As children, we always thought it so clever to slam dunk a playground insult with the timeworn retort, “It takes one to know one.” There was no obvious validity to the claim - at least not one I ever stopped to consider. But as an educator, I’ve increasingly wondered whether that schoolyard nonsense may provide a metaphor of sorts for better classrooms.
I was reminded of this once again listening to Walter Isaacson address a crowd of independent school folks at a conference this past January. Isaacson is best known as the author of Steve Jobs, the only authorized biography of the founder and longtime CEO of Apple, Inc. But his new book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, is also gaining attention. In addition, Isaacson had earlier written highly regarded biographies of Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin. All of this writing, by the way, has been in his spare time. His “day jobs” have included managing editor of Time magazine, chairman of CNN, and president of the Aspen Institute, which he currently leads. He is the consummate authority on invention.
In our fast-changing world - a cliché and an understatement - audiences of all kinds are hungry for clues about how to succeed. But at this conference, the educators had particular reason to listen attentively. Most of the greatest inventors, Isaacson began, did not sit well with schooling. Jobs left college before returning for his degree. Bill Gates never finished college. Einstein dropped out of gymnasium, the German equivalent of academic high school.
In fact, many of the most creative minds are not direct products of formal schooling. That has been true throughout history and may be even truer today. Jobs, a perfectionist, had a standard for excellence that was simply unmatched. As he explained to Isaacson, he developed his interest in electronics tinkering alongside his father, a car buff, in the family’s garage. But the main lesson he took from his father came from building a fence around their backyard. When young Jobs wondered if they needed to sand and paint the outward-facing rear fence that no one would see, his father insisted, “Of course we will; no one will see it, but we will know.”
Jobs later demanded that the first Macintosh computers not be shipped, at risk of missing a highly promoted launch date, until the chips on the circuit boards were redone and elegantly aligned, even though no one would see them. When the first iPhone was being designed, Jobs insisted that the face be made not of plastic, which he thought inelegant, but of an unscratchable glass - that happened not to exist. Through sheer will, Jobs persuaded the CEO of Corning Glass to resurrect a never-produced design for such a glass and hone millions of units in unthinkably fast time for the historic phone’s promised debut.
Einstein would eventually return to school, finish his secondary degree, and graduate from a Swiss technical institute. But it’s clear that the typical classroom of the time didn’t fit his way of thinking, which too often included questioning received wisdom. As a youngster, Einstein puzzled over why the needle of a compass always quivered its way to a northern direction. How is it that some unseen force can move a physical object? What precisely underlies this? As he grew up, he studied the physics of the time but never found an answer he considered satisfactory - frustrating his teachers. Einstein finally became a physics teacher himself, but only after several years of writing influential papers in his spare time at the patent office. His general theory of relativity soon turned the received wisdom of schools - and universities - on its head.
In Ben Franklin’s time, education and ideas were the realms of the elite. Franklin believed that ideas need not come from formal schooling or from any one authoritative source. He became a champion of the middle class, the common man (recall Poor Richard’s Almanac and its mass audience). He also promoted pluralism in religious thinking. He personally helped underwrite the establishment of more than 30 churches and synagogues in colonial Philadelphia - all of which eventually led his funeral service in mutual gratitude. Franklin saw the genius in the marketplace of ideas.
This latter point is the central message of The Innovators. The two most important inventions of our time are the computer and the Internet. The computer makes possible calculations far beyond human capability. It enables scientists and engineers to evaluate and apply vast stores of data, benefiting society today in countless ways. In the hands of individuals, personal computers expand the capacity of everyone to research, think, and communicate - all of which the Internet has augmented exponentially by connecting just about everyone on the planet. If the marketplace of ideas was an interesting notion in Franklin’s time, it is an overwhelming reality today.
It is no accident that the marketplace of ideas was where the computer and the Internet were invented. The computer and the Internet have no single inventor - notwithstanding those who might try to claim the mantles. Isaacson tells the story of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of English poet Lord Byron, and Charles Babbage, an early 19th-century engineer. Lovelace, a gifted mathematician and writer, collaborated with Babbage to describe and prototype the first general purpose - meaning programmable - calculating machine, capable of working with symbols as well as numbers. A century later, Alan Turing - played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the multi-Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game - dramatized his wartime “invention” of the modern computer to crack the Nazi codes. But as Isaacson observes, many minds were at work on computing machines at the same time, from Germany to a lone professor’s basement in Ames, Iowa.
The functioning, programmable computers that were to proliferate in the 1950s actually drew on all of this work. Teams of scientists and engineers, each contributing pieces, “invented” the computer. Same with the Internet. The U.S. Department of Defense created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to incubate security-related innovations, including communications. Bell Labs, the research arm of AT&T, pursued similar work in the private sector. Brilliant individuals such as Tim Berners-Lee, who first announced the World Wide Web, were crucial to the development of the Internet and to the computer. But the bigger story, Isaacson argues, is that invention was not a product of lone genius but of ongoing creativity, trial and error, and teamwork.
As I listened to Isaacson and subsequently read The Innovators, I kept returning to my own experience as an educator. I became one myself - an academic and college professor - because I liked school. I was good at school. I never took a break or even considered one. High school, college, graduate school, professor by age 24. Not until I was about 30 did I slow down and ask if school was what I should be doing, or if so, how I should be doing it. I subsequently followed other paths - think tanks, business, charter schools, now independent schools - but all in service of a familiar model of schooling. Yes, I’ve tried to work with innovative ideas, such as school choice, and certainly with innovative schools, including many in our own community. But I increasingly wonder if innovators in education are asking the most fundamental questions.
What should teachers be doing with students day in and day out? Is being good at school likely to make a student good at life? Most of the teachers I have known - and I have known many professionally and personally (wife, sibling, children) - liked school, even loved it. They were good at school. They remember teachers who were good to them. As teachers, we often return to school to affirm and give back. These are good things. These are virtues of teachers in independent schools.
But do these things include the virtues that we know distinguish the “hackers, geniuses, and geeks” or the other school misfits who go on to be leaders in our world? Jobs and other innovators about whom Isaacson writes held to standards of excellence that set them apart. In schools, we all like to think that we have high standards. But the vast majority of us also process students through age-graded curricula and time-based courses, assigning grades at the end - fair, good, very good, and only some excellent. Is this the way to promote excellence?
As educators, we say that we teach critical thinking. But do we really? Too many students want to know the “right” answers from first grade through Advanced Placement courses - where there are surely right answers. Thinking critically, questioning received wisdom, takes time. It’s not usually where a teacher begins. As Isaacson quipped, “Someone once said to me, ‘Like Einstein, I think outside the box.’?” To which Isaacson responded, “Perhaps, but Einstein also knew what was in the box.” Critical thinking is not about iconoclasm; it’s about deep understanding - which takes years and conscious effort.
Finally, there is teamwork. It may be the source of genius and innovation. It is also a cliché of our “21st-century schools.” We all acknowledge it. But is it what we truly value? Do we assess it? Do we know if our students are good at it - say, with the confidence we know if they are good at math? Recalling his days as an independent school student in New Orleans, Isaacson said, “We had a word for teamwork - cheating!” The audience roared with laughter, knowing the grain of truth - in schools of all types, yesterday and today. We have made progress, of course, teaching and promoting teamwork. I see it frequently in the classes that I visit. But as an independent school senior recently shared in a discussion that I observed, “I don’t like working in teams; one person always ends up doing all the work.” We have a ways to go.
So why is “it takes one to know one” a metaphor for my thinking about teaching and learning? As a lifelong educator, I have never adequately appreciated the genius that lies in learning differently from how I learned myself. I understand that everyone does not learn the same way. But until recently, I did not appreciate how much the greatest contributors and contributions to human progress stemmed from virtues that did not emanate from school. I find that the more I know of today’s creators and creations, the better prepared I feel to consider how schools might support them.
It takes one to know one. Applied to schools, it means this: It takes an educator aware of the conditions that foster innovation in order to help our best and brightest develop and thrive. Only a few of our students will emerge as true geniuses, of course, but we can - and should - help them all develop their skills and talents to the highest level possible.