Graham commented on my back to school post, “Screw literacy, it’s thinking that’s died“, and I replied that I would rather work with a thinking illiterate partner than an unthinking literate one. Literacy and numeracy are great skills and may make for a productive workforce but critical thinking (questioning all assumptions, as well as your own) is much more important for citizens in a democracy, especially a networked one.
Our economic, political and social future lies not in working hard but in choosing to do the hard work. Seth Godin describes the latter as:
It’s hard work to make difficult emotional decisions, such as quitting a job and setting out on your own. It’s hard work to invent a new system, service, or process that’s remarkable. It’s hard work to tell your boss that he’s being intellectually and emotionally lazy. It’s easier to stand by and watch the company fade into oblivion. It’s hard work to tell senior management to abandon something that it has been doing for a long time in favor of a new and apparently risky alternative. It’s hard work to make good decisions with less than all of the data.
Anyone can work hard, but it takes courage to take on the hard work of changing our communities, questioning the education system or creating a non-profit organisation with no guaranteed return on investment. Hard work is not about literacy, numeracy or even civics. Hard work is questioning underlying assumptions and seeing new patterns and then taking action on this knowledge. Critical thinking is not only hard work, but it’s difficult to teach and not easy to measure. No wonder schools avoid it.
To face the environmental, social, political and economic challenges of our tightly coupled global world, we’ll all need to do some very hard work. Are our schools helping to prepare students for this? Do our workplaces encourage hard work? Do our communities support those who choose to do the hard work, especially challenging the status quo?
What hard work are you doing?
Many people are so busy working hard they have neither the time nor the energy to do the hard work. But even if everyone had the time and the energy, wouldn’t we need to work hard to do all the things that hard work doesn’t accomplish? Our future economic, political, and social future lies in realizing that there is a place for both hard work and working hard.
Today my hard work was to read a little of Warlick, Stager, Downes and Jarche and to think of ways to integrate what I learned into the current reality of our school system. It is hard work, but I’m willing to do it.
Thanks for providing me with food for thought.
I’ll agree that those things are indeed hard work, and important work. I think I do my fair share of it.
I would argue though, that you need really solid literacy and numeracy skills to be an effective worker. You say that you would rather work with an illiterate thinker, than a literate non-thinker. I don’t buy that. These are the basic skills that can put good thinking to use. If we can’t analyze and communicate (the end point of literacy and numeracy training) our thoughts, then they are for nought.
I know of an illiterate fisherman who built some of the best boats on the East Coast, by hand and without any formal mathematical calculations. Limited literacy and numeracy skills, but a great thinker and doer.
Oral societies, for instance, had no literacy but produced some great thinkers. I used to think that literacy was necessary for everyone, but I’m beginning to have my doubts. Mark Federman’s essay on “Why Johnny and Janey Can’t Read” [Google it] is worth a peek (or listen to the podcast):
“But orality has not structured society since ancient Greece, and literacy no longer structures society today. The challenge for all the Mr. and Ms. Smiths throughout the academy, and eventually in the secondary and primary classrooms throughout the world, is to recognize that the exclusive focus and predominance given to the pedagogical artefacts of a literate world is inconsistent with the skills necessary to participate in the discovery and production of
knowledge in a ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world.”