If I could wave my mommy wand and cast a spell on the world, I would conjure up a school with this motto: “There is no such thing as failure.”
It would be a learning heaven that believes in kindergarten for life, where hard play replaces hard work, where “should” is not in the vocabulary, “rules” are against the law, “different” is common. It’s a place so conducive to creativity that big ideas cannot help but be born, a mental meadow that grows life-changing improvements for the disabled every single day.
Oh, Gail, you say, “There you go with your Harry Potter thinking again.” Normally, you’re right.
But this time – not so fast.
Such a place exists — not in a British adventure novel but in a location we would least expect to find it. It’s in the United States, hidden away in the temple of learning known as MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
*Crickets*
I know. That is what I thought. That place is Genius Central. Certainly nowhere I would consider fun or forgiving, magical — playful. This is a serious incubator for game-changing math and science prodigies, a Petri dish for technowizards.
It also is the home of the MIT Media Lab, and I interviewed its former director, Frank Moss, recently. He is a dad himself and a leader of the team that created this completely unorthodox approach to learning and creativity. He explains MIT’s secrets to success in a fascinating new book released this summer called “The Sorcerers and their Apprentices.”
The goal of the Media Lab, for the next quarter century, is to bring to reality the words of author and neurologist Oliver Sacks, who said, “We must humanize technology before it dehumanizes us.” The mission statement: to empower ordinary people to do truly extraordinary things and, in the process, take control over the most important aspects of their lives – their health, their wealth and their happiness.
I’ll have what they’re having!
If this is exploding the heads of all the control freaks out there imagining a spa for slackers, here’s what has emerged from that little chrysalis of creativity: E-readers, Guitar Hero, LEGO Mindstorms robots, child-safe air bags. Not bad for a play date, hmmm? But all that is just so five minutes ago for them.
They are focused on future innovations, such as Nexi , a mobile humanoid robot with social skills so finely tuned that she can serve as a companion for the sick and elderly. Then there is the CityCar, a foldable, stackable, electric vehicle of the future that will redefine personal transportation in cities and revolutionize urban life. SixthSense is a compact, wearable device that can turn any surface — a wall, table or even your hand — into a touch-screen computer.
Their work for the disabled is astounding. For example, consider PowerFoot, a robotic prosthesis that makes it possible for amputees to walk as if it were a real limb. There is a web service that enables patients to participate in the search for their own cures; people who are unable to pick up an instrument or even hum a tune can compose and perform to vast audiences.
Moss happily answered my request to give advice to mothers who hope to raise the innovators and creators of tomorrow. His advice was short and to the point: encourage children to take risks, to create and to invent.
He finds those qualities to be the heavy price we are paying for rewarding students for excelling at scripted tasks. “We take creativity and inventiveness out” of the formula, he said. With so much of our children’s education prescribed and controlled, he believes too many teachers and students are losing their willingness and ability to experiment.
At MIT, they invented a Web site called “Scratch,” where children can easily learn to program games and stories themselves the same way they build spaceships with their Legos.
Parents can contribute to their children’s creativity more than anything, he said, with an attitude. At dinner, ask, “What did you build today?” Keep paper and pencils around to encourage them to create and write their own stories, supplies to build with Legos, open-ended supplies to create in free-form ways.
At MIT, they support what they call “lifelong kindergarten.”
Moss is very concerned for the future of education. One of his reasons for writing this book is to spur a “desperately needed rethinking of our innovation ecosystem in the United States. There is near universal agreement that innovation is the key to confronting the urgent challenges that face humanity in the 21st century. But tragically, the 50-year-old ‘deal’ between government, industry and academia that spawned the wave of innovation in the United States in the late 20th century is broken.
“Government agencies, whose visionary leaders and money were the forces behind transformational advances such as the Internet and the mapping of the human genome, today support baby steps rather than bold leaps. University researchers play it safe in their grant proposals, aware that it is unlikely that peer reviewers will approve radical or controversial ideas.
“Large companies (with a few exceptions, such as Google) have dramatically cut their investments in curiosity-driven research, and most venture capitalists, whose longshot bets fueled the high-tech and biotech revolutions have lost their taste for early stage investment… I believe the way [ideas]are generated in abundance at the Media Lab can serve as a guide to help us reverse that disastrous path. “
At a time when the state Legislature is slashing the budgets of the universities, his message is a timely and critical reminder of the importance of a great education to the prosperity of our children, our state, our nation.