Category Archives: School / Education

Tyler Cowen asks for general advice for his college-bound daughter and it comes, and it comes, and it comes. Just about everyone has an opinion about education! Worth reading through the comments, though.

Bill Bullard, the former Dean of Faculty at my old high school, was scheduled to deliver the commencement address for this year’s graduating class. Last minute food poisoning prevented him from appearing in the flesh, but the text of his speech has been posted online (pdf). It’s classic Bill: intellectual and serious, eminently wise. If you’re like me and enjoy reading commencement speeches, it’s worth a print and read. He closes the speech by identifying three things students should unlearn from school:

• The importance of opinion. "Schools, especially good ones…that so emphasize student voice, teach us to value opinion. This is a great deception. Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge; it requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge, according to George Eliot, is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound, purpose‐larger‐than‐the‐self kind of understanding."
• The importance of solving given problems. "Schools teach us to be clever, great problem solvers, but not to include ourselves in the problem that’s being solved. This is a great delusion. It makes us arrogant and complacent and teaches us to look at the world as a problem outside of us. As in Oedipus, public problems – the plague on Thebes or our own pestilences, war or global warming – are private problems. The plague is only lifted when each person sees his responsibility not in analyzing the problem, not in solving the riddle, but in changing our actions to address a public need. Oedipus destroyed the two things that had deceived him – his eyes and his power – and in so doing saved his city."
• The importance of earning the approval of others. "Schools teach students to seek the approval of their teachers. Indeed, for all of our differences, this is one area that parents and teachers share; we are wired or we are hired to believe in you, to approve you, to prevent or mitigate the experiences of disappointment…Try to correct this in two ways. First seek people, work for people who don’t have to like you, people who can easily disapprove of you, people that you can’t easily please.  Their skepticism or indifference will define you. Second, if you don’t how to do so already, begin working for yourself, and let the teachers be damned. But they won’t be – they’ll just be all the more approving because that kind of integrity can only command respect. After all, most of the work we devise is devised for students who are not working for themselves, so those that do surpass our expectations and teach us things that we’ve never thought of."

Bill had a big impact on me as a student. I vividly recall sitting in an English class in which we were reading Shakespeare. Bill was substituting that day. In a mere 45 minutes he delivered a stunning analysis of the text at hand and ended the class with three really provocative questions for us to chew on. I remember turning to the person next to me — neither of us said anything, but we were thinking the same thing: "That was fucking brilliant." From that moment forward I committed to trying to absorb through osmosis as much of his intellectual intensity and perspective as possible.

Teachers. It’s trite I know, but they are highly under-apprreciated in society.

From Gene Weingarten’s high school graduation speech:

My point is that the basic, all-purpose high school graduation speech is a lie. It’s a lie, because they don’t want to tell you the truth, which is that you are embarking on a bold, new journey to explore such things as whether it is physically possible to jam into a dormitory elevator the entire contents of the faculty lounge, including the sectional sofa.

I will comment much more on my upcoming college experience soon.

(hat tip: Newmark’s Door)

This is an excellent list written for parents from Zen Habits.

I want to emphasize the anti-competition point. I have become much less competitive the past few years and I think I’m better because of it. I’ve wondered aloud whether you need a killer instinct in business. I do think you need some of that at an organization level, but on an individual level a mindset toward cooperation rather than competition can be surprisingly effective. Do you agree?

Below are my favorites:

• Investing. What is investing and why is it necessary? How do you do it and what are different ways of doing it? How do you research an investment? How does it compound over time? This is a good conversation to have with your teen.
• Frugality. This is something to teach them from an early age. How to shop around to get a good deal, to compare between products of different prices and quality, to make things last and not waste, to cook at home instead of eating out too much, to control impulse buying. When we go out and do a shopping spree, including before Christmas, we are teaching them just the opposite.
• Reading. Sure, we’re taught to read. But schools most often make this boring. Show your child the wonderful imaginative worlds there are out there. And show them how to find out about stuff in the world through the Internet, and how to evaluate what they read for credibility, logic, factualness.
• Positive thinking. While critical thinking is an important skill, it’s also important to have a positive outlook on life. Sure, things may be screwed up, but they can be changed for the better. Find solutions instead of complaints. And most of all, learn to believe in yourself, and to block out negative self-thinking.
• Motivation. Learn that discipline isn’t the key to achieving a goal, but motivation. How to motivate yourself, different strategies, and how great it feels to achieve a goal. Start them with small, easily achievable goals, and let them develop this skill.
• Anti-competition. As kids, we’re taught how to be competitive. In the adult world, that’s how we behave. And that results in back-stabbing, undercutting, feelings of resentment, and other life-affirming things like that. Instead, teach your child how there is room for many people to be successful, and how you’re more likely to be successful if you help others to be successful, and how they’ll help you in return. Learn that making friends and allies is better than making enemies, and how to do that. Learn cooperation and teamwork before competition.
• Develop intimate relationships. The best way to teach this is to develop an intimate relationship with your child, and model it with your spouse or other significant other (within appropriateness). Teach them the skills for developing these types of relationships, talk about the importance of it, and how to get through the bumpy parts as well. There are bad times in every relationship, but with the right skills of communication, empathy and compromise, they can get through them.
• Organization. How to keep paperwork organized, how to keep things in their place, to to keep a to-do list, how to set routines, how to focus on the important tasks.

The universities in Europe that I’m familiar with offer specialized education. If you’re a really good student in France or England, you go to a university and study one topic in-depth. Maybe history, maybe law, maybe economics. My friends in Europe chose one topic before they enrolled.

In America we have schools like that. But we also have the liberal arts college system, and liberal arts programs within larger universities. If you’re a really good student, chances are you will be at a school which will require that you sample broadly. Even if you’re set on becoming a lawyer, you’ll still have to take some math classes. Even if you know chemistry is your calling, you’ll still have to read Faulkner and Shakespeare.

The breadth and interdisciplinary nature of the American system probably provides more intellectual excitement, although also contributes to the swaths of English and philosophy majors who spend their 20’s wandering aimlessly. The European system provides deep knowledge to a student in a given area which probably aids in their job search early on, but also prevents students from the broad exposure which might set off new creative sparks. To oversimplify, the liberal arts system in America promotes intellectual curiosity whereas the European system promotes specific career tracks.

Here’s what trips me up: After higher education — i.e., in adult life — Europe is characterized as the place where career ambition and work come second to the general enjoyment of life and intellectual curiosity. We conjure an image of the French discussing the philosophy of life in an outdoor cafe at 10 AM on a Monday. And America is the place where the meaning of life and intellectualism are second to 80 hour workweeks. Public intellectuals are second to pop culture stars. We obsess about our work.

Does anyone else see this incongruence? Does anyone else find it odd that the inputs in each higher ed system lead to opposite outputs? I realize these are vast generalizations, but still, it’s striking.