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We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries. -- H. G. Wells
Our system of higher education is out of whack with the future, and with innovation; and it is at direct odds with what we say we believe. Not only are our universities not teaching innovation or delivering an innovation experience, they seem to be doing their best to destroy innovative thinking in young people. This is not intentional, but it may be all the more insidious for being unplanned, unnoticed and unseen.
Business leaders, politicians and economists all say more or less the same thing: The future depends on innovation and without it we are doomed as a country and a society to second-class status. So innovation, and those who can lead and cause innovation, are at a premium. You would think we would respond to this in our system of higher education; but, in fact, we are doing the exact opposite.
Innovation requires flexibility; it demands experience and knowledge that is both broad and deep. Both. Innovators must be comfortable with pivoting, adapting and changing, often and without hesitation. Innovators must be willing and eager to learn anew, all the time, and to learn quickly. But what kind of learning experience do we present to university and college students? From the day they set foot on a campus, most students are greeted with a homogenized, pre-packaged, profoundly compartmentalized, deeply siloed, interest-entrenched world. The experience of the modern university system is the antithesis of innovative leadership traits. Students are being taught to produce rather than create, to follow rather than lead, and to fear failure greater than death itself. It is as if we said we want to create an entire class of risk-averse followers, ready and able to follow commands. It is as if we decided to teach everything in ways that are the exact opposite of how innovation works.
Innovation requires independent thinking and a strong ability to work outside of the comfort of structure and predictability and security. But from the moment students enter into the higher education world, they are greeted with an insistent, unyielding message: "Prepare for a job!" This message is loud, and inescapable. Nothing takes precedence over "job!" and in very short order every student learns that they are in college for one reason and one reason only: To get a job. Students are encouraged to study only those things that will lead to a job; to avoid spending too much time on "unnecessary" studies that won't help with getting a job; to be sure to pick an "employable major," lest they be left behind for a job. They are pointed to internships, to career counseling and to every possible experience that will create a focus on getting a job, all well-intentioned efforts, perhaps; but all strongly reinforcing the jobs message. The system holds their hand, points them to the future, funnels their time, energy and work into a job-related program of study . . . and then we are all somehow surprised when this highly structured process of preparing someone for a job leads to graduates who expect structure and a job, rather than risk, disruption and opportunity.
We do all of this, even though we know that virtually any job we are encouraging students to prepare for will likely disappear in a few more years; that the job they are likely to have in ten years doesn't even exist today. We do this even though we know that the vast majority of students will have several careers and that many of those will by necessity be self-created. We do this even when we know that the "skills" (the most over-rated, over-promoted and non-innovative word in the English language) of innovators are the exact opposite of what is being taught in service to getting a job. We hang the boogeyman of "job!" over their heads; we turn them away from things that are fun, exciting, challenging, and off-the-beaten path; and we drill a misguided pragmatism into their heads every minute of every day they're in school. Then we are surprised when, after years of indoctrination about focusing on jobs, students graduate looking for jobs, rather than doing things that will create jobs
There's more. As part of our job focus and purported pragmatism, we dismiss as frivolous the Humanities and the arts, and anything else that is not explicity career- or vocation-focused. This is not always overt. There is the occasional discussion around students being well-rounded, and talk about filling out an education with a bit of literature or philosophy or history. But this is usually insincere tokenism, and we can verify this insincerity with a single glance at budget allocations. Follow the money in higher education and you'll find the real priority. It's jobs, not innovation.
Even when we give a bit of a nod to the "unessential" elements in a curriculum, like the Humanities, we still have to validate or justify these in some way as being part of the path to a job. Usually this is done by touting the development of "critical thinking" skills, a spiel which ranks as one of history's greatest scams. In service to validating various courses of study as being job-related, virtually every single course of study is packaged and sold as something that will "grow critical thinking skills," as if there are courses of study being offered elsewhere that will not grow critical thinking skills. One is inclined to wonder what parts of a university curriculum fall under the "no critical thinking skills required" department.
All of this of course is the exact opposite of what we should be doing to cultivate an innovative, risk-oriented mindset in young people. If we were serious about innovation, and about inculcating innovation into education, here's what we'd do:
1: We'd let students fail. In fact, we'd structure our educational system to be certain they'd fail. We'd let them fail, with serious, real consequences for that failure. We would not shelter them from failure, nor would we shelter them from risk. Lots of risk. The self-confidence and psychic endurance a real innovator must have doesn't come so much from a smooth path toward success, as it does from learning that you can recover from failure. Success is easy. Failure is more important.
2: Teach students that pivoting is good and that changing your mind is great. There is a particularly heinous lesson in the act of encouraging students to declare a major -- and then stick with that major for the duration of their education. This paradigm of deciding on a particular course of study at a very early age -- and being strongly encouraged to stick with it come what may -- ranks as one of the craziest assumptions we have in education today. The old saying that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy is wonderfully adaptable to education, with just a bit of a twist. "No major survives contact with a vibrant, broad learning experience." The institution of majors is not something that was created to foster learning, or innovative thinking; it was created to support academic departments. As long as we expect students to structure their education around the convenience of departmental structures, we are teaching students to be inflexible, slow to change, and subservient to existing rules. This is not innovation.
3: Teach students personal independence. Innovation is all about personal initiative, risk, can-do/will-do. It's about doing things that may lead to structure, not starting inside structure. When we put too much structure in place and too much guidance, or when we provide pre-packaged answers and pre-packaged solutions to challenges, we both limit what students might do and -- worse -- we rob them of the gift of wandering around in blind alleys. The best way to develop an ability to recognize a blind alley is to go down a blind alley. And if being an innovator has one predictable feature, it is the experience of going down many, many blind alleys. If we surround students with a constant offering of hypothetical solutions to problems and challenges, how will they learn that they are perfectly capable, as innovators, of creating their own solutions?
4: Breadth and depth. Obviously, sooner or later, a concentration in one area of inquiry might be important; but with innovation in mind, it's probably a lot later than sooner. When we push students too quickly into a major, we limit their chance to wander, to sample, to experiment, to learn about learning. The best way to introduce innovative thinking to students is by sharpening their ability to be effective in multiple fields of inquiry. If they are going to be innovators, they will need to function in multiple domains, in multiple disciplines; and most of their learning will be experiential. We should ensure that students explore, and sample, and try many different areas of study before they settle down to any concentrated work. Unless we are intent on teaching them to not be innovative.
Creating an innovative society, a true learning society, has little to do with artificially structured learning, and everything to do with acquiring and developing certain leadership traits. These traits come from the world of experimentation and failure, from the cultivation of broad interests, from curiosity and a willingness to be always ready to start over. This is what we should expect from higher education. Otherwise, we have created a system that guarantees we will fail to be innovative as a society.
