be one of the most innovative and forward thinking thought leaders in education today.

I could read his long list of accomplishments. His work at Harvard. His work as a teacher.

And as as principal. But you could read that all on his website at Tony Wagner dot com

if you'd like to. And I just wanna basically let you know that this book that he's written

"Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World" is really

a fabulous read. We're gonna be selling it outside, right outside there. You can buy

a copy and have Tony sign it afterward and he's gonna be kind of giving an overview of

the work he's seen in this space. So please welcome Tony Wagner.

[applause]

>>Tony Wagner: Delighted. Good morning. Thank you, thank you. It's really a pleasure to

be here. A lot more fun than being at Microsoft, where I was three weeks ago. I have to tell

you.

[laughter]

But, that's not for attribution.

How many of you here are parents? Raise your hands.

How many of you here are educators? Raise your hands.

OK. I love to begin with a quote from Einstein. "The formulation of the problem is often more

essential than the solution." We talk a lot about problem solving. Problem identification

is arguably the most important skill of the 21st century. For 25 years we've been talking

about failing schools and the need to reform education. Part of the problem is it's a little

bit punitive language. Anybody wanna go to reform school? Raise your hands. It's very

punitive. [laughter]

But beyond that I think that problem is not the right problem. If we merely aspire to

bring our disadvantaged students up to the levels of achievement of our middle class

students, we will fail all of our students. And put our economy in even greater jeopardy.

So that's what I wanna talk about.

Fundamentally the problem is this. Our system of education is obsolete. And needs reinventing.

Not reforming. And that is a completely different education problem. And guess what? Google

is mostly to blame for that obsolescence. I'm about to explain why. Because of Google

and other events, what one knows today no longer matters? How much you know is not a

competitive advantage. Information has become commoditized. It's like air. It's like water.

It's on every internet connected device, growing exponentially.

How many of you had to memorize the periodic table in high school? Raise your hands. How

many elements were there?

[quiet audience response]

I'm sorry, I didn't hear that answer.

[audience members call out answers loudly] [laughter]

Whatever answer you gave was wrong, because two more were added last week. If you don't

believe me Google it.

[laughter]

Ah, how many of you had to memorize the state capitals? Raise your hands. OK. Let's have

a competition. How many of you would like to recite them from memory while I Google

them and let's see who's quicker?

[laughter]

Memory is not something we need to think about educating as we have in the past. The world

no longer cares how much you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with

what you know. And that is a completely different education problem. It's not about filling

people up with more knowledge. It's about skill and it's about will. So I'm gonna be

talking about skill and will in the context of education.

Back in 2005, I read "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. How many of you have read

that? Those of you who haven't I encourage you to. Most important book I've read in at

least a decade. Scared the heck out of me. Because as many of you know, Friedman describes

a world where increasingly any knowledge, I'm sorry, any work that can be routinized

is very rapidly be off shored or automated. And I talked with him recently. He said he

got one thing wrong in that book. I said "What?" He said, "The pace of change." It's happening

far, far more quickly than he ever imagined.

So I think the question becomes in a global knowledge economy, what skills will our young

people need? Will your children need? To succeed. So that was a burning question for me back

then. And I decided to interview a very wide range of leaders. Corporate leaders from Apple

to Unilever. Leaders in the military. Community leaders. College teachers. Asking all of them

"What are the skills that matter most? What are the gaps?" And I came to understand there's

a set of core competencies every single student must be well on the way to mastering before

he or she finishes high school.

Some of you may have read my book "The Global Achievement Gap" that describes this. Came

out about four years ago. Very briefly they are: Number one, critical thinking and problem

solving. And fascinatingly, executives describe critical thinking first and foremost as the

ability to ask really good questions. Try an interesting exercise. Do a learning walk.

Observe classrooms. And listen for who is asking what kinds of questions.

Collaboration across networks and leading by influence was number two. Agility and adaptability

was number three. Initiative and entrepreneurialism was number four. Number five was, effective

oral and written communication. And it is by the way the number one complaint of both

college teachers and employers. Number six was accessing and analyzing information. Number

seven was curiosity and imagination.

So that book came out about three and a half years ago. And it describes the new skills.

And the global achievement gap is the gap between the new skills all students will need.

Not just for a good career, but for continuous learning and active and informed citizenship.

Those skills versus what is taught and tested even in our very best schools. That's the

global achievement gap. That gap between the new skills all students need as well as how

they are motivated to learn. Versus what we're teaching and testing. So that's skill.

So two things happened when that book came out three and a half years ago. Number one,

I got a kind of affirmation frankly that stunned me. From literally from Taiwan to Singapore

to Helsinki to Bahrain to Thailand to Birmingham, England. Around the world, people saying "Yep,

these are exactly the right skills, would you come and talk to our audiences about them?"

From Wall Street to West Point, same message exactly. But then the other thing happened.

The global financial collapse. I saw students with a BA degree and about 30,000 dollars

of debt on average coming home to no job. Now they had seemingly mastered many of these

skills. But what was missing? Why weren't they able to find jobs? Or create jobs? Right

now today, the un- and under-employment rate among college graduates 2005 and more recent

is 44 percent.

[pause]

About 22 percent are completely unemployed. The other 22 percent have jobs that do not

require a college education. What's the problem? Well, as I came to try to understand it and

come to grips with the global economic collapse. And mind you, I'm a recovering high school

English teacher. So what I knew about economics four years ago you could put in a thimble.

But I really studied it and I came to understand a couple of things. Number one, our economy

has become a more and more and more dependent upon consumer spending as the engine of our

economy. Back at the end of World War II, nearly 50 percent of all jobs were manufacturing

related. Now we don't make so much as we do buy stuff other people have made. That's point

one.

Point two, that consumer economy has been fueled by debt. People putting money on their

credit cards as fast as they can. Pulling the money out of their houses as fast as they

could. The savings rate in 2007 was minus two percent. Leading me to conclude that perhaps

we've created an economy based on people frequently spending money they do not have, to buy things

they may not need, threatening the planet in the process. Now, the question becomes,

how do we become less reliant on consumer spending? Which is not sustainable economically,

environmentally, or spiritually in my opinion. How do we become less reliant on that? What's

gonna replace it? What's gonna be the engine of growth? What's gonna create jobs in the

future? So I read, over and over again, one word kept coming up. Innovation.

Now let me be clear, we're not just talking about breakthroughs in science technology,

engineering and math. Innovation as I'm using it is broadly defined. Becoming a country

that produces young people who have more better ideas to solve more different kinds of problems

than what we have today. Young people who are creative problem solvers. That's the simplest

definition of innovation. Someone who is a creative problem solver. First of all, a problem

identifier, and then a creative problem solver.

Now, we've always been known as a country that's been highly innovative. But is that

because of or in spite of our education system?

[audience chuckles]

[unintelligible] percent question for the day. Are you ready for this? I'm gonna say

it so fast you won't have time to Google it. What do Bill Gates, Edwin Land the inventor

of the Polaroid instant camera, Bonnie Raitt the folk singer, and Mark Zuckerberg all four

have in common?

They were not college drop outs, I'm sorry. They were Harvard college dropouts.

[laugher]

That's different. I mean, you know, Steve Jobs, he was just a college dropout. Michael

Dell, he was just a college dropout. These guys were Harvard college dropouts.

So I decided to take on a very different kind of research. I wanted to try to understand,

what must we do differently as parents? As teachers? As mentors? And as employers? To

develop the capacities of many, many, many, more young people to be creative problem solvers.

To be innovators. In whatever they do. Not just STEM fields. Social innovators and entrepreneurs.

Innovators in all domains. So I first interviewed a very wide variety of young people in their

twenties. Who were highly innovative. But again in a broad range of fields. Some were

artists, musicians, social entrepreneurs. Some were in STEM fields.

And then I studied their ecosystems. By that I mean I went and interviewed each one of

their parents. Trying to see if I could discern patterns of parenting that had made a difference.

I asked each one of them, "Was there a teacher or a mentor?" who had made a significant difference

in their lives? In their development as innovators. 30 percent could not name a single teacher.

Almost all of those young people were from disadvantaged backgrounds. Where their schools

and teachers were not what one finds here. The other 70 percent could name a teacher.

And you know the span of teachers was elementary to graduate school. Then I went and interviewed

each of those teachers and mentors. From these young innovators. Profiled.

Talked to them and came to understand something that I still to this day find shocking. In

every single case, these teachers from elementary to graduate school, were themselves outliers

in their educational settings. Their institutions. Teaching in ways that were very different

than their peers. But remarkably similar to one another. And further, when I went to those

few schools that we have identified as doing an outstanding job of educating people to

be innovators, talking about High Tech High. I'm talking about Olin College of Engineering.

I'm talking about The D School here at Stanford. I'm talking about the MIT Media Lab. When

I visited those places, the kinds of teaching I saw there was totally consistent across

those schools. And completely congruent with the ways in which these young, these outlier

teachers whom I had interviewed were teaching. And so I came to understand that the culture

of learning that produces innovators. The work culture which we've been talking about.

It develops the capacity to innovate. In a classroom or in a corporation indeed. Is radically

at odds with the culture of schooling in most classrooms. In five essential respects.

Number one. Culture of innovation is all about collaboration. Teamwork. Accountable teamwork.

All of these teachers built accountable teamwork into almost all of their assignments. Valued

teamwork as much as individual achievement. Number two, the culture of learning to become

an innovator is all about problem based learning using multiple disciplines. It's right here.

Judy Gilbert director of talent here at Google said to me: "If there's one thing academics

must understand is that problems can neither be identified, let alone solved, within the

bright lines of individual academic disciplines." The culture of schooling is all about becoming

a specialist. That's what we incent. That's what we reward. First we divide and conquer

the high school universe. With curriculum. Carnegie units. Which have not changed in

125 years. Then when we go to college we're supposed to have a major. Oh and we want to

teach in college. We wanna have a, uh, doctorate. When I did my doctorate at Harvard, I was

told my first year that my dissertation would be a conversation between myself and one or

two other people in the world. Conversation with two people. For four years? I don't think

so.

[audience chuckles]

I chose a different path. Got through Harvard but by other means.

Number three. The world of innovation, learning to become an innovator is learning how to

make mistakes, reflect on them, and learn from them. Iterate. I was down here at IDO,

talked to folks there. They said "Our motto is 'Fail early and fail often.' There is no

innovation without trial and error."

A student at Olin said "You know, we don't even talk about failure here. We talk about

iteration." Very different world. The D School at Stanford they're sitting around the table

talking. "Actually, you know we were thinking, F is the new A."

[laughter]

Try that out on your parents.

[laughter]

Number four. The culture of learning to become an innovator is an active process. Where students

are creators. Where students are producing real products for real audiences. Solving

real problems. So often the culture of schooling is the absolute antithesis. It's about consuming,

not creating. Sit and "git". In fact, I wonder if that's where we learn to be such good little

consumers. We start out, that's how we get schooled 12, 16 years.

Number five and most important, I think. I discovered that every single one of these