more important than quality just as it was for most industrialists of course it worked several generations of productive fully employed workers followed but now nobel prize­winning economist michael spence makes this really clear there are tradable jobs doing things that could be done somewhere else like building cars designing chairs and answering the phone and non-tradable jobs like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy alas spence reports that from 1990 to 2008 the u.s economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs if you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do he will find someone cheaper than you to do it and yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do do you see the disconnect here every year we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor the bargain take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers as adults has set us on a race to the bottom some people argue that we ought to become the cheaper easier country for sourcing cheap compliant workers who do what they re told even if we could win that race we d lose the bottom is not a good place to be even if you re capable of getting there as we get ready for the ninety-third year of universal public education here s the question every stop stealing dreams free printable edition 7

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parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with are we going to applaud push or even permit our schools including most of the private ones to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable testable and mediocre factory workers as long as we embrace or even accept standardized testing fear of science little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself we re in big trouble the post-industrial revolution is here do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it 4 what is school for it seems a question so obvious that it s hardly worth asking and yet there are many possible answers here are a few i m talking about public or widespread private education here grade k through college to create a society that s culturally coordinated to further science and knowledge and pursue information for its own sake to enhance civilization while giving people the tools to make informed decisions to train people to become productive workers over the last three generations the amount of school we ve delivered to the public has gone way up more people are spending more hours being schooled than ever before and the cost of that schooling is going up even faster with trillions of dollars being spent on delivering school on a massive scale until recently school did a fabulous job on just one of these four societal goals first the other three a culturally coordinated society school isn t nearly as good at this as television is there s a huge gulf between the cultural experience in an under-funded overcrowded city school and the cultural experience in a well-funded school in the suburbs there s a significant cultural distinction between a high school drop-out and a yale graduate there are significant chasms in something as simple as whether you think the scientific method is useful where you went to school says a lot about what you were taught if school s goal is to create a foundation for a common culture it hasn t delivered at nearly the level it is capable of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake we spend a fortune teaching trigonometry to kids who don t understand it won t use it and will spend no more of their lives studying math we invest thousands of hours exposing millions of students to fiction and literature but end up training most of them to never again read for fun one study found that 58 percent of all americans never read for pleasure after they graduate from school as soon as we associate reading a book stop stealing dreams free printable edition 8

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with taking a test we ve missed the point we continually raise the bar on what it means to be a college professor but churn out ph.d.s who don t actually teach and aren t particularly productive at research either we teach facts but the amount of knowledge truly absorbed is miniscule the tools to make smart decisions even though just about everyone in the west has been through years of compulsory schooling we see ever more belief in unfounded theories bad financial decisions and poor community and family planning people s connection with science and the arts is tenuous at best and the financial acumen of the typical consumer is pitiful if the goal was to raise the standards for rational thought skeptical investigation and useful decision making we ve failed for most of our citizens no i think it s clear that school was designed with a particular function in mind and it s one that school has delivered on for a hundred years our grandfathers and great-grandfathers built school to train people to have a lifetime of productive labor as part of the industrialized economy and it worked all the rest is a byproduct a side effect sometimes a happy one of the schooling system that we built to train the workforce we needed for the industrialized economy 5 column a and column b aware caring committed creative goal-setting honest improvising incisive independent informed initiating innovating insightful leading strategic supportive or obedient stop stealing dreams free printable edition 9

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which column do you pick whom do you want to work for or work next to whom do you want to hire which doctor do you want to treat you whom do you want to live with last question if you were organizing a trillion-dollar sixteen-year indoctrination program to turn out the next generation of our society which column would you build it around this is more of a rant than a book it s written for teenagers their parents and their teachers it s written for bosses and for those who work for those bosses and it s written for anyone who has paid taxes gone to a school board meeting applied to college or voted 6 changing what we get because we ve changed what we need if school s function is to create the workers we need to fuel our economy we need to change school because the workers we need have changed as well the mission used to be to create homogenized obedient satisfied workers and pliant eager consumers no longer changing school doesn t involve sharpening the pencil we ve already got school reform cannot succeed if it focuses on getting schools to do a better job of what we previously asked them to do we don t need more of what schools produce when they re working as designed the challenge then is to change the very output of the school before we start spending even more time and money improving the performance of the school the goal of this manifesto is to create a new set of questions and demands that parents taxpayers and kids can bring to the people they ve chosen the institution we ve built and invested our time and money into the goal is to change what we get when we send citizens to school 7 mass production desires to produce mass that statement seems obvious yet it surprises us that schools are oriented around the notion of uniformity even though the workplace and civil society demand variety the industrialized school system works to stamp it out the industrialized mass nature of school goes back to the very beginning to the common school and the normal school and the idea of universal schooling all of which were invented at precisely the same time we were perfecting mass production and interchangeable parts and then mass marketing some quick background stop stealing dreams free printable edition 10

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the common school now called a public school was a brand new concept created shortly after the civil war common because it was for everyone for the kids of the farmer the kids of the potter and the kids of the local shopkeeper horace mann is generally regarded as the father of the institution but he didn t have to fight nearly as hard as you would imagine because industrialists were on his side the two biggest challenges of a newly industrial economy were finding enough compliant workers and finding enough eager customers the common school solved both problems the normal school now called a teacher s college was developed to indoctrinate teachers into the system of the common school ensuring that there would be a coherent approach to the processing of students if this sounds parallel to the notion of factories producing items in bulk of interchangeable parts of the notion of measurement and quality it s not an accident the world has changed of course it has changed into a culture fueled by a market that knows how to mass-customize to find the edges and the weird and to cater to what the individual demands instead of insisting on conformity mass customization of school isn t easy do we have any choice though if mass production and mass markets are falling apart we really don t have the right to insist that the schools we designed for a different era will function well now those who worry about the nature of schools face a few choices but it s clear that one of them is not business as usual one option is smaller units within schools less industrial in outlook with each unit creating its own varieties of leaders and citizens the other is an organization that understands that size can be an asset but only if the organization values customization instead of fighting it the current structure which seeks low-cost uniformity that meets minimum standards is killing our economy our culture and us 8 is school a civic enterprise at the heart of horace mann s push for public schooling for all was a simple notion we build a better society when our peers are educated democracy was pretty new and the notion of putting that much power into the hands of the uneducated masses was frightening enough to lead to the push for universal schooling being surrounded by educated people makes democracy stronger and it benefits our entire society in the words of john dewey democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses and for the higher education of the few the traditions of a specialized cultivated class the notion that the essentials of elementary education are the three r s mechanically treated is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals it s easy to see how this concept manifests itself there are more doctors scientists enlightened stop stealing dreams free printable edition 11

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businesses and engaged teachers in a society that values education sure education is expensive but living in a world of ignorance is even more expensive for a long time there was an overlap between the education that the professions rewarded and the education that we might imagine an educated person would benefit from tied up in both paths is the notion that memorizing large amounts of information was essential in a world where access to data was always limited the ability to remember what you were taught without fresh access to all the data was a critical success factor the question i d ask every administrator and school board is does the curriculum you teach now make our society stronger 9 three legacies of horace mann as superintendent of schools in massachusetts mann basically invented the public school except he called it a common school because a key goal was to involve the common man and raise the standards of the culture right from the start building a person s character was just as important as reading writing and arithmetic by instilling values such as obedience to authority promptness in attendance and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment after a self-financed trip to prussia he instituted the paramilitary system of education he found there a system he wrote up and proselytized to other schools first in the northeast u.s and eventually around the country his second legacy was the invention of the normal school normal schools were institutes that taught high school students usually women the community norms and gave them instruction and power to go work for common schools as teachers enforcing these norms across the system his third legacy one with which i find no fault was banning corporal punishment from schools as further proof that his heart was ultimately in the right place the man who industrialized the public schools he created left us with this admonition be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity unfortunately that part of his curriculum is almost never taught in school 10 frederick j kelly and your nightmares in 1914 a professor in kansas invented the multiple-choice test yes it s less than a hundred years old stop stealing dreams free printable edition 12

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there was an emergency on world war i was ramping up hundreds of thousands of new immigrants needed to be processed and educated and factories were hungry for workers the government had just made two years of high school mandatory and we needed a temporary high-efficiency way to sort students and quickly assign them to appropriate slots in the words of professor kelly this is a test of lower order thinking for the lower orders a few years later as president of the university of idaho kelly disowned the idea pointing out that it was an appropriate method to test only a tiny portion of what is actually taught and should be abandoned the industrialists and the mass educators revolted and he was fired the sat the single most important filtering device used to measure the effect of school on each individual is based almost without change on kelly s lower-order thinking test still the reason is simple not because it works no we do it because it s the easy and efficient way to keep the mass production of students moving forward 11 to efficiently run a school amplify fear and destroy passion school s industrial scaled-up measurable structure means that fear must be used to keep the masses in line there s no other way to get hundreds or thousands of kids to comply to process that many bodies en masse without simultaneous coordination and the flip side of this fear and conformity must be that passion will be destroyed there s no room for someone who wants to go faster or someone who wants to do something else or someone who cares about a particular issue move on write it in your notes there will be a test later a multiple-choice test do we need more fear less passion 12 is it possible to teach attitudes the notion that an organization could teach anything at all is a relatively new one traditionally society assumed that artists singers artisans writers scientists and alchemists would find their calling then find a mentor and then learn their craft it was absurd to think that you d take people off the street and teach them to do science or to sing and persist at that teaching long enough for them to get excited about it now that we ve built an industrial solution to teaching in bulk we ve seduced ourselves into believing that the only thing that can be taught is the way to get high sat scores stop stealing dreams free printable edition 13

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we shouldn t be buying this we can teach people to make commitments to overcome fear to deal transparently to initiate and to plan a course we can teach people to desire lifelong learning to express themselves and to innovate and just as important it s vital we acknowledge that we can unteach bravery and creativity and initiative and that we have been doing just that school has become an industrialized system working on a huge scale that has significant byproducts including the destruction of many of the attitudes and emotions we d like to build our culture around in order to efficiently jam as much testable data into a generation of kids we push to make those children compliant competitive zombies 13 which came first the car or the gas station the book publisher or the bookstore culture changes to match the economy not the other way around the economy needed an institution that would churn out compliant workers so we built it factories didn t happen because there were schools schools happened because there were factories the reason so many people grow up to look for a job is that the economy has needed people who would grow up to look for a job jobs were invented before workers were invented in the post-job universe workers aren t really what we need more of but schools remain focused on yesterday s needs 14 the wishing and dreaming problem if you had a wish what would it be if a genie arrived and granted you a wish would it be a worthwhile one i think our wishes change based on how we grow up what we re taught whom we hang out with and what our parents do our culture has a dreaming problem it was largely created by the current regime in schooling and it s getting worse dreamers in school are dangerous dreamers can be impatient unwilling to become wellrounded and most of all hard to fit into existing systems stop stealing dreams free printable edition 14

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one more question to ask at the school board meeting what are you doing to fuel my kid s dreams 15 when i grow up i want to be an astronaut assistant jake halpern did a rigorous study of high school students the most disturbing result was this when you grow up which of the following jobs would you most like to have the chief of a major company like general motors a navy seal a united states senator the president of a great university like harvard or yale the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star the results among girls the results were as follows 9.5 percent chose the chief of a major company like general motors 9.8 percent chose a navy seal 13.6 percent chose a united states senator 23.7 percent chose the president of a great university like harvard or yale and 43.4 percent chose the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star notice that these kids were okay with not actually being famous they were happy to be the assistant of someone who lived that fairy tale lifestyle is this the best we can do have we created a trillion-dollar multimillion-student sixteen-year schooling cycle to take our best and our brightest and snuff out their dreams sometimes when they re so nascent that they haven t even been articulated is the product of our massive schooling industry an endless legion of assistants the century of dream-snuffing has to end we re facing a significant emergency one that s not just economic but cultural as well the time to act is right now and the person to do it is you 16 school is expensive it s also not very good at doing what we need it to do we re not going to be able to make it much cheaper so let s figure out how to make it a lot better not better at what it already does better at educating people to do what needs to be done do you need a competent call-center employee school is good at creating them but it s awfully expensive do we really need more compliant phone operators and at such a high cost stop stealing dreams free printable edition 15

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