Quotations from The World is Flat

by Thomas L. Friedman
Chapter #7
(Discussing what skills students need to be successful in this energy world)

      “Alas, we are growing quite concerned that we are not going to retire as well-off as our parents did, and our kids probably are not going to be as well-off as we were. Everyone seemed to me to be looking for the magic formula that would spare their kids from a future of downward mobility.

      The first and most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to “learn how to learn”—to constantly absorb, and teach yourself, new ways of doing old things or new ways of doing new things.

      That brings me to my second theme—passion and curiosity. When the world is flat, curiosity and passion for a job, for success, for a subject area or even a hobby are so much more important. Because in a flat world you have so many more tools to take you and your curiosity so much further and so much deeper.

Plays well with others
      You need to like people. You need to be good at managing or interacting with other people.

The Right-Brain Stuff
      We need to stress how to nurture more of your right brain as well as your left. If you want to be sure that you are what I call an untouchable, argues Daniel Pink, a person with a job that “a computer or robot cannot do faster or some talented foreigner cannot do cheaper” and just as well, you need to focus on constantly developing your right-brain skills—“such as forging relationships rather than executing transactions, tackling novel challenges instead of solving routine problems, and synthesizing the big picture rather than analyzing a single component.”

Tubas and Test Tubes
      So let’s work backward now just one more step. If the jobs of the new middle require you to be a good collaborator, leverager, adapter, explainer, synthesizer, model builder, localizer, or personalizer, and these approaches require you, among other things, to be able to learn how to learn, to bring curiosity and passion to your work, to play well with others, and to nurture your right-brain skills, what does that mean specifically for education?”

The answer for Mr. Friedman lies right here at Living Wisdom High School. For 37 years we have been developing techniques for teaching exactly what he suggests students learn.