Part of the MFA Interaction Design Weekly Thesis Blog series - 3 of 64

“Our culture has a dreaming problem.”

In his manifesto on education, Stop Stealing Dreams, Seth Godin wrote about a survey of high school students by journalist Jake Halpern. He asked students from three high schools in Rochester, NY.

“When you grow up, which of the following jobs would you most like to have?”

The chief of a major company like General Motors
A Navy SEAL
A United States Senator
The president of a great university like Harvard or Yale
The personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star

A disturbingly high number choose “the personal assistant to a very famous singer or movie star.” I was tearing up at this point. Seriously, what is wrong with our schools? What is wrong with our culture, that our children when presented with these choices picks the one that matters least?

Perhaps there are better dreams out there than the first four.  Maybe they want to own their own restaurant.  Maybe they want to be a scientist, or radio host.  Maybe they don’t want to be rich and powerful, but just do good work.  That would be wonderful.

But a personal assistant? To a famous person? If that is the scale of our students’ ambitions, then our culture has failed them.

Here’s what I want to explore: Can we teach people to care?

I know that we can teach them not to care; that’s pretty easy. But given the massive technological and economic changes we’re living through, do we have the opportunity to teach productive and effective caring? Can we teach kids to care enough about their dreams that they’ll care enough to develop the judgment, skill, and attitude to make them come true?

“Judgment, Skill and Attitude” in Stop Stealing Dream by Seth Godin

That’s what I want to explore too. Why are so many of our students so bad at dreaming? So bad at caring? Throughout his manifesto Seth attributes it mainly to the industrial model of education, which in its quest for standardization and conformity beats the idiosyncratic passions and dreams out of students.  In the guise of equipping students with a standard set of academic knowledge, we’ve knocked the dreams out of them.

I tend to agree, but I would also approach it from a different angle. What kinds of dreams are visible to our children? What do we celebrate, what we work towards, what stories we tell each other as a society; these all feed into what dreams our children catch.

The dreams we need are self-reliant dreams. We need dreams based not on what is but on what might be. We need students who can learn how to learn, who can discover how to push themselves and are generous enough and honest enough to engage with the outside world to make those dreams happen.

“Dreams are difficult to build and easy to destroy” in Stop Stealing Dreams by Seth Godin

I think many students today think that these dreams feel out of reach. How do we make these self-reliant dreams more accessible? Can we make these dreams seem possible? Can we connect students to people who understand where they come from, who can be role models they strive towards? To use Simon Sinek’s words, let’s start with why. Giving students their dreams back, their raison d'être back, is an important step toward reforming education.

That’s where I think I have an opportunity as a designer. We can tell better stories about the future, so that our students dream better dreams.