Page 226 - The Drucker Lectures

From Teaching to Learning [ 207

enough that he can tell his patients what they need to do. And,
again, this requires the ability to continue to learn.
Another thing: Working life has extended so much in the last
50 years that it exceeds the life expectancy of even the most suc-
cessful businesses. Very few businesses are successful for more than
25 or 30 years. And yet most educated people who go to work in
their early twenties will keep on working until they are 70. And
so they [had] better be prepared for a second career, whether it’s in
another organization where they’re doing what they have been do-
ing or in a new line of work. They must be prepared to learn again.
They must be prepared to position themselves. They must be pre-
pared to want to learn—to see it not as something they need to do,
but as something they enjoy doing. They will have to learn how to
learn. They will have to have acquired the habit of learning.
We also know the implications of these changes. We know
that this means a different focus very early in education. When
you look at the school we have, it started in Florence around
1756, 250 years ago, and it was a school that quite rightly for its
time focused not only on base skills but also on bringing every-
body up to a minimum. And therefore it focused on the weak-
nesses of the student.
And so it is today. Not long ago, I visited one of my children
and her daughter in fourth grade. And I went along to the parent-
teacher meeting. And the teacher came up to us and said, “Ah,
you’re Mary Ellen’s mother. She needs more work on division.”
She didn’t say that Mary Ellen, this granddaughter of mine, is an
excellent writer, loves to write stories. She didn’t say, “She ought
to do more stories.” She rightly, understandably, focused on what
Mary Ellen needs to do to come up to the minimum. But that
is counterproductive if we’re focused on getting people to learn.
We know that nothing so motivates people—nothing—as much
as achievement. And, therefore, we will have to focus learning
on what children and adults excel in.