Tag: education reform

Thiel (& friend) on Education

ericryangrant

I caught Peter Thiel’s interview on Tim Ferriss podcast last night. It was, as expected, a thought-provoking Q & A from one of the more intelligent and experienced names in Silicon Valley.

And while the whole 23 minutes is worthwhile, I wanted to blog on one part of it. Thiel is asked about education, a subject he’s familiar with as he’s invested in university-busting startups and talked long and passionately about disturbing the one-size-fits-all trend in higher Ed.

The comment stemmed from something Thiel’s friend said to him — that Higher Education right now in the US is akin to the Catholic Church in the 16th century in the years leading to the Reformation.

And how it true it seems. The Church, at that point, was greedily taking money for repentence, convincing people that it could only be saved by going through its doors. It was a ‘too big to fail’ type deal, and too big, really, to even disrupt.

Until Martin Luther did something bold and changed people’s minds around him and elsewhere and changed the history of the world in doing so.

Education could use its Luther, that’s for sure. But that’s not the important part. The important part is whether our society is ready to take the leap to get behind a bold action that takes a system down. The University system has become, in modern nations and especially the US, a seemingly untackle-able beast.

Businesses consider it necessary and base salary and financial offerings on accreditation from these places.

Adults think their kids need it. (In one study, parents were asked if they thought US students needed to go college. 54% said yes. Then they were asked if their kids needed to go to college. 89% said yes.)

And, we’re defining childhood success based on this system which ultimately is made to get you into a college.

We need something to pull the fabric away and offer a (what will seem radical but will soon cease to be) alternative. There have been some intriguing ones offered, but none that have convinced a skeptical (and compliant) public that its viable.

Investors like Thiel have helped carve some spots in adult and continuing education. To be blunt, that’s cute, but it’s a far cry from taken down the bloated beast that is tuition-starved institutions.

So what’ll be? Well, I hope to see it soon. My inkling is that it will. And then we’ll be the fun part — the slow dismantle and reformation of another great institutional titan. And then all the cards are in the air.

Data Correlation, Education, and Cannabis

ericryangrant

I can’t imagine this is the last time I’m going to see the contents of this article brought into discussion.

I’ll sum it briefly: a study found that kids who smoked marijuana were significantly less likely to graduate high school and even less likely to graduate from college. The likelihood decreased with more consistent use of the drug.

The study implies correlation and causation. The journalist in the linked article does a good job of at least addressing why this might be a misconception and, more importantly, how easy it’s going to be for this data to be misinterpreted. His sentence, “You can expect these findings to be highly cited by opponents of liberalized marijuana laws, like the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Smart Approaches to Marijuana project. But it’s important to put them in proper context.” is spot on.

I hope the causality idea is at least questioned. Is it the marijuana smoking that makes a student less likely to graduate? Or are students that might, for one reason or another, be destined not to graduate drawn more to using the drug? It’s worth asking as a qualifier to this.

A few more things come into play here. Education is used as a hallmark here of accomplishment in a completely one-size-fits-all manner. I don’t have to list the accomplished people we know that didn’t graduate from school (or *cough* the famous folks who have admitted to smoking marijuana). (In this way, the finding that smokers were 7x more likely to be depressed is much more important — but, again, what’s the causation here?).

If we can continue to look at educational achievement as the only standard idea of success, we’re not going to do any favors for our youth. The education system already does a disservice to rebellious minds. It clenches these students in its fists and attempts to squeeze out the creativity in them ( to be so emphatic about it) — so it’s no wonder that the lost souls look for other avenues for that creativity. This where the study comes back to. What sustains these kids? And how are we so damn sure that they won’t be successful — so much so that adults are telling other adults to look at marijuana smoking as a sign of some kind of failure.

But this is a system-based assessment. In the pantheon of American life, education still remains king. Learning does not. No one seems to care if one discovers something wonderful outside of school. Or learns a skill late one night while doing something that might be considered mischievous. Why can we not look at learning as something outside of education? What hurts most about this study isn’t the correlation problem, it’s this idea. Personal success can be had outside of our precious system, can it not?

So we continue on (like boats against the current) thinking that the only judge of a successful kid is his/her success in this system we went through ourselves. We see it as a future-looking prism to cast life success (and we won’t get into what the hell that means).

I suppose it’s summed up like this: we label some students as “underachievers” without considering that the system has failed them. The system, rarely, is called out for its own under achieving, but that weight is put constantly on students and faculty alike.

The kicker is that this actually relates to the study aside from just illuminating our ability to separate a system from a reality. It also shows what damage that system can have. Now we have a somewhat demonized group of kids, who are experimenting with drug use — and I’m certainly not condoning that here — but are further being ostracized and pushed away because they aren’t doing well in schools. The system isn’t going to enhance those that are failing at it. It’s not built that way. It merely sustains the class system it’s rooted in and meant to continue on.

My worry is that all of this is combined into one big misunderstanding. There are the “underachievers” and the “potheads” and this study makes it too easy to loop those together — with one big group that the system can reject. And with the large majority of us complacently buying into that system, we’ll leave them behind. My hope, then, is that this group — rejected at such a young age — can figure out not to define its own success of these silly metrics.