Clayton Christensen |

In his first address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, President Obama made education a cornerstone of his remarks—and properly so given the urgent need to improve education in this country. Obama also made a point of saying that it isn’t enough just to give education more resources; schools also need more reform. This echoes a piece that Clay and I authored last week. Obama elaborated that offering preschool options isn’t enough, for example. We have to continue to improve them, he said, as well as cut “education programs that don’t work.”

We hope that concrete action follows this encouraging rhetoric. One thing we remain worried about is that the money in the stimulus package targeted for schools will be used to fund a continuation of the status quo. This is borrowed money. Charging education isn’t the same thing as changing it. Budgetary crises sometimes compel us to adopt disruption—which can lead to wholesale transformation of a system to something that serves many more people far better and far more affordably.

A point that Obama also touched upon in the speech is the fact that the price of tuition for post-secondary education is higher than ever. This is a big problem. But as we’ve pointed out in many posts on this site (here and here, just to give two examples), the solution isn’t to subsidize tuition to expensive colleges through scholarships or loans. If we do that, all we’re doing once again is charging education, not changing it. We haven’t made the system any less expensive; someone is still paying for it.

Industries only become more affordable through disruption. We need teaching universities and online universities to take more market share with a more affordable model to bless the lives of many more people. Subsidies will only delay the transformation to models like Andrew Jackson University and StraighterLine.

The headline says it all. That’s the potential finding from a Cornell study that found a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3, according to a fascinating article by Gregg Easterbrook in Slate.

The effect of early childhood on the brain is significant and cries for more good research. In our book, we draw on Betty Hart and Todd R. Risley’s work that shows that one of the fundamental reasons some children struggle to learn is that they don’t hear enough words before they reach the age of 3 and benefit from “language dancing.”

This raises many questions. Among them: Could a busy parent simply turn on the television and put the infant in front of it so they could hear the requisite number of words? The answer from research is a clear no. That sort of “background noise” has insignificant impact on a child’s intellect. But this Cornell study raises some questions here – maybe sitting the child in front of the TV would affect the brain in other ways.

This also leads us to think that the existence of multiple types of intelligences has its roots in the process in early childhood where our neural pathways are emblazoned in the brain. Babies who hear “extra talk” perhaps have strong verbal-linguistic intelligence; maybe listening to music helps produce stronger musical intelligence. And being disproportionately exposed to certain things like TV perhaps has strong effects on the brain, too.

As we advocate for more online learning, we need to be cognizant of how the medium for our information could in fact change how we think. Nicholas Carr writes about this phenomenon in the July/August cover story for the Atlantic Monthly titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Of course, if the real world is changing regardless of whether we think it is good idea, and if students need to think differently to cope in this new world, we probably need to change how students learn in schools to match that evolution. We might also wonder if students in fact learn differently now than did students of an earlier generation, and if this, too, calls for different forms of learning.

There is mixed research on this last question to be sure. What do others think?

We wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to David Brooks’s recent op-ed in the New York Times. Since the Times published this set of letters recently in response to the column, I thought I’d put our letter up here. It’s below.

Dear Editor,

In his July 29, 2008 column, “The Biggest Issue,” David Brooks points to a dire problem threatening the United States’ future: lack of educational progress.

The regression that he writes about afflicts many countries as they reach prosperity. As we recount in Disrupting Class, when countries reach prosperity, the extrinsic motivation for students and educators to tackle the hard subjects like science and engineering dissipates. The New York Times reported on this exact trend in its May 17, 2008 article, “High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers.”

To bring students back into the fold and into subjects like engineering, we must allow students to learn these subjects in ways that are intrinsically motivating. One way to do this is to customize the learning to the way each student learns best—something that computer-based or online learning has great potential to do.

Brooks is right that early childhood learning is vital. The problem, however, with many early childhood programs is that unless they employ an individual surrogate parent who has the instinct and aptitude to engage in hundreds of hours of face-to-face so-called “language dancing” for each child, the programs will not work and the result will be more wasted dollars.

Sincerely,

Clayton M. Christensen
Michael B. Horn
Curtis W. Johnson

We did also have a letter published in the Washington Post today. You can read it here.