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Title

Educating Producers

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Published at 05:52 PM on January 12, 2009
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I am a producer. I like to produce things, whether that means businesses, websites, or blogs.

For the most part, education fails to thoughtfully educate producers. Over the centuries, schools have gotten very good at teaching consumers. We emphasize reading and math, so consumers can consume more.

There is nothing wrong with this. Many people are consumers, and everyone needs the skills to be one. However, a growing tide of people are producers — people who feel the unquenchable need to make. The education system fails to even recognize this trend, let alone teach to it.

From a purely business perspective, this is dangerous. Producers are responsible for a disproportionate percentage of the GDP, and giving producers better education will help to increase that. But it’s also important from a human perspective — education should match the personality of the student.

A good start would be to help students identify whether they are a producer or consumer. This is as easy as asking a simple question:

Some people are consumers by nature; they consume vast quantities of knowledge purely for learning’s sake. Others are producers; they consume knowledge with the intent of one day acting on the knowledge and producing something, be it a book, a song, a blog, a startup, etc… Neither is better than the other.

The key is to answer one question: which are you?

Beyond that, schools can give education appropriate to each type of student. For the most part, we are a mix of both producers and consumers; teaching consumption and production will help everyone.

The one additional component which producers absolutely need more of in their education is practice. Whenever possible, there should be time to practice (authentically) producing businesses, books, or music. Though practice doesn’t make you perfect, it does make you a whole lot better of a producer.

Schools need to recognize and identify producers, so a proper education can be given to them.

How do you teach producers?

Article found via Michael Mistretta

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Name
Sharon Williams
Site
carveraig.21classes.com
Timestamp
8:16 PM on January 12, 2009
Content
You bring up an excellent point. For teachers, the battle is with time, standards and evaluation. It is difficult to give up the class time needed to tackle such projects and sometimes even harder to evaluate. Fortunately, I do think this is changing as more are embracing Project Based Learning and Web 2.0 technologies. Currently I advise a group of students who compete in T.S.A.(Technology Student Association). This organization provides numerous opportunities for “producer” education, including marketing and business plans. Sadly, even with these incredible opportunities, few take enough interest to pursue the task seriously. It appears culture, education, and parenting has stripped many of the intrinsic motivation to participate in projects that require students to “produce”.
Name
morgante
Site
newlyancient.com
Timestamp
9:07 PM on January 12, 2009
Content

@Sharon: True, it is difficult to work in the time to build project-based learning. But I think too many teachers see it as an either/or situation. In reality, project-based learning can also help students (and teachers) to pass standards. Deeper learning also comes with development of “shallow” skills. There are numerous examples of this: when writing a business plan, one needs proper grammar; when researching a book/article, one needs to read a variety of material. Both life-long and standards-based skills can be developed at the same time.

Sounds like you have a good program going there with the TSA. Hopefully, over time, society and schools will begin to open up to the idea of (real) student projects more. Science fair boards don’t count.

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