Each of these could be considered an individual deception but they so often come packaged together that I will treat them as a connected group. I’m going to start with what I consider to be a wise quote from Warren Buffet. “Never ask a barber if you need a haircut”. Of course the implication is that they will always say yes because they have a vested interest in the answer.
I recently had a coaching session with a college recruiter. One thing that came out during that session was the amount of pressure he was under to meet a quota of students enrolled in a graduate program. This guy was an honest hard-worker who I’m confident placed his potential students above his universities need to keep enrollments up. But make sure you keep Warren Buffet’s comment in mind when you decide to purchase an education.
By most accounts inside and outside, our educational system is broken. Forty years ago the United States had the number one educational system in the world. As I write this we stand at nineteenth. Approximately 6,000 kids drop out of high school every day. I have had numerous friends that work as educators. The reports of chaos and fighting are frightening… and that’s just the administrators. What they have to deal with in the classroom in beyond belief. What should be environments of help and hope toward a better future have become dungeons of discouragement and despair. And these are the people that claim to hold the keys to our children’s future.
The system is so flawed it’s hard to know where to start. There are pockets of greatness springing up all over the country. A teacher here, a school there, and even occasionally we see a whole school district excelling. But I want to address 3 flaws that we rarely here discussed in any forum on educational reform.
The first is generalized intelligence testing that has often come packaged as the Stanford-Binet which I believe is now in it’s 5th version. Although it is designed to access 5 areas including Fluid Reasoning, Knowledge, Quantitative Reasoning, Visual-Spatial Processing, and Working Memory it still cuts a very narrow swath in terms of possible talents that can be productively applied in ways that could make both a contribution to society and earn substantial income. As Harvard Professor Howard Gardener likes to point out, the Stanford-Binet and tests like it tend to erroneously ask, “How smart are you?” instead of the more helpful question, “How are you smart?” This simple reorganization of 4 words has enormous implications. The solution, which is already showing up in the more progressive learning institutions is the adoption of “Multiple Intelligence” concepts and methods in the classroom. If you have children of any age, don’t wait to develop a working knowledge of these ideas. A good primer for the uninitiated is Thomas Armstrong’s Seven Kinds of Smart.
The second opportunity for ref ore is Academic Scorecards, specifically the SAT, which is a college entrance exam. Educator Jennifer Fox reports:
“Since 1983, U.S. News and World Report magazine has ranked America’s 100 Best Colleges. This publication has changed the way parents and students choose institutions of higher education, leading them to believe that the value of a college degree is only as good as its brand name. For the past twenty-five years, this annual ranking system has almost guaranteed that SAT scores are considered the most important factor in college admission. In reality, SAT scores remain a notoriously poor measure of both student ability and likelihood of success in college.”
For a more thorough discussion of SAT’s I recommend Chapter 3 of Fox’s book Your Child’s Strengths. But my main concern is that the SAT like general intelligence testing focuses way too narrowly and leaves many children out who are very talented in ways not measured by this instrument.
My third topic of this education trap drives back to Buffet’s comment about “never ask a barber if you need a haircut.” Let me cut to the chase. The snobbery in education is appalling to me. We see it in many forms. There are Public School Snobs who insist that they are necessary. There are Private School Snobs who insist that only they provide a superior educational experience that will catapult your child forward to a place that will insure success. And there are the College and University Snobs who consistently suggest that you can’t succeed or be a productive member of society without jumping through the sometimes ridiculous ceremonious hoops.
Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I believe a good education is critical in establishing the foundation for success. I’m just suggesting that our institutions aren’t as good or as necessary as they think they are in providing this foundation. And in many cases they actually confound, confuse, and destroy initiative and hope.
If you believe a college degree is a pre-requisite for success let me drop a few names on you. Each of the following either dropped out or never attended college in the first place:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Richard Branson, Lawrence Ellison, Kirk Kerkorian, David Geffen, John Richard Simplot, Theodore W. Waitt, Wayne Huizenga, Ralph Lauren, Joseph Albertson, Michael Dell, Stephen Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Harry Truman, Frank Sinatra, Tony Robbins, Erik Erickson, Eric Hoffer, Andy Rooney, Peter Jennings, Barry Diller.
Many of them are billionaires. All of them have been off the charts successful. And this is only a partial list of some of the more famous names. I have quite a file going on these people. I could go on by telling you about the University of Chicago study that reports that those with college degrees have less sex and that those with post-graduate degrees have the least sex of all. I could tell you about the 500,000 you would have in the bank at age 50 if you took your college $120,000 college education fund and invested it in a meager municipal bond paying only 5%. I could tell you about the fuzzy math educrats use to convince you that your earnings will be higher if you get a college degree. But I won’t...
Again, I’m not saying don’t go to college or don’t get a degree. In many cases college is a very useful step. In some cases like medicine it is a necessary step. College can also be a great place to explore and discover your passion. Use school and college as one tool in your bag on the road to a good education built around your unique talents.
If you drop out of school make sure you drop in on some other kind of continued education for the rest of your life. Steve Jobs dropped out of Reed College but he didn't stop taking courses at a university. He followed his natural curiosity and spent 18 months taking classes on Calligraphy and Fonts. These design courses later figured heavily in the directions Apple would take.
"Course Correction" or "Coarse Correction" is on the way. The internet is forcing it. According to yesterday's Week-End Edition of the Wall Street Journal, University's are beginning to hand out "merit badges" for specific kinds of course work short of a degree. This will allow students to focus developing areas of talent rather than struggle through classes dispensing information they will never use. Even top schools like MIT are jumping on this bandwagon offering credit for completing this type of short program.
Your Moment of Truth: Focus on education that develops your natural talent into full blown strengths while staying wary of the education systems sometimes self-serving hoops.
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