Page 228 - The Drucker Lectures

From Teaching to Learning [ 209

given them competences, but they can’t utilize them in the tra-
ditional classroom.
And so we already know the specs of the school of the future.
The focus is going to be on learning. And the teacher’s job will
increasingly be to encourage learning, to help learning, to as-
sist with learning, to mentor learning. That will require a good
deal of teaching, but the starting point will be learning and not
teaching. And we know quite a bit about it.
First, we know that learning is very individual. There are
some children who never crawl—who go straight to walking
from sitting up. And others keep on crawling until they are 3.
But by 3, they can all walk. Learning is individual, and learning
builds on what we are good at. And this we know is going to be
one of the specs: How do we enable children to focus on what
they’re good at, on their strengths?
We also know that the best way to learn, especially for young
people, is to teach. I learned that when I was a sophomore in
high school, and my closest friend was one year younger. He was
a very bright boy, but he had difficulty learning the traditional
key subjects of my Austrian school: Latin and Greek and math.
He was a very gifted musician, and made a very respectable ca-
reer in music, ending up as conductor of a major orchestra. But
in Latin and Greek and math, the key subjects, he was slow. And
so I began, without any conscious effort, to tutor him. I myself
had been a very indifferent student—not because things were
difficult, but because I was lazy. Yet six weeks after I began to
tutor Ernest in Latin (which I wasn’t particularly fond of) and
Greek (which I loved) and math (which I was good at), I sud-
denly was at the head of my class. Suddenly I enjoyed all of these
subjects. Joy is the right word. And I learned them because I had
to explain them.
And suddenly it hit me: The best way to learn is to teach.
Indeed, one of the reasons why the one-room schoolhouse of a