Pace Layering the Skills of the Future
There is a certain persona—often a start-up founder or technologist—who talks about what schools will (or at least should) teach. A recent example:
It’s an interesting mix of lower-order, specific skills (writing for Twitter) and higher order, general skills (becoming a creator).
We can call this a “mix” of skills, but it might be more useful to talk about it as different “elevations” and “pacings” of skills. And that is where Stewart Brand’s pace layering model comes in.
Brand is one of the luminaries in Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators. Among other things, he founded The Whole Earth Catalog and lobbied NASA to take the first photograph of Earth from outer space. One of his most important contributions to long-term thinking is his pace layering model.
We can map onto his model different kinds of skills. At the surface layers, skills are “expiring”—things like writing well for Twitter, for example, or designing with Figma. At the deeper layers, skills are “enduring”—developing mental models like “decentralization,” or becoming a creator.
As Seth Godin says in his new book The Practice, enduring skills underpin the most important work we can do—and therefore we should teach them: “We can teach people to make commitments, to overcome fears, to deal transparently, to initiate, to plan a course of action. We can teach people to desire lifelong learning, to express themselves, to innovate.”
The challenge, of course, is that enduring skills live at the deeper “pace layers,” so they take longer to teach, take more practice, and conform less well to industrial models of educating people.
In your curriculum, what is the ratio of expiring skills to enduring skills?
Which is another way of asking: are you mortgaging your students’ futures by over-investing in fast pace layers at the expense of slow pace layers?
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