Category Archives: School / Education

At our senior retreat yesterday, I opened a letter I wrote to myself on September 20th, 2002 at my freshmen retreat. I was more taken by it than I expected (maybe because it was handwritten, unlike my typed journal entries from those years). It wasn’t so much what I wrote – although that was quite interesting – but how I ended it. I wrote "Good luck Ben of ’05! -Ben of ’02"

That really symbolizes a central truth of being a teenager: each year so much changes. Everyone knows about the physical changes, but the more important are the emotional and cognitive. Even now, looking back to what I wrote in 2002 reminds me that since I’ve accumulated more experiences I have greater perspective. What excites me is that I’ve accumulated a tremendous set of one-of-a-kind experiences that should (and does) give me perspective that may be slightly different…in a world of intellectual homogeneity.

In a few days I’ll become a high school senior, and, as always, my ability to juggle a multitude of activities will be put to the test. My schedule will become slightly insane, especially come basketball season. This is where I doubly focus on my health and nutrition to make sure I’m performing day in day out at peak capacity.

I’m lucky that nearly all of the elective classes at my high school are college level courses, often times better than AP classes we don’t even bother following what the College Board outlines. This is what I’ll be spending 19 hours a week doing (plus all the homework, studying):

1. Asian Studies – A look at Hinduism, Buddhism, and other belief systems of India and China. A number of very cool spiritual books which will be right up my alley.

2. Geography – Everywhere I look I read about how an understanding of geography will be critical in the world. I’ve posted about cultural geography, and today I read a book review on how geography is the foundation for many of the most pivotal issues facing our world. I know squat right now, so this will be helpful.

3. Pyschology – A much coveted class, we will be covering the foundations of pycho-analysis, Freud, etc. We’ll also be reading a book that was recommended to me, The Sociopath Next Door.

4. Pre-calculus for the Social Sciences – Math-challenged Ben is still chugging away with an applied math course. Ho hum.

5. What It Is – A novel based English course. Examines the role of reality and intercourse between what is being told versus how it is being told.

I am also exploring ways to independently study globalization and philosophy.

In addition I will be partaking in the following activities on-campus:

The Devil’s Advocate (student newspaper) – I’m Executive Editor, working closely with a couple esteemed colleagues, and a bunch of other smart people. I will be writing a ton, managing our staff and budget, editing, and making sure we kick up lots of dust as a good student paper should.

Men’s Varsity Basketball – I’m returning Captain, working with a senior-heavy team. We’ll be working hard for a league championship!

KUHS Student Radio – The radio station I founded and run – we’ll be moving to an all-podcast format.

So there you go, that will be my life at University High School this fall.

A prediction at Larry Lessig’s blog that a complete curriculum in English from Kindergarten through the University level will exist for free by 2040. “In the long run, it will be very difficult for proprietary textbook publishers to compete with freely licensed alternatives. An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.”

Here here! On this topic, I am of course familiar with the fabulous MIT OpenCourseWare, but does anyone else know of other “open source” educational resources/courses/curricula designed for self-learners?

After getting a trackback ping from a professor at Case Western Reserve University, I came across David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College. As a DFW fan (the guy’s a brilliant writer, and I have his 1,000 page Infinite Jest on my bookshelf waiting for me) I checked it out and now declare it required reading for everyone. He starts off by saying that the biggest cliché in commencement speeches is that the value of your liberal arts education isn’t what you learn but that it “teaches you how to think.” Rather, he thinks the value of the liberal arts education is that it gives you the ability to choose what to think. It’s incredibly thought provoking in ways well beyond what college means as he dissects how we are our own point of view. Intrigued? Go read it and become smarter after 5 minutes. I have included my favorite parts below, it’s long enough that I didn’t blockquote it.

“Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience….

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out…

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

A New Yorker article that Chris Yeh writes about affirms two things in my mind: 1) I’m glad my high school doesn’t do the valedictorian thing, and 2) That I’m not even close to being of valedictorian status doesn’t mean anything in my quest to think different and change the world.

“In 1981, two professors…began following the lives of eighty-one high-school valedictorians…According to Arnold’s 1995 book “Lives of Promise: What Becomes of High School Valedictorians,” these students continued to distinguish themselves academically in college; a little less than sixty per cent pursued graduate studies. By their early thirties, most were “working in high-level, prestigious, secure professions”—they were lawyers, accountants, professors, doctors, engineers. Arnold totted up fifteen Ph.D.s, six law degrees, three medical degrees, and twenty-two master’s degrees in her group. The valedictorians got divorced at a lower rate than did the population at large, were less likely to use alcohol and drugs, and tended to be active in their communities.

At the same time, Arnold, who stays in touch with her cohort, has found that few of the valedictorians seem destined for intellectual eminence or for creative work outside of familiar career paths. Dedicated to the well-rounded ideal—to be a valedictorian, after all, you must excel in classes that don’t interest you or are poorly taught—the valedictorians had “used their strong work ethic to pursue multiple academic and extracurricular interests. None was obsessed with a single talent area to which he or she subordinated school and social involvement.” This marks a difference, Arnold said, from what we know about many eminent achievers, who tend to evince an early passion for a particular field. For these people, Arnold writes, a “powerful early interest evolves into lifelong, intensive, even obsessive involvement in the talent area.” She goes on, “Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.” Valedictorians, by contrast, conformed to the expectations of school and carefully chose careers that were likely to be socially and financially secure: “As a rule, valedictorians relegated their early interests to hobbies, second majors, or regretted dead ends. The serious athletes among the valedictorians never pursued sports occupations. Most of the high school musicians hung up their instruments during college.”

Chris goes on to say:

“In other words, while valedictorians do well, most of those who are most successful in life were definitely not valedictorians. Let me emphasize one line from the quote above: Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.

School isn’t like real life. In fact, it’s about as far from real life as can be imagined. The lessons that let you be successful in school (follow the rules, work hard, know the right answers) are completely the opposite of those that help you become a successful entrepreneur (change the rules, work smart, know the right questions).”

Ah, I sleep easier.