We Are All Weird, A Book Review

Seth Godin’s new book is a fantastic manifesto about our changing world and how it will affect all of us in the very near future. Society is changing from what he calls normal to weird; from mass-market to individualized manufacturing. Ford is a mass-market company that makes one F-150 to suit everyone whereas other companies focus on the weird by risking themselves to do something they love regardless of whether or not a bulk of the population will buy/use it. To clarify:


The mass marketer keeps missing the point. He’s busy looking for giant clumps instead of organizing to service and work with smaller tribes.

This new type of culture has many implications for education. If we, as teachers, administrators, policy makers, etc., continue down the path of trying to educate the masses, we will surely fail. Education is not an industry that can be successful when people try to set classroom policy that will affect 4 million children. This notion of having every child learn the same thing in the same will (and should) die. Not every child is the same and not every child has the same set of skills, background knowledge, passion, etc.


If you cater to the normal, you will disappoint the weird. And as the world gets weirder, that’s a dumb strategy.

Catering to the normal is exactly what our education system is doing today. We set children on a track (special education, technical prep, college prep, gifted, etc.) and then say that they must fit the mold of their particular track or they will be a failure. The adults determine the track, the adults determine who is “smart,” the adults determine whether you are going to succeed or not. Clearly, this must and will change as the world becomes more weird. There are very strong forces that will oppose this shift to weird:


And so the factory-for-the-production-of-normal works overtime to sanitize and corporatize and discipline our kids into normalcy.

There is a huge disconnect between the Secretary of Education and teachers and students. There is no way that Mr. Duncan can establish policies that will benefit every child when he does not have the opportunity to see every child:


The challenges of the education system are driven by our distance from the problem, not by money. The disconnect is caused by our fervent desire for a return to normal, a normal we actually never had. Why are we puzzled that in a world filled with change, a static, history-based approach is not working out so well? … The simple alternative to our broken system of education is to embrace the weird. To abandon normal. To acknowledge that our factories don’t need so many cogs, so many compliant workers, so many people willing to work cheap. It’s simple, but it’s not easy.

The very students we are creating with our system are the very students who will live the rest of their lives unnoticed. The most successful people in the world, many times, think differently from other people. They are creative and use their creativity to solve everyday problems. We kill this creativity in our school system. If we want to mold students that society and companies want, we need to allow the students to be themselves and not to fit a prefabricated mold that we used 150 years ago.


My proposed solution is simple: don’t waste a lot of time and money pushing kids in directions they don’t want to go. Instead, find out what weirdness they excel at and encourage them to do that. Then get out of the way.

If you haven’t read We Are All Weird, you definitely need to. It’s only about 100 pages and full of amazing ways in which we are becoming more weird. These 100 pages will change how you look at the world.