On October 22 2024, Dr. Lindsay Whorton, president of The Holdsworth Center, interviewed Roy Spence and Ted Dintersmith on how we can reimagine the school experience to better prepare students for jobs of the future.
Ted Dintersmith is a venture capitalist whose films, books, keynotes, and philanthropy focus on the urgency of reimagining school to keep pace with the tsunami of innovation reshaping society. He is the founder and Chairman of WhatSchoolCouldBe.org, a non-profit organization catalyzing progress in schools, districts, and states across America.
Roy Spence is co-founder/chairman of Austin’s GSD&M advertising, where he co-created culture-changing campaigns like “Don’t Mess with Texas” and helped grow some of the world’s most successful brands. He founded the Make it Movement to help young people discover their purpose and talents while they are still in school so they are confident about making a great living doing what they love.
Below are key takeaways from the discussion.
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Let kids discover their talents and explore careers.
Let’s transform our education in Texas and America from testing to talent discovery. Have you ever heard of CTE (Career and Technical Education) instructors? They’re our heroes and we’re putting them on TV and I’m going to change their name to career coaches.
We want every young person in middle school and high school in America to start their journey of discovering their purpose and careers while they’re in school. And by the way, these aren’t jobs anymore. These are careers.
– Roy Spence
Change our culture to respect the dignity of all work.
We need to have teachers, counselors, superintendents, principals, rallying behind the idea that America was born different, not perfect. It was born with the idea of respecting the dignity of all work.
Part of the Make it Movement is we are trying to change the culture through ‘Wow’ marketing. We’ve got to have marketing as a force for good. You cannot change behavior until you change perception and awareness, right?
– Roy Spence
Shift the focus in schools. Machine intelligence will disrupt everything.
In the 1980s and 90s, robotics and outsourcing wiped out lots of communities and lower-skilled, physical labor jobs. Thos e jobs are gone.
I think what we’re going to see with (AI) is it’s going to wipe out a lot of cognitive skills jobs. Within three to five years all the jobs that college grads used to roll into will be gone. Those kids are going to need to either have great hands-on skills or be able to leverage AI or be able to create their own career path because they’re very entrepreneurial. But the jobs you apply for where you say, ‘I’m good at carrying out assignments’ – that’s exactly what AI is perfect at doing.
All the stuff that we call high stakes educational testing is done perfectly by machine intelligence. If our achievement metric in schools is exactly what computers do perfectly, God help those kids. We can do better.
– Ted Dintersmith
Support students and educators. Let them innovate.
I went to all 50 states in one school year, to 200 schools. I was blown away by the educators. And what I found was that these teachers, they’re itching to be more innovative.
My whole perspective on education directly mirrors my experience in technology because I was a venture capitalist. We don’t tell anybody what to do. You say, ‘What do you want to do and how can I help you? What is your dream and what can we support you in your dream?’ And that’s my attitude about education. What is your dream and how can we support? The dream could be a student’s or a teacher’s, it could be a principal, superintendent, bus driver. And we just support the heck out of them.
– Ted Dintersmith
Help students find their purpose. Don’t make them choose between college or career.
We’ve got this thing locked in our mind in this country: The path that’s great is the college path. It’s always college or career. You hear that all the time. College or career. It can be both. College works out great for some but for a lot it’s not a good path. I’m not anti-college, I’m anti going to college mindlessly and just sort of checking off the boxes and coming out with a large amount of student debt and not knowing what you want to do. The kids that have internships and apprenticeships, they make better choices about their courses and their majors.
What I find is that kids who feel like there’s a purpose in their schooling, who can see a path forward in their life, can power through a whole heck of a lot.
– Ted Dintersmith
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