like children, okay. Now you could say well, we're -- first of all everybody's biased in

a lot of ways and we have our set of biases too. It may be that we embrace the idea in

this book of thinking like children because we're kind of, you know, childlike. We have

kind of obvious observations sometimes. There's observations that strike people as obvious.

We ask a lot of questions that are not considered, you know, the kind of questions that people

ask in good company or smart company. But one of the most powerful pieces of thinking

like a child that we argue is thinking small. So I realize that this runs exactly counter

to the philosophy of the arena in which I'm appearing which is thinking big, Big Think,

but our argument is this. Big problems are by their nature really hard to solve for a

variety of reasons. One is they're large and therefore they include a lot of people and

therefore they include a lot of crossed and often mangled and perverse incentives.

But also a big problem -- when you think about a big problem like the education reform. You're

dealing with an institution or set of institutions that have gotten to where they've gotten to

this many, many years of calcification and also accidents of history. What I mean by

that is things have gotten the way they've gotten because of a lot of things a few people

did many, many years ago and traditions were carried on. And now to suddenly change that

would mean changing the entire stream of the way that this institution has functioned for

many years. Therefore, attacking any big problem is bound to be really hard and the danger

is you spend a lot of resources -- time, money, manpower, optimism which is perhaps one of

our most precious resources attacking a problem that you can't make any headway on. So I mean,

you know, history is littered with brilliant people who have attacked large problems in

the past half century, century among them famine, among them poverty and most recently

I think education reform, a healthy diet and so on. So these are all really big problems.

So our argument is -- you know what? There's a lot of people out there thinking big. Maybe

some of them will be successful. Probably not so many honestly. It's very, very hard.

Our argument is -- you know what? Let the people who are gonna try to think big solve

big problems -- let them go. There's enough people doing that. Why don't you just try

to think small. Why don't you try to find one piece of the problem that you can identify

and peel it off and try to solve that problem or answer that question. So there are a lot

of reasons why it's better to do that. It's easier to satisfactorily answer a small question

or solve a big problem because you can get the data, you can understand the incentives,

it's just inherently much less complicated. If you can come up with a solution to a small

problem there's a much better chance you'll actually be able to get it done. A lot of

people feel like they come up with the answers to big problems but then you need to get all

the political and capital will to do it. And that can be much harder than actually solving

the problem.

So if you can peel off a small piece of a problem and then someone else peels off another

small piece and you add them up, you're constantly, you know, working toward a better place. So

I'll give you an example. If you think about, let's say, education reform. Even that very

phrase is kind of weighted or biased toward the supply side, the schools. It's basically

saying that oh, all the kids and the families who are sending their kids to school -- they're

all doing exactly the right thing. But education needs to be reformed because plainly the schools

and teachers and principals, they're the bad people. So that's kind of an assumption already

about where the problem should be solved. So you think, you know, people have been talking

about the many, many inputs that go into education -- class size, technology in the classroom,

resources spent, curricula -- the way the curricula are taught and so on.

So, you know, what if you say instead well, that's all -- those are big parts of the education

puzzle and they can all be attacked in some way. What if, however, what if we think about

instead of the education side -- what if you think about the student side. What if you

think about the kids who are showing up from school and what if you can look at areas in

which they're not doing well and maybe try to learn something from that and gather some

data and figure it out. So I could offer two examples about this. One is a pilot program

that was built here in New York City that was called School of One. And what School

of One did was it basically tried an entirely different model for each kid. Let's say in

a math class -- each kid would come into math class on a given day and have the option of

learning that day's lesson or whatever lesson in a number of different formats. In other

words it might be sitting in a room with a teacher and a bunch of other kids and getting

group instruction.

It might be peer learning with other kids. It might be virtual tutoring. It might be

doing a computer game. In other words, you offer all these different options for each

kid to try to learn the same material. Then at the end of each day, each kid gets tested

on how well they did on that lesson. And then you can learn what each kid -- how each kid

best learned. What form of teaching best learned. Then you have a very nice algorithm that overnight

computes the score of each kid with each kind of teaching and in the morning each kid now

comes in with a sort of playlist to determine what I'm gonna do today in what format of

learning and what I'm going to tackle. So that's, to me, a really neat idea in which

technology and a smart way of thinking about the demand side of education, the students

can change the way you can think about learning generally. Here's an even simpler one that

than and an even smaller one that than.

It turns out that if you look at the poorest learners in schools, I think pretty much anywhere

but in the U.S. and in much poorer countries as well. You can notice that often a bunch

of them have something in common which is they have bad eyesight. So as ridiculous as

this seems to be talking about in the twenty-first century, you know, who doesn't wear glasses

now. I mean an estimated one million people in America wear glasses that have no prescriptions

in them just because they want to look like me, okay. So Lebron James, you know, half

of the NBA now goes to put on their fake glasses after a game because it's just become a thing,

right. So you would think that the stigma of glasses is dead. But it's not and in some

places it's really not dead. So some scholars, some researchers went to a relatively poor

rural province in China and they wanted to know how big a deal is poor eyesight for education

generally. In other words, is poor vision depressing classroom scores.

And what they did is they found out that a tiny, a pitifully tiny fraction of the students

in this one region who needed glasses were wearing them -- almost none. And there was

a stigma and there were beliefs that wearing glasses in childhood would have a bad effect

later in life and so on. Some of which may have logic to them, some of which may not.

So they did an experiment these economists did. And they said what if we take all these

students who need glasses and we'll divide them up and make an experiment. We'll have

a control group. The kids -- half the kids keep going like they were before -- they don't

get glasses. The other half we give them glasses - $15 glasses I think it was funded by The

World Bank. Much cheaper than all new computers and all new curriculums -- a $15 pair of glasses.

They gave them to one set of kids. Then after a year they measured their education, their

test scores against the kids who hadn't gotten the glasses. And it turns out that having

glasses is a really big deal in school. Surprise, surprise, right. A tiny problem, incredibly

obvious solution where thinking like a child, you know, sometimes we shy away from obvious

ideas because we think, oh, that's not sophisticated enough, not smart enough. Here however was

a bunch of low hanging fruit. A bunch of kids who needed glasses. The minute they got them

they started doing much, much better in school. And that, to me, is the beauty of thinking

small. You find a problem that you can actually figure out instead of pining about it and

guessing about it for years and years, come up with a solution that's actually doable,

in this case incredibly cheap. And happy ending, it works. Not every solution will be so easy

or so cheap or they won't always work but I think you can see why we think at least

that thinking small can have a huge benefit.