This is a great opportunity for us all coming together today.
I understand that our focus today is on how we apply technology
to make our public schools better. We must focus on the lives
of our children and their futures.
Technology will be a big
part of properly educating our children, which will make education
more cost effective and exciting, but first, last, and always
are the children and providing them with the finest education
system in the world. If our children are put first, and everything
we do in education is calculated to improve their lives, we
will succeed.
I listened with interest as various groups today
talked about the problems in the public schools, and how to
solve them. What we do now in education is see a problem, spend
a fortune, and wonder why it didn’t work. If I wanted
to build a bridge without coming up with a blueprint or concept,
you would fire me and hire a team that uses the engineering
process.
My advice to you is very simple. When schools across
our state have a problem, put together what I call a small
Delta team or Swat team of the best minds. Assign them the
responsibility to go out, gather information and get a consensus
of solutions to the problem. First, go through the engineering
process and develop a conceptual plan. Only in America would
you go from noble concept, to mass production, to failure,
and wonder why. Once we have the noble concept, we must develop
a detailed plan on paper – a blueprint. This plan must
be designed in a modular way, because we know that there will
be things that we forgot to include, or things we will have
to take out and fix.
The next step must be to pilot test the
plan – and finally mass produce throughout our schools.
Once we have the plan working successfully during the pilot
phase, and it is built in a modular fashion so that it can
modified incrementally, we know it is the proper solution.
You must all pledge to one another that once the plan is in
place, you can make it better every day, and can change it
incrementally by adding new modules or improving the existing
modules. It took 2 million years to reach a billion people
on the planet. This occurred in 1800. We are now up to 6 billion.
We added 1 billion in just 12 years. If the birth rate remains
at current levels, the human population will go to 50 billion
by 2100. The lowest forecast I’ve seen is 30 billion.
Where does the U.S. fit in? Right now we have 300 million people.
Where does China fit in? They have 1.3 billion people – think
of that. And where is India? 1.1 million people, and scheduled
to pass China in the next 20-30 years. If you fly through China
and land at any of their big cities, you won’t believe
the growth, and the skyscrapers that are there. What is their
secret? - a well educated population. And how did they get
that? In a very odd way.
I learned 26 characters, 10 numbers
and that’s it. An uneducated Chinaman can draw 2,000
symbols. Think of the hand-eye coordination that comes with
drawing the symbols. An educated Chinaman, I was told by a
prominent Chinaman many years ago, can draw 5,000 symbols.
I made a speech the other day. There was a Chinese professor
there – he pulled me aside and said, “No, it’s
6,000 symbols.” Now imagine, at a very early age, having
to learn to draw and recognize 6,000 symbols.
The people in
India are very smart. They speak English. They don’t
have that magic with all the symbols. One day I called a group
of Indians together that work in my company, and I said, “Why
are you so much smarter than we are?” They were very
modest, very shy. They wouldn’t tell me. One finally
said, “You know, if there is any secret, I think it probably
is that in order to talk to the children in my neighborhood,
I had to learn 12 different dialects by the time I was 2 years
old.” That is a neuron connector!
We are born like an
unwired computer. The only thing that works the day you are
born are the neurons that are connected in your brain that
allows you to breath, that lets your heart beat, and regulates
your body temperature. You can’t see, you can’t
hear . A few days later the neurons start to connect and you
can see – and hear - 1,000 trillion neuron connections
can be made! There’s one small part of the brain that
is very precious to all of us in this room – and that
is the creative part of the brain. It’s about the size
of a walnut. It can only get wired between birth and 18-24
months. The activities a baby has in his or her life during
that period determine whether or not a child will be creative.
I’ve seen a number of studies on creative people. Many
of them came from rural areas. Nearly all of the children had
invisible friends. Most of them had to create their toys from
wooden boxes. They got wired.
Contrast that with just sitting
around watching television. Our biggest challenge of all is
to get those children wired. The ability of the neurons to
connect starts to shut down in the sixth year of a child’s
life.
One of the most exciting people you will hear from this
afternoon is a lady who figured that out in 1970. Terry Ford,
Director of East Dallas Community School, is going to be talking
to you. I supported her efforts. She took the poorest children
in Dallas at 3 months of age. She kept them in her school – breakfast,
lunch, dinner – 12 months a year. They only went home
at night to sleep with an aunt, an uncle, or whoever they had.
They attended school until they finished the third grade. Then,
they were bussed all over Dallas - and 80% were on the honor
roll! I rest my case – Isn’t that wonderful!
Many
of Terry’s children were minorities at a time when the
most elite colleges were trying to find minorities smart enough
to receive scholarships. These children got full scholarships
to some of our most elite schools. They soared like eagles
there, and they have gone on to do great things in their lives.
They were very proud of what they could do. They outperformed
most of the kids in the public schools, so that made them understand
that they weren’t a nobody from nowhere – they
had great self-esteem.Terry Ford has successfully created several
charter schools across Texas. These are examples of things
we can do, and the sooner we start the sooner we finish - but
it even gets better.
A number of years ago a lady in Tennessee,
Donna Blevins, who is here today and will tell you her story,
decided that she wanted to take the most underprivileged children
in her area and teach them to read, write, and do all sorts
of things using laptop computers. She later sent me videos.
Here are these little boys and girls that really didn’t
have a family unit, didn’t have anything - They were
just on fire working with the computer. She had them writing
letters and numbers at age 1, she had them doing simple reading,
writing and math at age 2, and then one day she called me and
said she wanted to see if some of them could do Algebra at
age 3. They did! They were getting their neurons connected,
right? I think that is our biggest challenge, because no matter
how hard we work, if we come in at a time after you can no
longer connect those neurons, we’re just hammering on
concrete. Please keep that in mind.
Let’s go back to
our public schools. One of my saints is Wendy Kopp, who recruits
the brightest college graduates across the country to give
two years of their lives to “Teach for America.” When
I was growing up during the Depression, all of my teachers
were the daughters of parents who had enough money to send
them to college just because they loved them so much. The two
opportunities they had coming out of college were teacher or
nurse. My teachers could have been on Wall Street today, making
huge salaries. I had incredible teachers.
Today we have to
really work to get the best and brightest teachers. Technology
can really help them. Don’t accept the fact that I’m
right – Just take a look at it , kick the tire, see if
it works, and then go through the engineering process, pilot
test it. I can assure you that people like Michael Dell, Steve
Jobs, and others in the industry who are here, will help you
any way they can to make this possible.
Let’s assume
we have what we consider perfect software. We’ve got
it out there and it’s all working. And then somebody
comes in with a better idea. We can download it overnight.
This beats printing another school book doesn’t it. Let’s
follow the engineering process. Let’s go low and slow
on this one. Instead of having all these school books that
you lumber in and out of school with, and they become obsolete
every few years – You can download every few days, or
as often as you want to, on millions of computers, and update
it. How many books can be stored? The current IPOD has a disk
a little bigger than a silver dollar, and it will store 33
million pages of print. They will not only have all the books
they need – They could have the school library, if you
wanted it in there!
You can go to Tennessee to see everything
that Mrs. Bevins does. You can see everything that Terry Ford
is doing in Dallas. Confirm with the doctors that the brain
really is the way I say it is – that once you are six
years of age it all starts to shut down – that creative
part needs to begin early because that’s where all the
Edisons will come from. It’s really interesting to look
at the backgrounds of those who had the creative minds – look
at how they grew up, and you’ll say they really had a
lot working when they were little children.
Let’s assume
the education plan appears to be perfect. Realize you can always
improve it. Always pilot test your new creative ideas. There
are many companies in the United States that do not want to
be bothered by somebody too young or inexperienced, with a
creative idea. They want their people to be robots.
Over the
years I have always listened and had my team listen. We teach
everyone to listen, listen, listen to the customer for creative
ideas, and listen to the people who work directly with our
customers for creative ideas.
Again and again the creative
ideas that made a huge difference in my company’s success
(and I’m sure this will also be true in the schools’ success)
came from people too young and too inexperienced to have the
idea. They didn’t know any better, and said, “Why
don’t we do this?” Keep an environment where people
are constantly coming in with better ways to do things. Let’s
have a system in the Texas public schools using the internet
so that every school in the state can see it overnight.
This
is the kind of thing that we can do that would make all the
difference in the world in education. The sooner we start,
we will be a role model for the nation. We cannot be complacent.
We cannot be like the high school football player that scored
on Friday night and never scored again. We are so proud of
all that our country has done in the past, but we need to look
at where we are now in the world. We need to look at where
we are going in the world.
That’s the main story I have
to tell you today. Education is so important that we must always
recognize that no matter where we are in public education,
we must work tirelessly to make it better.
I have often been
asked – If I could have three wishes for our country,
what would they be –
-
A strong, moral, ethical base
-
A strong family unit in every home
-
The finest public schools in the world!
THANK YOU FOR CARING ABOUT OUR CHILDREN,
AND YOUR DETERMINATION TO GIVE THEM THE WORLD’S FINEST
PUBLIC SCHOOLS!
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