FRANÇOIS TADDEI LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY Author photograph : © Monsitj/iStockphoto © Version française, Calmann-Lévy, 2018 SUMMARY FRANÇOIS TADDEI with Emmanuel Davidenkoff LEARNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY Translated from French by Timothy Stone SUMMARY SUMMARY To all those who have taught me so much. SUMMARY SUMMARY If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea...” Antoine de SAINT-EXUPÉRY, Citadelle SUMMARY Summary Prologue ......................................................................................................................................................... 11 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................13 1. Why will we learn differently st in the 21 century? ................................................................................................21 2. What i’ve learned ...........................................................................................55 3. New ways of teaching .........................................................................79 4. Before you can learn, you have to unlearn ...................................................................................113 5. Learn to ask (yourself) good questions ........................................................................................................201 6. A how-to guide for a learning planet ................................................................................281 Conclusion. Toward a more humane humanity ...........................291 Annex. CRI activities in 2020 ...................................................................................................297 Acknowledgements ..........................................................................................................................311 Notes ...............................................................................................................................................................327 SUMMARY Prologue Where are we going? I couldn’t tell you any more than the next person can. But my life has been one of asking questions, drawing parallels, and forming hypotheses. Contained in the following pages are what I imagine an expert in comparative evolution would have to say if he or she were from another planet. For perhaps the first time in the history of humanity, there’s growing collective awareness that we’re living through an evolutionary transition, like any one of the transitions that occurred dating back to the primordial soup from which life emerged all the way to when Homo sapiens first appeared. And in this way, we’re extraordinarily lucky. The more of us there are addressing the questions that this new transition presents, the better we’ll be able to mobilize our collective intelligence along with the intel- ligence of machines and other living organisms; the more likely we’ll be to come up with the right answers to these questions and construct a brighter future than the one some are predicting or that certain tech experts are actually creating. 11 SUMMARY Learning in the 21st Century Who knows? Perhaps humans will in fact be able to progress at the same rate as technology, and a better world will emerge in which progress will actually serve humanity and nature. That’s my hope, anyway. May this book, along with all of you, be a part of making this a reality. SUMMARY Introduction I had just gotten to sleep after a long night of jetlagged insomnia when I was forced awake by the unmistak- able, ear-splitting wails of the sirens of New York City firetrucks. I opened my eyes. The clock showed 9:30 a.m.; that was 3:30 p.m. in France, where I had been the previous morning, dropping off my son at preschool before catching a plane to New York. After landing, I went to stay with my friend and colleague Stan Leibler. He was the head of a laboratory at Rockefeller University, where I had been invited to give a seminar. I had also been thinking about spending a sabbatical year there, that world-renowned institu- tion famous for its Nobel Prize winners in biomedical research. Stan gave me a tour of the campus, right on the banks of the East River on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From the top floor of the tallest building on campus, we took in–as one must–the fabulous New York City skyline, the steel geometry of the skyscrapers cutting up the horizon as we looked to the south of Manhattan Island. After that we ate dinner, and then Stan showed me to one of the 13 SUMMARY Learning in the 21st Century single rooms reserved for visitors, who come from all over the world. I tried in vain to fall asleep until finally, just as the sun was rising, I began to doze off. Awoken by the sirens, I tried against all hope to get an extra half hour or so of sleep while the hubbub down in the street continued. It kept growing louder. Eventually the sound had invaded the entire room, and I dragged myself out of bed to go look for Stan. Passing someone in the hallway, I heard him mutter that something had happened at the World Trade Center, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then I found Stan. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going upstairs.” Just as we had done the previous evening, we went up to the top floor of the tallest building and looked to the south of the island. But the fabled skyline had changed. My brain refused to comprehend it. “Unbelievable,” someone said. “One of the towers fell.” I still didn’t believe it. “No, no, there’s just a lot of smoke,” I said. “It’s hidden by all the smoke.” At those words, the second tower fell. It was September 11th, 2001. The course of history was changing before our eyes. There were Israeli researchers with us. They were used to living in a place under threat of terrorist attack. “We can’t let terrorists scare us,” they said. “We must continue our work.” I recalled my own experiences with terrorism in an effort to match their resolve, that we can’t shy away the face of terror. My family is from Corsica and I often visit there. Nationalist bombings have rung out through the “blue nights” there for decades. In Paris, 1986 was a 14 SUMMARY Introduction year of attacks; I was 19 and going to college there. In February of that year, there were attacks on the shopping arcade beneath the Claridge Hotel, the popular Gibert Jeune bookstore, and a FNAC-Sports retail store in a busy shopping district in the center of Paris. In March, the Point Show shopping arcade on the Champs-Elysées was attacked. In September, the post office in the Hôtel de Ville, a police headquarters, the Renault pub on the Champs-Elysées, a Tati department store, and a super- market food court in La Défense, the financial district just outside Paris. In 1995 and 1996, there were attacks on Paris subway stations Port-Royal, Maison-Blanche, and Saint-Michel, parts of town I went to almost every day. Nonetheless, we found it impossible to get back to work. We went down to give blood, but the waiting line was three blocks long, and on top of that, they weren’t accepting blood from Europeans for fear of spreading mad cow disease. Back at the university, we tried to talk science, but everything brought us back to what had happened. A colleague told me about an experiment on predator-prey relationships, which showed that even when predators are rendered harmless and don’t attack, their presence still scares their prey and decreases their fertility. His conclusion was that fear has the same impact as real danger. We can’t give in to fear. While we were trying to focus on other things, my wife and children back in Paris were worried sick. I had sent them an e-mail letting them know I was fine, but it had been blocked and wouldn’t get to them until a week later. All telephone communication had been cut off. It would be three days before I could get in touch with them and reassure my distraught wife, who for some reason had 15 SUMMARY Learning in the 21st Century been convinced I was out buying shoes at the World Trade Center the morning of the attack. My son, who was only 3 years old at the time, was under the impression that all the buildings in New York were falling, not under- standing that it was just the same footage being replayed over and over on television. It just so happened that the return flight I had booked for a week later would be one of the first to receive authorization to take off from New York City after the airports had been closed. Before takeoff, I bought the weekend edition of the New York Times. It’s known for being dense, but that day, it was as thick as a book and contained hundreds of eyewitness accounts of the attacks. It was only then, reading those eyewitness accounts during my return to Paris, that something hit me. I had been in New York City only a short distance from the disaster, yet I hadn’t been able to really understand it. I didn’t have access to television–the broadcast antennas were on top of the World Trade Center, so the entire city was without television–and my hosts had done their best to distract us to keep us from panicking. I passed yet another sleepless night on the flight, and it occurred to me suddenly that, there, 30,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, I was no longer a microbiologist who marveled over the curious behavior of bacteria; rather, I was a global citizen who had been thrown unwittingly into the epicenter of history, a history in transition. My brain swarmed with questions. What kind of world do I want to see my kids grow up in? What kind of a world will I leave for them? Will I continue to be a powerless bystander as I had been throughout that week? Or can I be a changemaker? If the world was headed off the rails, 16 SUMMARY Introduction what should we do? Migrate to another planet? Face the inevitable? Try to build a better world? But how do you work toward a more humane...humanity? To add to the shock of the attacks, I learned the following week that terrorists were making use of biological weapons in letters containing anthrax.