Dan Pink: Compliance to engagement

Daniel Pink's books Drive and A Whole New Mind both speak to how education needs to shift from just left brain linear, sequential abilities to also include the metaphorical right brain abilities.

This leads to the question, how do we motivate people to shift away from the factory model of education towards conceptually creative learning. To make this shift, Pink argues that we must move away from traditional carrott and stick manipulators that simply encourage sit and get - or in other words, an education system that was about processing people through compliance.

Compliance may be good enough in training workers to conduct rote instructions on fundamentally simplistic tasks, but ingenuity, advancement and creativity require much more than just compliance - we require engagement which demands far more autonomy, purpose and mastery on the behalf of children.

Pink also identifies the sad irony in that the American education system is currently moving towards even greater emphasis on routines, right answers and standardization precisely at the time when our society is moving away from these these factory model characteristics.

Want more on these topics?

Here is a brilliant interview by Harvard Business Review's blogger Andrew Keen and Daniel Pink.