Need a Job? Invent It By THOMAS L.

Need a Job? Invent It By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
WHEN Tony Wagner, the Harvard education specialist, describes his job today, he says he’s “a translator between two hostile tribes” — the education world and the business world, the people who teach our kids and the people who give them jobs. Wagner’s argument in his book “Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World” is that our K-12 and college tracks are not consistently “adding the value and teaching the skills that matter most in the marketplace.”
This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.
That is a tall task. I tracked Wagner down and asked him to elaborate. “Today,” he said via e-mail, “because knowledge is available on every Internet-connected device, what you know matters far less than what you can do with what you know. The capacity to innovate — the ability to solve problems creatively or bring new possibilities to life — and skills like critical thinking, communication and collaboration are far more important than academic knowledge. As one executive told me, ‘We can teach new hires the content, and we will have to because it continues to change, but we can’t teach them how to think — to ask the right questions — and to take initiative.’ ”
My generation had it easy. We got to “find” a job. But, more than ever, our kids will have to “invent” a job. (Fortunately, in today’s world, that’s easier and cheaper than ever before.) Sure, the lucky ones will find their first job, but, given the pace of change today, even they will have to reinvent, re-engineer and reimagine that job much more often than their parents if they want to advance in it. If that’s true, I asked Wagner, what do young people need to know today?
“Every young person will continue to need basic knowledge, of course,” he said. “But they will need skills and motivation even more. Of these three education goals, motivation is the most critical. Young people who are intrinsically motivated — curious, persistent, and willing to take risks — will learn new knowledge and skills continuously. They will be able to find new opportunities or create their own — a disposition that will be increasingly important as many traditional careers disappear.”
So what should be the focus of education reform today?
“We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over,” said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.”
What does that mean for teachers and principals?
“Teachers,” he said, “need to coach students to performance excellence, and principals must be instructional leaders who create the culture of collaboration required to innovate. But what gets tested is what gets taught, and so we need ‘Accountability 2.0.’ All students should have digital portfolios to show evidence of mastery of skills like critical thinking and communication, which they build up right through K-12 and postsecondary. Selective use of high-quality tests, like the College and Work Readiness Assessment, is important. Finally, teachers should be judged on evidence of improvement in students’ work through the year — instead of a score on a bubble test in May. We need lab schools where students earn a high school diploma by completing a series of skill-based ‘merit badges’ in things like entrepreneurship. And schools of education where all new teachers have ‘residencies’ with master teachers and performance standards — not content standards — must become the new normal throughout the system.”
Who is doing it right?
“Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” he said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’ They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives — all with a shorter school day, little homework, and almost no testing. In the U.S., 500 K-12 schools affiliated with Hewlett Foundation’s Deeper Learning Initiative and a consortium of 100 school districts called EdLeader21 are developing new approaches to teaching 21st-century skills. There are also a growing number of ‘reinvented’ colleges like the Olin College of Engineering, the M.I.T. Media Lab and the ‘D-school’ at Stanford where students learn to innovate.”

A Child Star With a Knack for Publicity By N. R. KLEINFIELD
There were problems with her heart that weren’t getting better. She weighed 320 pounds. One can only imagine the toll taken by so many years of cloying attention, all the beguiled admirers staring and cooing and craning to get close to her. The press was always sniffing around for new angles. Of course, there was her age.
Forty sounds painfully young — but, then, she was a gorilla. Once you’re past 37, you need to consider putting your affairs in order.
And so it was sad but not entirely surprising when word came on Sunday of the passing of Pattycake, the Bronx Zoo gorilla who had long reigned as one of the city’s more acclaimed tourist attractions. Jim Breheny, the zoo’s director, said she had been discovered around 8 a.m. by a worker in the zoo’s Congo Gorilla Forest. Apparently, she went peacefully, in her sleep. Even at 40, her looks were still pretty much intact.
For a gorilla, she had had quite a life. “She was a story that captivated people,” Mr. Breheny said.
She earned a superstar’s distinction and heaps of publicity right at birth, on Sept. 3, 1972, being that she was the first gorilla born in New York City, as opposed to, say, Cameroon or Gabon or Equatorial Guinea. It was an excellent Manhattan address — the Central Park Zoo. Her furry face served as a bit of a respite at a time when the city found itself grappling with high crime rates and an intensifying financial crisis.
Another gorilla, Hodari, was born just a month later at the Bronx Zoo, and he never got the press she did.
In every sense, Pattycake’s arrival was a surprise. Zoo workers had been unaware that Lulu, her mother, was even pregnant until one day she matter-of-factly produced a bundle of dark fur. Back then, it was still relatively rare for gorillas to give birth in captivity.
Gorilla babies were typically raised by humans. But Pattycake, a western lowland gorilla, a species classified as “critically endangered,” lived with Lulu and her father, Kongo. The housing wasn’t ideal; the gorillas shared the Lion House.
Stardom enveloped her at once. The Daily News conducted a contest to name her, attracting an estimated 33,000 entries. Zoo attendance soared.

One devotee remembered that “seeing her was like seeing a movie star.”
Adrian Savonije, 45, who was touring the zoo on Monday with his children, said he had visited Pattycake since he was a child. “I grew up with her,” he said. “She was a big attraction here, a little mini New York landmark.”
There were initial concerns about her mother’s ability to raise her, Lulu being just 8, and caged, but things seemed to work out. When Pattycake was 6 months old, though, there was a frightening accident. She was squatting with her right arm slung through the bars separating the cage she occupied with Lulu and the neighboring cage of Kongo, who sometimes got a bit rough. Kongo playfully grabbed her arm. Either out of parental rivalry or mere playfulness, her mother scooped her up, inadvertently fracturing Pattycake’s right humerus.
It became one of the best-known broken arms in history. The public hung on every ensuing development.
There was an hourlong operation at New York Medical College. The arm was put in a cast, and later in a sling. She was moved to the far larger Bronx Zoo to recuperate. She slept on a cot, was fed infant formula in a bottle and wore a vest, and cloth nappies.
While Pattycake was convalescing, a full-fledged, two-borough custody battle erupted between the two zoos. The Bronx Zoo found her to be undernourished and said she had intestinal parasites. Her mother, the zoo believed, just wasn’t doing her job.
To resolve the custody fight, a referee was brought in: Dr. Ronald D. Nadler, a specialist well-versed in gorilla reproduction from the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta. While Lulu might not have qualified as gorilla mother of the year, he concluded, she was more than up to the task of providing Pattycake with the best chance of developing “the normal repertoire of a gorilla.”
Three months after the accident, Pattycake returned to the Central Park Zoo. There was a well-chronicled reunion with her parents, with conspicuous emotion on display all around. On Pattycake’s first birthday, her parents celebrated with her, and a banana layer birthday cake. Birthday cards funneled in from as far away as California. During the party, more cake found its way into Pattyca