Page 227 - The Drucker Lectures

208 [ The Drucker Lectures

I get incredible, fabulous work from my advanced students
because they are 45 or 48 years old and they are comers, or their
organizations wouldn’t send them to us for a year or two or three.
And when I say, “What are you good at?” they usually don’t
know that. Then I say, “I want you to write your first paper on
what you are good at.” And you have no idea what an explosion
I get because they reach for excellence, and now they’re reaching
for excellence in everything, even the things where they are very
poor. They are motivated by achievement. And this is nothing
new. Every one of the great educational leaders since [eighteenth-
century Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich] Pestalozzi knew it.
But we can’t do it in the normal schoolroom of yesterday with
30 children, where everybody has to come up to a minimum
level and the minimum skills. Instead, we have to focus on “your
Mary Ellen needs more work on division. She is not very good
at it.” The teacher can’t say, “She ought to do more writing.”
She paid no attention to Mary Ellen’s writing because it didn’t
need any attention. Mary Ellen is good in writing. What does
she need any attention for? But we know that if you want to
create the habit of learning, you have to give children a sense of
achievement, and that means building on their strengths. The
weaknesses are universal. The strengths are individual—and
that you can’t address in the traditional classroom.
We also know, by way of implementation, that in order to
acquire the habit of learning you have to manage yourself. And,
incidentally, this is probably one area where the computer is a
real help, because when you look at those 5-year-olds with the
computer, they are way ahead in computer literacy—way ahead
of me. Well, 85 years ahead of me. When you look at them,
they focus on what they’re good at, whether they play computer
games or do simple learning work. They manage themselves.
They go back to what they’re not good at. But they focus on
what they’re good at, and it motivates them. The computer has