Developing The I-CAMP Academy in Los Angeles

According to a TED talk given by Ken Robinson, "All kids have tremendous talents and we squander them pretty ruthlessly....  We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children." Robinson also gave a talk at the RSA where he pointed out that our education system was designed in the 19^th Century and is not properly preparing our society to meet the challenges of the 21^st Century.

In addition to meeting the challenges of the 21st Century, we also need to develop long term solutions to the wealth and health disparities in American communities. Waiting for Obama, Superman or anyone else to fix things is not a viable solution. Therefore we at Street Therapy and Stories for LA are developing the I-CAMP Academy, a project-based learning environment, where young people will initially develop skills such as computer programming and video production. In the future we plan to widen the set of skills.

I-CAMP stands for Intrinsic, Community, Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, which are fundamental elements for building wealth and health. Billions of dollars of wealth have been created from the Digital Revolution, but lower income families are being left behind. One study shows that only 40% of families with income below $30,000 have broadband access at home.

According to Larry Page, the CEO of Google, the historic technology boom is an opportunity to excel individually and to improve the conditions of the planet at large. Those who fail to do so are shamelessly squandering the opportunity. To Page, the only true failure is not attempting the audacious. “Even if you fail at your ambitious thing, it’s very hard to fail completely,” he says. “That’s the thing that people don’t get.”

We will kick the first project off with a Kickstarter campaign. We will teach kids HTML5 and video production skills and let them create mobile apps and make a documentary about it. Roger McNamee, a director and co-founder of Elevation Partners and an early investor in Facebook, gave a talk expressing the fact that no one is doing a good job of providing media experiences on mobile devices. Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, gave a talk explaining the research showing that young people are much better at divergent thinking and that divergent thinking is a prerequisite for creativity. So let's give young people an opportunity to use their abilities in divergent thinking to come up with ideas for new media experiences that work.

14 year old Robert Nay of Spanish Fork, Utah developed Bubble Ball, which was downloaded over 2 million times from iTunes and became the number one app. Why not a teenager from Los Angeles?

Autonomy—how much control you have over your life—and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in producing the social gradient in health.... In the age of the genome and high-tech medical care, thinking about health typically turns to biology and technology. The discovery of how important control and participation are for health leads in a different direction: to the circumstances in which we live and work. In other words, this is health research that leads us to focus not on access to the latest medical technology, but on the way we think about the sort of lives we want for ourselves, and the sort of society in which we want to live in.... These social inequalities in health—the social gradient—are not a footnote to the “real” causes of ill health in countries that are no longer poor; they are the heart of the matter. The status syndrome can be illustrated by a short ride on Washington, D.C. subway. Travel from the southeast of downtown Washington to Montgomery County, Maryland. For each mile traveled, life expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other. The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity by Michael Marmot

Community. No one was used to thinking about health [or wealth] in terms of community.... [T]hey had to get them to realize that they wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy [or wealthy] if all they did was think about an individual's personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the value of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

The following is taken from Drive by Daniel H. Pink:

Type I (Intrinsic) and Type X (Extrinsic). Motivation 2.0 depended on and fostered Type X behavior—behavior fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and concerned less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which an activity leads. Motivation 3.0, the upgrade that's necessary for the smooth functioning of twenty-first century business, depends on and fosters Type I behavior. Type I behavior concerns itself less with the external rewards an activity brings and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself. For professional success and personal fulfillment, we need to move ourselves and our colleagues from Type X to Type I. The good news is that Type I's are made, not born—and Type I behavior leads to stronger performance, greater health, and higher overall well-being.

Autonomy. Our “default setting” is to be autonomous and self-directed. Unfortunately, circumstances—including outdated notions of “management”—often conspire to change that default setting and turn us form Type I to Type X. To encourage Type I behavior, and the high performance it enables, the first requirement is autonomy. People need autonomy over task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (who they do it with), and techniques (how they do it). Companies that offer autonomy, sometimes in radical doses, are outperforming their competitors.

Mastery. While Motivation 2.0 required compliance, Motivation 3.0 demands engagement. Only engagement can produce mastery—becoming better at something that matters. And the pursuit of mastery, an important but often dormant part of our third drive, has become essential to making one's way in the economy. Mastery begins with “flow”—optimal experiences when the challenges we face are exquisitely matched to our abilities. Smart workplaces therefore supplement day-to-day activities with “Goldilocks tasks”—not too hard and not too easy. But mastery also abides by three peculiar rules. Mastery is a mindset: It requires the capacity to see your abilities not as finite, but as infinitely improvable. Mastery is a pain: It demands effort, grit, and deliberate practice. And mastery is an asymptote: It's impossible to fully realize, which makes it simultaneously frustrating and alluring.

Purpose. Humans, by their nature, seek purpose—a cause greater and more enduring than themselves. But traditional businesses have long considered purpose ornamental—a perfectly nice accessory, so long as it didn't get in the way of the important things. But that's changing—thanks in part to the rising tide of aging baby boomers reckoning with their own mortality. In Motivation 3.0, purpose maximization is taking its place alongside profit maximization as an aspiration and a guiding principle. Within organizations, this new “purpose motive” is expressing itself in three ways: in goals that use profit to reach purpose; in words that emphasize more than self-interest; and in policies that allow people to pursue purpose on their own terms. This move to accompany profit maximization with purpose maximization has the potential to rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.

Daniel H. Pink, a former speech writer for Al Gore and author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, writes about a shift in much of the advanced world “from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of what's rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.” He describes the six essential aptitudes on which professional success and personal satisfaction increasing will depend: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning.

"Apple continues to defy modern principles of economics and delivered the investment community something never seen before (e.g., quarterly revenue of USD 28.6 billion growing 80 percent year over year)," wrote Gleacher and Co. analyst Brian Marshall, in his updated report where he raised Apple's 12-month target price to USD 500 from USD 450. Apple is the most valuable tech company and is on pace to become the most valuable company ever with one important reason being that CEO Steve Jobs has adopted the aptitudes of the Conceptual Age. Steve Jobs on design: "I want Bob Dylan songs!"

In a story for Wired written by Steven Levy we learn that in 1999 when venture capital firms invested in Google, they wanted to replace Larry Page as CEO. The Google founders, Page and Sergey Brin, were take on a tour of high-tech CEOs: Apple's Steve Jobs, Intel's Andy Grove, Intuit's Scott Cook, Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos and others. After the tour they told one of the VCs, John Doerr, that they were ready to hire a CEO but would only consider one person: Steve Jobs.

Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend on it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining.... Most of our experience, our knowledge and our thinking is organized in stories. — The Literary Mind by Mark Turner

Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions.... Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion. — Things That Make Us Smart by Donald Norman

In the Element, Ken Robinson writes: “I use the term the Element to describe the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together. I believe it is essential that each of us find his or her Element, not simply because it will make us more fulfilled but because, as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions will depend on it. When people are in their Element, they connect with something fundamental to their sense of identity, purpose, and well-being. Being there provides a sense of self-revelation, of defining who they really are and what they're really meant to be doing with their lives.”

In The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk debunks the long-standing notion of genetic “giftedness.” We are not prisoners of our DNA, and greatness is in the reach of every individual. “Forget everything you think you know about genes, talent, and intelligence,” David Shenk writes. “In recent years, a mountain of scientific evidence has emerged suggesting a completely new paradigm: not talent scarcity, but latent talent abundance.”

Bill Gates is the chairman and co-founder of Microsoft. He one of the wealthiest people in world with a net worth of over $50 billion. He was doing real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Apple, the most valuable technology company, was co-founded by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak's passion for electronics developed in 4th grade, when his father, an engineer for Lockheed, guided him into some science fair projects. Crazy about mathematics Woz earned his HAM radio license by 6th grade and by the time he reached college was designing and building whole computers.

Steve Jobs is the CEO and more famous co-founder of Apple. He frequented after-school lectures at the Hewlett-Packard. He was soon hired there and worked with Steve Wozniak as a summer employee.

Mark Zuckerberg is the president and CEO of Facebook. In 2008, he was named the youngest billionaire in the world. He began using computers and writing software as a child in middle school. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming in the 1990s, and later hired software developer David Newman to tutor him privately.

Where does any young person in Los Angeles have the opportunity to accumulate the amount of programming experience that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg did in their youth? Where are the Los Angeles technology companies holding after-school lectures? According to Douglas Rushkoff in his book Program or Be Programmed:

We do not teach programming in most public schools. Instead of teaching programming, most schools with computer literacy curriculums teach programs. Kids learn how to use popular spreadsheet, word processing, and browsing software so that they can operate effectively in the high-tech workplace. These basic skills may make them more employable for the entry level cubicle jobs of today, but they will not help them adapt to the technologies of tomorrow....

Meanwhile, kids in other countries—from China to Iran—aren’t wasting their time learning how to use off-the shelf commercial software packages. They are finding out how computers work. They learn computer languages, they write software and, yes, some of them are even taught the cryptography and other skills they need to breach Western cyber-security measures. According to [retired Air Force Lieutenant General Robert Elder, former head of Cyber Command], it’s just a matter of a generation before they’ve surpassed us.

The United States has a visa program that is primarily used by Indian companies to enable them to outsource programming jobs to India. In 2008, Microsoft was granted 1037 H1B visas but that was only good enough for fifth place on the list of companies granted the most visas. The top four grantees were Infosys with 4559, Wipro with 2678, Satyam with 1917, and Tata with 1519. These are all Indian firms that are outsourcing programming jobs.

In addition to manufacturing jobs, even the logical, linear, left-brained programming jobs are being shipped overseas. So why in the 21^st Century do our public schools still teach according to a system designed for the 19^th Century? Why aren't we developing the inventive, empathic, big-picture capabilities of our young people? In Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto writes:

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think “success” is synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, “schooling,” but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find ways to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

...We have, for example, H.L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not: “...to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence.... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim...is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States...and that is its aim everywhere else.”