Foolish Pink Prescription

Forgive me for saying -- I find this Wharton puff piece embarrassingly shallow and trite. Pink is telling groups who pay him to speak and write -- largely the education bureaucracy -- what they want to hear and want to believe.

He ignores completely the fact that education is cumulative, and that rote learning of (say) reading and math is foundational to problem-solving. My daughter is constantly being put into "teams" (mere groups) with other students to create work products, which is fine except the entire process is utterly unlike any you would see in a modern or future workplace. She ends up doing much of the work herself, and a quarter of her cohort are functionally illiterate or innumerate. (Should school teach good teamwork, or just reinvent the broken team dynamics of the worst modern workplaces?)

Pink also depends heavily on the discredited "left-right-brain" imagery from the 1980s. Modern brain science has debunked this, however it's a useful shorthand for weak thinkers, so it lives on:

Pseudoscientific exaggeration of the research

Hines (1987) states that the research on brain lateralization is valid as a research program, though commercial promoters have applied it to promote subjects and products far out of the implications of the research. For example, the implications of the research have no bearing on psychological interventions such as EMDR and neurolinguistic programming (Drenth 2003:53), brain training equipment, or management training. One explanation for why research on lateralization is so prone to exaggeration and false application is that the left-right brain dichotomy is an easy-to-understand notion, which can be oversimplified and misused for promotion in the guise of science.^[18] The research on lateralization of brain functioning is ongoing, and its implications are always tightly delineated, whereas the pseudoscientific applications are exaggerated, and applied to an extremely wide range of situations.

Once he loses his cute brain-sidedness concept, Pink is left with suggesting that modern problems and future employment will depend on soft skills, complex skills, and other things not currently taught in schools. Duh.

Pink fails to point out that ALL of the skills he pimps -- "design, storytelling, synthesis, empathy and pattern recognition" -- depend on an underlying set of basic skills (literacy, numeracy, listening skills) that ARE supposed to be taught in modern schools, and largely are not, as well as human skills (work ethic, manners, self discipline, thrift, punctuality, respect for others, or overall emotional intelligence) today taught neither in schools nor many homes.

If this is the state of the art of advanced thinking about basic education, we're in big trouble.