Podcast: Tony Wagner on Learning By Heart

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast where we unpack what is new and innovative in education. Tony Wagner is a former high school teacher, principal, teacher educator, and school coach. For three decades, he’s been an advocate for deeper learning for all students. His books, Change Leadership, Global Achievement Gap, Creating Innovators, and Most Likely

to Succeed, sounded the alarm bell that the new economy requires new experiences and outcomes. In his new memoir, Learning by Heart, Dr. Wagner recounts his own struggles with traditional education and his lessons learned from the last two decades of work exploring the innovation economy. Let’s listen in as Tony and Tom recall their work together and talk about the path forward.

Hey, Tony Wagner, welcome to the Getting Smart podcast. Oh, Tom, it’s great to hear your voice and I’m looking forward to the conversation. Where and how are you weathering the lockdown? Weathering would be the operative word. I’m in rural New Hampshire on Squam Lake looking at a solid sheet of ice on the lake that remains.

Bearground with patches of snow here and there, but we’re doing just fine. We’re making time to zoom, we’re FaceTime with friends and family. We have a schedule where we do some work regularly. We take walks every day, so we’re doing just great things. Tony, we’ve got a lot of history and I want to let our listeners in on just a little bit

of that. I’m going to go in the way back machine to 1994. I was a first year superintendent here in the Seattle area and Rudy Crew was the Tacoma superintendent and early in the morning I used to shoot across the tide flats of Tacoma and have coffee with Rudy and he would explain to me what I should be doing.

First on his list was that he told me to send our principals to Tony Wagner’s training program at Harvard. It wasn’t mine. I just cameo appearances here and there. He said you got to get your principals to meet Tony Wagner and my principals came back

and said there’s this guy that sounds kind of like you, but we understand him. When you started with serious disability coming from an engineering background, I was lucky. I was a recovering high school English teacher. Well, the interesting thing is like on some dimensions I was the best prepared superintendent ever.

On most dimensions I was completely unprepared and so I invited you to become our district coach. Do you remember what you did and how you did it for us? Clearly, I mean maybe you have a better memory than I. My main recollection is that I was I think a sounding board for you and there’s something

that you needed where you could speak candidly to me and express your concerns. But I also spent a lot of time listening to the principals and the students and kind of trying to be an intermediate if you will and give you a sense of what I was hearing, what the challenges were. The other thing I think that you utilized me for is helping principals and teachers

understand the need for change. That my attempts to explain to folks about this changing world and what it means for kids I think was something that I was able to do because I had the credibility of having been a high school teacher. So they heard me in a different way perhaps.

And then finally I think we talked a lot about and you did a great deal of public engagement. Focus groups and community meetings, helping the community understand the need for change. So I did I love the fact that you would go visit schools and talk to principals and kids and you would come and meet with our leadership team. You remember that our leadership team used to meet in the mall?

I do. We took over a vacant store and we moved all of our customer facing functions. The mall and we used to meet there and you would come and describe what you had seen and felt like it was going in the right direction and what we needed to be thinking about. It just there was such a useful dialogue and I like the way you described that role of

the intermediate. I think it was as valuable for our teachers and leaders as it was for the leadership team. No, thank you. It was a pleasure because I think you were such a visionary superintendent willing to try new things, really open to understanding more deeply how to do your job well.

And that’s not something that’s common. I think a lot of superintendents like senior managers and many, many businesses think they got to be where they are because they’re somewhat smarter than other people and don’t necessarily have to listen. Have you done coaching of that short in the last 20 years?

It seems like that’s been a thread for you, right? Oh, I did quite a bit of it. Yours was the first district, but I had many after that. And as you know, when I was involved with the Gates projects that you helped to initiate, I did a great deal of coaching.

And then most recently out of the blue, I got a call from one of the principals with whom we worked when we were in the Gates project, who is now superintendent at North Shore. And I’ve become her and her leadership team’s coach as they think about how to really transform learning in the school district and start a new high school. And it’s been a joy to reconnect, especially with a superintendent so experienced and so

visionary in her understanding of what needs to change. Jonah, you have a new memoir out. It’s called Learning by Heart. We’re going to come back and talk about that. But in the book, you talk about your own educational experience.

And as you think about elementary and middle school, it sounds like traditional education didn’t work very well for you. Well, that’s kind of an understatement, Tom. I made it school, you know, from day one, not just some days, some subjects, but pretty much the whole package.

You know, I loved wandering the farm where I grew up and I did a lot of learning there and in summer camp. But class, classroom learning didn’t work for me. I was asked not to return to the middle school where I was attending eighth grade for high school.

I dropped out of a very second grade boarding school in my senior year because of an encounter with an English teacher, which we could talk about, and then dropped promptly after that out of two different colleges before graduating from a small experimental college that in many ways opened incredible doors for me as a learner and enabled me to become a teacher because I’d probably graduated from somewhere.

Right. So that was, I think that was called Friends World Institute, right? Friends World Institute became Friends World College. What was it? You know, it was interesting.

It was founded by a group of Quakers who hired this visionary educator by the name of Morris Mitchell, who was really had studied with and had been influenced by John Dewey. So for Mitchell, it was all about hands-on learning. So he believed, we learned best by engaging and doing what he called study tours, study trips.

And his vision was to really educate agents of social change. Now keep in mind, this is 1965, 66. And so his vision was to create centers all over the world, seven of them, and have students move from their home center to each of the others and then come back to their final home center for the last semester of their senior year and write a senior thesis.

Now the vision was grandiose. But the experience that I had as a student there where there were no formal classes, no grades, and there were seminars and where we really studied social problems. And I actually ended up living for a year and studying in Mexico. And it was an incredibly transformative set of experiences.

The major academic requirement was that we keep a journal about all of our learning. We had an academic advisor and he would sit down with us and regularly and talk about what we’re learning, talk about what was our journal, and then award credits on the basis of what we had written about what our learning in our journal. It was quite ahead of its time, but it enabled me to be more independent, to take initiatives,

to pursue the subjects and topics that really interested me most deeply. And along the way, I encountered some extraordinary people who made a real difference in my life. That’s really powerful. And it’s interesting, Tony, before we started recording, I mentioned that I had sort of rediscovered this idea of educating for social change, for social good.

And I think that was so vibrant in the 60s and I sense a resurgence of that ethic that ethos today. Wonder if you’d see that as well. I do. You know, it began when I began seeing it when I interviewed young people for my 2012 book,

Being Innovators. And all of those young people in my interviews, some from privilege, some from poverty, equal number of young men and women, they all want to make a difference. They all want to solve real problems. And they’re impatient with an education system that doesn’t give them the tools and the opportunities

that they seek. You were a teacher and a school head. I’d love just a reflection on your time leading schools. What was a big takeaway or a huge from a tense? Oh, you wouldn’t have to go straight to that one.

That was one of the biggest disasters of my adult life. That’s a good story. For some, I mean, I tell it with a great deal of pain. The short version of the story is I was 33 years old. I had 10 years of experience teaching both public and independent schools.

And I thought I was ready to be a school leader. I knew how to transform my classroom. And so by gosh, I was going to go transform a school and create a model school. And so I became head of this very small precious little K through a independent school in Cambridge, Quaker School called Cambridge Friends.

And you know, there was the challenge was on the surface, all the trustees, all the teachers thought this was the most wonderful school that had ever been created on the earth. But beneath that surface, that the near, I heard disgruntled parents saying, you know, it’s not academically rigorous enough. There it’s too permissive with behaviors and so on.

And I began to see with my own eyes that, you know, those eighth graders were not going to be ready for ninth grade at a school like Sidwell Friends where I had previously taught. And there were many kids who seemed to me being far too indulged by adults in terms of their misbehaviors. But I didn’t know how to do anything, Tom. You know, I’d taken this ridiculous seminar for new heads of schools.

And the college there talked to us about his window shade theory of leadership. He said, you know, you as a leader, you got control of the window shade. You’re led up a little and you’re going to give a little more power to the people. You bring it back down and you take it all back. He said, it’s all about where you put your window shade.

It’s terrible, is right. Oh, God, it was awful. It was terrible. So I was a disaster as a head. I lasted a year and a quarter.

That was it. Well, like what do you take away from that? The good news is that it creates a sense of humility about the job, right? Oh, absolutely. First of all, you know, personally, you know, I was heuristic.

I had an over, I had an exaggerated sense of what I could do. I wasn’t grounded. You know, I didn’t understand that leadership is very different than, you know, being a good teacher, which I was. I was a good teacher.

But being a good leader is completely different. So that’s the first point, under really understanding that there is something to master about leadership. Secondly, and it was kind of it foreshadowed later work that I learned about from other other leaders. I had a sense that something needed to change.

I had no idea how to frame the conversation to bring others in. You know, I had the solution. We had more, we’re going to need, we’re going to have more rigor, better discipline, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, they didn’t see that there was a problem.

And then it just, yeah. Well, I want to underscore that. I think that is the, today, the first job of a school head or a system head is to lead that faculty conversation, that community conversation. The new work is really building, is that a temporary agreements around a new context.

And so I think this being a conversation leader and agreement facilitator might be the first job today. Is that something? You know, I just couldn’t agree more. And it became most clear to me when I was doing my doctorate at Harvard, and I wanted

to study schools in the process of change. And they hung out for a year and a half and three completely different kinds of high schools trying to change. And the core message that I came back with is that teachers were being asked to change and had no idea why.

You know, we in education have an affliction called answeritis. We start with solutions to problems most people don’t see, answers to questions most people haven’t had a chance to ask. And so I agree with you. The job of a leader is to facilitate a conversation.

But also I think to, as Ron Hyfitz talked about in his book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, get on the balcony and help people see the bigger picture and frame the bigger questions or the bigger challenges. Not having to believe you have to answer them. That’s it.

You know, our job is to empower the educators to find new solutions to new problems. It’s what Ron Hyfitz calls an adaptive challenge. It’s not a technical challenge. I’m glad you mentioned Ron. And I do want to underscore adaptive challenge.

This is really important for teachers and principals that we are experiencing in society a set of adaptive challenges, things we have never experienced before for which there are no easy answers. And I think the idea of inviting kids into adaptive challenges is really, it’s challenging, right?

It requires a sense of humility to say, listen, I don’t know the answer to this. And in fact, nobody knows the answer to this, but here’s how we might approach this problem together. And openness to adaptive leadership, I think is really critical. I think both you and Ron have made a real contribution over the last 30 years in that

space. Well, I learned it the hard way, I think, beginning with that Canvas Friends experience years ago. All right. So, fast forward.

So, 1999, I give you a call and say, hey, Bill and Melinda have invited me to help them start this foundation. And Bill told me to go visit schools for six months and tell them what to do. Can you help me line up some school visits? So that fall was kind of Tom and Tony’s wonderful adventure, right?

We visited, I don’t know, probably hundreds of schools. You introduced me to Ted Seiser and Debbie Meyer and to all the innovators in Boston, Linda Nathan. We visited the Met and Dennis Lipke. We visited New York and visited what was the first multiplex that had a Julia Richmond,

right? Yep. That was the deepest and most wonderful learning curve of my life. Is that six months? Oh, so much fun.

It was exciting for me, too. And just to imagine what we were learning and seeing and what and how that could be brought to scale was really a rich and vital time, wasn’t it? Oh, it’s incredible. I knew it was a very heady time, too, because you had access to resources.

And so all of these schools that you mentioned, these leaders, had basically been scrounging and had been on the fringe for so long. And for them to finally begin to see the possibility of real resources and possibilities for scale-up and an acknowledgement and an appreciation of their substantial intellectual contributions.

I mean, they were really the first innovators in education, the ones you just talked about and made such a difference for so many of us today. And they’re largely forgotten now, but all of those people made a real difference. And then you really tried to bring their ideas into the public space in a very significant way.

Well, thanks for all those intros. It was life-changing, and I like to think that it helped put the sector on a slightly different trajectory. In some respects, it’s interesting to note that right at the same time, the standard space movement was turning into federal policy, and just a year later turned into no-challenge

out left behind. And so you had these networks of progressive schools being launched, and you had standards, assessment, and accountability, this equity-seeking effort, and people like me thinking that these things could live harmoniously. And I guess with 20 years of hindsight, we see that accountability efforts kind of swamped

the new school development efforts to some extent. Those ideas didn’t live as harmoniously as we once thought. You have thoughts about that? Yeah, I do, because I think we’re always, in hindsight, we’re always very critical of NCLB, but it came about for a reason.

And the reason was that we as educators had fallen down. We had not paid sufficient attention to the achievement gap. We had not disaggregated data. And so to some extent, we brought this on ourselves. And I think if our new efforts now to reimagine education for the 21st century are to succeed,

we are going to have to create what I call accountability 2.0. We’re going to have to create an accountability system that does, in fact, hold us accountable for what matters most. That’s a button and a bumper sticker I want every educator to have. Hold me accountable for what matters most.

So we’re going to have to design a different kind of system that in a sense really powerful learning and teaching, but at the same time uses data and other forms of evidence, qualitative evidence, examples of student work, to make sure that we are, in fact, on the track and never leave any kid behind again. Thank you for that.

Put a pin in that and come back and do another podcast on that topic. You agree? Love it. All right. I want to do a quick lightning round and just highlight some of the great books that you’ve

written. In the 90s, you wrote a book called How Schools Change, which is kind of an ethnographic look at three communities. A great second edition came out in 2002. And speaking of Ted Seiser, he wrote the forward to that.

In a sense or two, why was that book important to you? Well, it was actually based on my dissertation at Harvard, and I had to really fight to do a qualitative research dissertation. And it really did, as I said, encapsulate the essence of the learning that teachers were being asked to change and didn’t know why.

And that really set me on a course. How do I as an educator help people understand why change? Hey, listeners, it’s your host, Jessica. I wanted to just take a quick break to share an important resource with you. Recently, our team launched the Getting Through microsite to support educators,

leaders and families on the path forward during this unprecedented and uncertain time. There’s something there for everyone, whether you’re just getting started with your transition to distance learning or you’ve had plans in place for a while and now have the opportunity to share your work and guidance with others. We hope this gives you a place for your voice and an opportunity to learn.

We know we will get through this together. Check it out at GettingSmart.com slash Getting Through. OK, now back to the show. Now we’re going to move into a period where you had really good forwards to your book because I wrote the forward for the next few weeks.

Making the grade came out in I think 2002. And I think the real focus there was you talked about school being obsolete and must be reinvented. I really I love that sentiment because it it didn’t blame teachers. It explained that we’ve inherited this obsolete system

that wasn’t delivering what kids needed. Well, that’s right, because the message then, as you’ll recall, about the standards movement was that schools are failing and needed reforming. And of course, that was a total teacher blame. And so I was trying to counter that message with a different one, which is,

you know, some schools are failing, but in fact, the system is obsolete and doesn’t need performing. It needs reinventing or reimagine. And my favorite model of the era was no shame, no blame and no excuses. Next book was Change Leadership.

You get into more I think both you and Michael Fulin, and we’re moving into this space of thinking systematically, systemically reframing the problem, laying out a new set of skills. What else do you remember about Change Leadership?

Well, first of all, it came about because of a great grant that that you guys gave us at the Foundation, the Gates Foundation to create this Change Leadership Group, which brought together Bob Keegan and myself as co-directors, plus Jude Garnier and Lisa Leahy and later others.

And we really had the luxury of trying to study, change and change leadership and try to understand it and then work actively with school districts, teams of school districts led by superintendents in the process of change. And so learn from that. What is the methodology?

And I remember vis-a-vis, Tom, the conversation you and I had, said, look, you know, you’ve got a problem in business. You can call a bane, you can call a Mackenzie, you know, you can call these those, but who do you call if you’re an education leader and you’re having a problem with educational change?

There was no one. So the Gates Foundation grant enabled us, I think, to develop, first of all, a theory and a methodology and then case studies. And that’s what really influenced that book. And it wasn’t just written by me.

It was written by me as well as all of my colleagues. And it was a result of about eight years of learning that the Foundation granted enabled us to achieve. I forgot about that, the change solution group that was behind that. That’s great.

That was important work. A couple of years later, you wrote what really turned out to be your breakout book called Global Achievement Gap. What was that about? Well, you know, I read Thomas Friedman’s

The World is Flat 2004, 2005, because my wife told me to. She made me read it. She said, you have to read this book. And I did.

And I said, oh, my God, this is going to be an incredibly different world. And we need to understand it. So that was one sort of larger influence. But then the other influence I was sitting next to this business guy. I got upgraded to first class because I’ve been traveling so much

and I had the mileage and his name is Clay Parker. I sat next to him and we started chatting. Turned out he was the CEO of a company that made the machines that made microchips. I mean, about as technical and STEM-y as you can get, right? And so I said, OK, here’s an interesting opportunity.

It’s a new world. He’s the kind of guy that Tom Friedman would have written about. I’m going to interview him and say, OK, so, Clay, tell me, when you go to hire somebody for your company, what’s the first thing you look for? And this guy was trained as an engineer.

And I thought, you know, we’ll get all this bands, masks up and all that. And he said, well, the first thing I look for is someone who knows how to ask good questions. And I went, whoa, to recovering high school industry. Sure, that was music to my ears. He asked him to explain.

He said, well, you see, you have to understand that to solve a identify the right problem. It’s not about problem solving, he said. It’s about problem identification. And to identify the right problem, you have to know how to ask good questions. You have to ask the right question.

So I said, OK, now what’s the second thing? And he said, and I’m waiting now for the technical stuff, you know, the science math stuff. You said, well, the second thing is I want it. I want someone who can look me in the eye and engage in a thoughtful conversation. And I’m going, oh, my God, this is this is about a second because you can get it as a business.

And he’s telling you stuff that as new this teacher, I tried to do. I said, well, why is that quite easy? Well, look, it doesn’t do any good if you know how to ask good questions, but you can’t engage others. You can’t leave a team. You can’t get things done unless you know how to engage others.

He said, most engineers, you know, look at their feet when they talk to you. So to me, they sent me out on a kind of journey exploration. I said, all right, maybe he’s a one off, but let’s go find out. So what I did, Tom, was I interviewed a wide variety of executives and it took me a couple of years to get access from literally from Apple to Unilever to senior leaders in the US military

and asked them, what are the skills that matter most and what are the gaps? And I got the same kinds of consistent findings that Clay Parker described. I ended up calling them the seven survival skills. And then I compared that with what I was seeing in some of our very best schools and advanced placement programs and classes.

What were they teaching? And that was the global achievement gap. It was the gap between the new skills all kids were going to need, not just for work, but also for learning and citizenship versus what was being taught and tested even in our very best schools.

You followed it up with creating innovators, which was further elaborated on those skills. But I think was written for a bit more of a general audience. Parents included, is that fair? Oh, yeah. I will go with you.

The gap also had a wide following from parents. What happened, Tom, is I kept talking to these leaders and I still had the assumption we were in a knowledge economy. And I began to realize, well, Peter Drucker coined that term in 1969. And this was now 2010.

And I suddenly realized it wasn’t a knowledge economy anymore. It was the innovation era. And what do we have to do beyond the seven survival skills to prepare all kids to be innovators, to graduate all kids from high school innovation ready, not college ready? And so this time what I did, as you know, is I interviewed a wide variety of young people,

all of them were in their 20s, some from privilege, some from poverty, some, equal number of men and women, but all of them were in some way identified as creative problem solvers. Some were social entrepreneurs, some were in tech. I talked to the guy who led the team that developed the first iPhone and everything in

between. There were artists and so on. And I tried to understand what had been the forces that had shaped their lives. And, you know, I interviewed all of their parents and asked them about their parenting and what was different.

And I also, of course, asked them most about their education. And one of the first important things I learned was that while some of these kids had gone to leading schools, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon specifically, they all told me they had learned to become innovators in spite of their schooling, not because of it. But they got all named at least one teacher who made a real difference in their lives, just as

you were telling me earlier about the teacher that made the greatest difference in the lives of your daughter, Carolyn. And so I interviewed all of those teachers and I discovered they were all outlier teachers, teaching ways that were fundamentally different from their colleagues, but very similar to one another and similar to all those teachers.

And we saw in that first great, great road trip we took together in 1999. So that was the essence of that book. How do we prepare all kids to be innovation ready? Yeah, I love the formula that you laid out was play, passion and purpose. The forces that drive young innovators as a beautiful summary.

In 2015, you wrote a book with Ted Dintersmith around a movie called Most Likely to Succeed. What was fun about that project? Well, it was great fun working with Ted on the movie. It was an extraordinary adventure to make a movie that could help a large audience

understand why change parents, teachers, community members. And with Ted, the effort was to really begin to get more specific. If the problem is preparing all kids for the innovation era, what do we need to change in the curriculum? And math, for example, I mean, you know, I was an English teacher, but Ted had a PhD in

mathematical modeling. And so he had much more credibility for sort of critiquing the math curriculum than I. So we kind of divvied up the ground, so to speak, and wrote from our perspectives and our experiences about how do we specifically reimagine particularly the high school curriculum? And so that was the real focus of that book.

It was an extension of creating innovators in some respects. And I’ll just give our friend Larry Rosenstock a plug. The movie features high tech high extensively and the really powerful learning experiences that young people have there. And I’ll give a plug right back because you and I went to visit high tech high early on.

And you said, oh, my God, how do we have more of these? Visitive when there is an abandoned naval base and a gutted warehouse and a guy who promised that the only textbook would be Gun Steers and Steel by Jerry Diamond. Actually, there’s a funny story, a backstory to that. When there were a group of kids who screened the movie, most likely, to succeed in a school

district. And then they were in live time talking to high tech high kids about the movie and about their experiences in school. And so these conventional high school kids and they were in Salt Lake City, I think, I was in the audience and I said, to ask the high tech high kids, do you really not have

any textbooks at all? And the kids said, oh, yeah, we have a few. We use them as door stops. Oh, that’s great. That sounds like Larry.

Yeah. All right. The reason for the call, Tony, is that you just released a memoir. It’s called Learning by Heart. After this great string of books that we’ve just talked about, was it harder or easier

to write a memoir? It was both. It was easier in the sense that I wasn’t trying to have to construct a new argument or do new research. You know, I had no new arguments to make, but I had stories to tell.

And I was in a sense trying to simply answer the question of how did I become in my own world an innovator? And so that was the easy part. The hard part was the emotional revisiting traumatic experiences. And I don’t mean personal family experiences.

I mean, traumatic school experiences. You know, I was very lucky. I started collecting papers that I had written and things that I’d done, you know, since the age of 14. Now I had journals.

I had 10 years of teaching journals. I had all of my journals from Friendsville College. I had every paper I’d ever written that I thought was of any interest. And so I had this treasure trope of material. I had two unpublished manuscripts.

I’d actually started writing a book, Tom, in 1976 called Educating for Character, based on my teachers, my teaching experiences. The tone of then four years later published a book by the same title, Educating for Character. And then I’d also written three drafts of a novel in my first year of my doctoral program because I was so bored at Harvard.

And so I had all of that material. And I had all my life, Tom. We share a passion in my life. I know yours is poetry. Mine has always been fiction.

I loved reading fiction. And I began life wanting to be a novelist. I wrote three. I wrote starting when I was 19. I actually started writing upcoming of age novel.

I wrote eight pages of it. The novel I finished in my first year of my doctoral program. And I realized I’m not a novelist, but I do love using the tools of in the novelist toolbox, storytelling, character development, dialogue and description. And so for me, it was pure joy to be able to at last kind of, in a sense, develop

another side of my writing interests and writing abilities. So the good party for an English teacher. Oh, that was really fun. I have to say, though, I had great fun. The longest version of the story is I’d written a proposal from four or five years

ago based on this and sent it to Scribner and who was my publisher. Cause they had write a first refusal and they came back and say, really interesting material, but you basically don’t know how to write a memoir. And so my agent, Edith and Harmsworth spent eight months finding me a coach. And she’s not a ghost writer.

She can write a word, but Robin Dennis and I skiked weekly and she would go through drafts and we’d talk through stuff. And the first thing she helped me to understand is basically a memoir is not really about me. It’s about other people in my life and the influence that they’ve had for good or

for bad. And that in many ways, a memoir is like a good novel. You’ve got a sympathetic character. Hopefully I’m somewhat sympathetic who goes through a lot of trials and tribulations and maybe comes out at the end having learned something useful to

somebody else. So that’s, that’s. Wow. That’s, that’s a great story. I’m glad you shared that that an English teacher who had written his entire

life and bestselling author needed a coach to do a memoir. And just being able to take that tough advice, like, sorry, this, this version sucks. You need a coach. Wow.

And to be able to turn that corner and use it productively. Um, wow, what, that’s a great, great story. I’m glad you shared that. I think that’s important for, uh, for our audience. The message is we learned through trial and error.

That’s how humans learn. And when we’re trying to, you know, put this pressure on these kids, they have to be perfect little kids to get into the right college and have the right job. We’re doing tremendous damage. And when we create this bell curve and we say, okay, you had this many mistakes.

So you get an S. We, you know, in the innovation world, you learn through trial and error. You learn through iteration in the world of school. The more mistakes you make, the more you fail. And so, you know, it’s the exact opposite of the real world.

And so in some sense, I wrote the memoir showing all of my mistakes and all of their wrongness and there were many helping. I hope that for people to understand learning through trial and error begins when we learned to walk, when we learned to talk, when we learned to ride a bike, we’re going to fall and skin our knee and we have to get up and keep going.

I guess another big takeaway from, from the book is that we really need to be thinking about leveraging student interest and strengths, that those inviting young people to do real work that is important to them and their community is really what school ought to be about. Is that fair?

Oh, I couldn’t have been more talk. I mean, fundamentally, school destroys curiosity. It undermines intrinsic motivation because kids don’t get the answer on questions. They don’t get to ask, you know, what am I interested in?

What do I want to learn? Let alone pursue those. And so I had that gift at Friendsville College that saved me, literally saved me. And, you know, there are so many kids today who never experienced that. This curiosity is like a muscle that withers from atrophy.

And so I really deeply believe the more we help kids to discover themselves and the nature of their interests, but also discover themselves in the context of a connected world. You write about the new mutuality. And I think you’re right, you know, to understand the best way to put it, you

know, it was Jean Tanger, the Swiss psychologist who did the most succinct definition of education I’ve ever heard. He said, education, the goal of education must be to overcome egocentrism in two domains. And actually it means on reason, learning to weigh evidence.

Emotionally, he said overcoming egocentrism means learning what he called reciprocity, but what I think we would call empathy. So the challenge is to help people more fully realize themselves in the context of a world that is increasingly not just interconnected, but also interdependent as Thomas Friedman says.

Tony, we’re recording this at a bizarre time. I think we’re peaked pandemic as we, as we speak or moving into it. I guess as you think about the teachers and leaders listening to this, what would you invite them to think about? As they begin to imagine, I know most of them are scrambling, trying to provide support

to kids remotely right now. But when they have a few minutes to think about post pandemic learning, what would you like them to be thinking about? Well, I think you’ve written about some great ideas in your recent Forbes column, Tom. And I agree with you that as I’m talking to Michelle Reed, this very dynamic

superintendent at North Shore, she’s saying, well, what if we don’t have regular classes in the fall? What would education look like? What would learning look like? It’s not school based.

What about grades? Do we need grades? What about testing? Should we have it? Do we need it?

In a sense, it really, it begins to free us to imagine if we could start from scratch to design an education system that was really created to enable the fullest development of the human capability. What would that look like? Because what’s clear to me is that the person who’s most fully developed in the

context of being socially connected and aware and empathetic is a person who’s going to be not only successful in this new world, but who’s going to thrive. We talk too much about success and not enough about thriving. And I think it’ll also be the kind of person who’s most readily able to adapt and to pivot and to pursue things of real interest that can lead to something

more deeply fulfilling, whether it’s in work or in play. Sony Wagner, it’s been a treat to have you on the Getting Smart podcast. Where, where can people find the book? It’s really starting April 7th. It should be available anywhere and everywhere from Amazon to independent

bookstores. Where can they find you online? Oh, TonyWagner.com or Pat D.R. Tony Wagner. Also, just as a quick PS to the whole thing, one of the great joys that I had

in doing the book was being able to narrate the audio version. The other book version is available April 7th as well. I had great fun doing the narrator for that. Yeah. I want everybody to get a copy of it.

It’s a terrific read. And I think it’s really a timely, timely message. So skip Netflix on night and check out Learning by Heart. Tony, thanks for joining us. Thomas and a joy to reconnect.

And thank you so much too for all of the incredible work you have done that have enabled so many educators to think differently. Thank you. A big thanks to Tony for joining us on today’s episode. We appreciate the journey recounted in his new memoir and his advocacy

for deep learning for every student. For more on deeper learning, be sure to check out episode 232 with Virginia State Superintendent James Lane and Ted Dintersmith, Tony’s co-author on Most Likely to Succeed. And before you go, don’t forget to rate and review the show and make

sure you’re subscribed. That’s it for today, listeners. For the Getty Smart podcast, this is Jessica signing off.