The other morning a friend dropped me a New York Times article by Michael Ellsberg (author of The Education of Millionaires). It’s pretty typical for people to shoot me Ellsberg’s work, because, hey! I write a blog called Stay Out Of School, so I must be totally down with this drop-out-and-start-up thing. In this particular piece, Ellsberg claims that startups are the primary source of job creation—which America really needs right now. Can’t really argue with that, right? That’s just stats.

Then he hits us with this:

It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.

Fine. Totally true.

Sounds sexy.

This article was tossed my way coincidentally after I shared this on Twitter:

You heard me. Several teenagers I know from some of the top private schools in the country are unclear on what odd numbers are. Shortly after I posted this, a friend drew my attention to another tweet by a tutor remarking that she was teaching her high school students how to multiply.

This came as no surprise to me, but I’m beginning to think it would actually surprise the rest of you. Hopefully it would surprise Michael Ellsberg. It appears that we’re unclear about what a 75% high school drop out rate really means: it doesn’t mean we lose 1 in 4 kids, but the other 3 are graduating with flying colors and on the fast track to the next big thing.

25% Drop-Out Rate Doesn’t Equal 75% Awesome

What’s happening in high schools today is not your father’s high school education. It’s not yours, either. Frankly, it isn’t even mine.

And yet, we insist on conversing about dropping out of college on the presumption that high school students have the basic skills that successful 30- and 40- somethings have, which, by and large, is just not the case.

The conversation about dropping out of college has become as sophomoric as a certain Pink Floyd song. Again, in the public’s defense, that might be because people don’t really know how bad it is. “You don’t need those academic skills,” we cry, thinking we mean lengthy memorized hunks of The Canterbury Tales or how to measure the volume of an irregular shape in Euclidian space. You need… [well, let’s use Ellsberg’s words verbatim]:

“Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.”

I’ve got news for you: it’s not unlikely that your high school kid can’t do division. Yes, even yours. Even though she goes to Dwight.

Ellsberg again:

“…our children grow up amid an echo chamber of voices telling them to get good grades, do well on their SATs…”

Well what would be preferable to that? Bad grades? The inability to read critically and solve problems in new ways (which, last I checked, is basically what the SAT tests).

Since when do we need skills like networking to the exclusion of academia? Why are being great at physics and great at networking considered mutually exclusive, and why on earth would we tell our students that that’s the case? To return to Ellsberg’s point, you don’t need a college degree to successfully launch a business of the caliber he mentions if you’re already an extraordinarily well-educated person and you’re an autodidact. Being a genius doesn’t hurt either.

There’s A Reason We Still Recommend a High School Diploma

It’s notable that no one has yet started encouraging kids to drop out of high school to join the work force. That’s the line we’ve tacitly decided to draw in the sand: high school diploma, paramount, college degree, not so much. On some level we all know that encouraging dropping out of high school would be nothing short of insane, because the truth is that in order to effectively generate an idea for and subsequently run a startup, you do need an academic skill set that encompasses fundamentals we wrongly assume high school graduates have.

The college-is-useless meme is driven by a bunch of hyper-educated self-starters who wrongly assume the majority of students leave high schools equipped with the same skill set they did, skills paramount to a successful startup, including:

• The ability to think critically, including understanding both sides of an argument and considering the motivation and background driving a perspective. This includes the ability to revise one’s own perspective on the fly as more intel is gathered—which, on a more fundamental level, means knowing the difference between fact and opinion.
• The prowess to translate ideas into a formal, organized argument that others can understand.
• The capacity to analyze data and recognize errors or outliers that could imply either error or opportunity.
• The wherewithal to gather information and synthesize it, connect it to their pre-existing web of knowledge and draw new inferences and assumptions (which, by the way, is the basic act of creativity) No really, creativity requires an internal web of knowledge.
• The background to understand social nuance on the grand scale, including historical trends that have created the current social construct that colors The Market.

Listen, I love high schoolers. I spend six days a week doing my damnedest to help them think better and more quickly. I have no interest in throwing them under the bus…but I’m telling you: we’re grossly overestimating what they’re walking out the doors of their high schools knowing.

Sure, skipping college is just fine for that rare, glorious individual who knows how to create for him/herself a life that reflects the info-rich experience that an ideal college experience embodies and is already equipped to harness that exposure into something great. I consider a lot of those types my friends. However, if we want to talk seriously about education, we need to get past the dazzle of the scrappy geniuses and face an ugly reality: even a kid with the intelligence that warrants applying to Stanford next year might not to know to write a five paragraph essay.

I know, because I’ll be teaching him how to do so this afternoon.

Cat’s outta the bag.

Shut up about dropping out of college. It’s beside the point.

Let’s tie together some stuff in the news.

I want to to share with you two snippets of articles I found this week while traveling.

This one, from Ad Age, an interview with Vincent Kartheiser of Mad Men:

Ad Age: Well, you’re not only loyal to Don in the role of Pete, but in real life you’re also loyal to Jon Hamm. You were the only cast member who spoke up and supported him earlier this week on the “Today” show about his comments slamming reality TV and about Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton being “fucking idiots.” So do you think reality TV is rotting America?
Mr. Kartheiser: No, I don’t think it’s rotting America, but I don’t think he’s wrong. It’s OK to look at something and say what it is. It’s OK to look at a McDonald’s hamburger and say, “Yeah, I like the taste of them, but they’re not good for me.” We live in a time where everyone’s very aware that there’s people who are celebrities because of their fathers or celebrities because of this machine that’s selling something very simple and very ordinary, and people are buying it. It’s not an awful thing, but I think it’s OK to say it’s not a splendid thing, either. [emphasis mine]

Here’s another clip, from an Op Ed in the New York Times by Bill Maher:

I have a better idea. Let’s have an amnesty — from the left and the right — on every made-up, fake, totally insincere, playacted hurt, insult, slight and affront. Let’s make this Sunday the National Day of No Outrage. One day a year when you will not find some tiny thing someone did or said and pretend you can barely continue functioning until they apologize.
If that doesn’t work, what about this: If you see or hear something you don’t like in the media, just go on with your life. Turn the page or flip the dial or pick up your roll of quarters and leave the booth. [emphasis mine]

It makes all the sense in the world that we’re seeing two people commenting on the cult of the pointless apology at a time when people are (rightly) up in arms about the circumstances that led to this:

Mar 23, 2012 · SANFORD, Fla. – While public cries to charge Trayvon Martin’s killer continued to intensify Friday, the president weighed in…

After all, Kartheiser and Maher are commenting on a culture in which we are quick to embrace EZ-peel solutions and slow to drum up legitimate anger over something deserving real fury. They’re two sides of the same coin, opposite results from the same kind of thinking. See, all this foolish apologizing is happening because we’re collectively becoming whiny weenies and manipulators—and our cries over the inane have drowned out our ability to see things as they are and for what the deserve.

On one hand we’re always ready to get wound up about pundits being… pundits. On the other hand, many of us are hesitant to be outraged over things that matter deeply, like unarmed teenagers killed on suburban streets—or our collective willingness to feed them food that slowly kills them, anyway.

The Grossly Underestimated Power of Words

How we talk about things actually changes their meaning, which can be very cool. That discourse can change meaning is why different groups have appropriated language to their own benefit (e.g. the LGBT community appropriated the term “queer” 20+ (?) years ago from the opposition and made it their battle cry).

In the same way, when we demand apologies—and what we’re really demanding is remorse—for things that we all know at the end of the day are stupid, we actually devalue calls for apologies for those things that legitimately warrant it.

If I admonish a student for showing up three minutes late, getting up to take a bathroom break, answering a text message, and failing to complete the important homework assignment I gave him, he may not hear the truth: I’m actually annoyed that he didn’t do his homework because failing to do so will have serious negative consequences. So I let him go pee and answer his buddy. Then, when I’m angry, he’ll know I’m not kidding.

On a social level, there are a hundred grey areas across incredibly serious issues to which we chronically over- and under-react:

• bullying and kids-being-kids
• the causes of childhood obesity and how we should address about it
• harassment and flirting

When we get wound up about the trivial, we more easily overlook the inexcusable. Letting the stuff slide that should slide and holding people accountable for real offenses is hard—and I don’t just mean intellectually. Failure to apologize when an apology is due is the result of an ugly combination of hubris, ignorance, and laziness on the part of the offender:

• hubris, in that we actually think we’re inherently more important than another;
• ignorance, either because we don’t know we’re wrong or, again, because we actually think we’re more important;
• laziness, in that sorting things out in ways that don’t ultimately require an apology can be a hell of a lot of work.

Feeling remorse and apologizing for things that warrant apologies means being humble, aware, and engaged. Not needing an apology for something trivial is also the fruit of being humble, aware, and engaged. This is not exactly the American way. Our collective calls for pointless apologies from others simply deflect the microscope from ourselves—yes, you and I might be wrong sometimes—and, most importantly, from those issues that really warrant outrage.

We’re creating static, misfiring our energy at nonsense, and people are getting away with grossly unacceptable behavior in the midst of it all. You know that saying, ‘It’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye?’ Well, it’s all a bunch of stupid apologies until somebody’s child dies.

What has you angry today? What should have you angry today?

When I was around eighteen years old I was hanging out by the pool with The Boy Who’d Always Been Out Of Reach. You know the one. I thought this guy was so far out of my league he may as well have been Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall.

While I still have no idea how it happened, I found myself alone with him one afternoon at his parents’ house, jeans rolled up to our knees, sun pouring down, feet dangling in the water.

“Want a cup of coffee?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

Lies! I didn’t want a cup of coffee. It was hellaciously hot and it would be safe to say that up until that point in my life I’d probably drunk a half dozen cups of coffee total. I just didn’t like it.

“I only drink it black. You don’t need milk and sugar, do you,” he asked, heading toward the kitchen. He may as well have said, You don’t need me to tie your shoes for you, do you?

“No, no. Black’s great.”

Lies again! To a girl who at the time subsisted on yogurt, cottage cheese, apricots, and waffles, this was as appealing as a mug of used car oil.

But what did I do?

I drank it.

Why?

Because I wanted to be a black coffee drinker because I wanted to impress the cute boy.

In other words, I had a goal.

These circumstances repeated themselves a handful of times with the same boy (who doesn’t like piping hot coffee at the beach, right?). While I haven’t heard from the him in over a decade, lo and behold, I stand before you now, mumblemumble years later, a dedicated coffee drinker (who’s decided she was too good for him, anyway!).

Coffee, wine, super dark chocolate: some of the greatest pleasures are found in treats for which most of us must develop a taste. We actually teach ourselves to like these things because we cognitively know that they’re good and that we ought to like them.

Doing so is the product of discipline and willpower—the very same discipline (AHEM) that we tap into to lose weight, write a book, or save money.

Developing a taste for things works in reverse, too. The more dedicated we become to developing a taste for a particular thing, to enjoying its quality and nuance, the more likely we are to develop a distaste for a shoddy substitute. Let’s go back to the chocolate.

Not so many years after the impressing-boys-with-my-black-coffee-drinking stage, I met another guy: this time, a man who really liked extremely dark chocolate (like 80% cocoa and darker). True to form, I decided that I would like it, too. This was less of a stretch; I was already a woman who’d buy a Symphony milk chocolate bar on occasion, so putting aside the milk and sugar on this front was a little easier.

But here’s what happened: as my palate developed and I actually learned to appreciate the real cocoa flavor of darker chocolate, I simultaneously lost my taste for cheap milk chocolate and candy. Butterfinger? Forget it. Crunch bars? Can’t do it.

They don’t taste like chocolate! They taste like sugar and artificial flavoring.

Only by pushing myself to eat something a little higher quality—and a little initially off-putting—was I able to figure that out.

This doesn’t merely make me a foodie arugula eating elitist; it makes me someone who consumes less crap, takes in fewer empty calories, and gets more pleasure bite for bite from the candy I consume than I used to. My point here is not to be a jerk about the food I eat or reveal what a pathetic pushover I can be when the right boy is around; my point is that the willpower I’m describing, discipline to change our taste and preferences, even when we’re motivated by the shallowest, dumbest things, is something we can all tap into.

We’ve all motivated ourselves to do something for cute so-and-so. Everyone is disciplined in some circumstance, and all discipline is fundamentally the same. So what if we were motivated by something really important to change our preferences? What if our longevity depended on it? Or the health of our children? Our national security? Our healthcare cost?

Could we learn to prefer a trip to the gym to a trip to the mall?

Could we rather read some literature than watch another hour of daytime television?

Could we prefer two meals of locally raised, grass fed beef a week to six days of something frozen and mass produced that we dump out of a bag?

How big are the possibilities for change when we’re willing to change not only what we do but what we fundamentally want?

(Or, Don’t Hate Me Because I’m a Conservative)

I voted in Palm Beach County today.

For some of you, the needle may have already skidded across the metaphorical record. I’ve already seen the gears turning on the faces of my friends this week….. Voting… voting… there’s voting going on? OH! THE REPUBLICAN PRIMARY!

Then they stare at me in disdain and disbelief.

It gets worse.

I was having a little text exchange the other night with one of my most brilliant friends (who happens to be an ardent Obama supporter) about politics. It was late and I think I’d had a glass of wine or two—enough to be a little more loose-lipped about my political past than I’d normally be.

“Big secret,” I typed. “I was an absentee ballot voter in Palm Beach County, Florida in the 2000 elections. I voted for Bush. You heard me: I’m one of the 500 people in the world who got us into this whole mess.”

I’m not kidding when I tell you I didn’t hear from him again for a full 24 hours.

“I’m still recovering from this information,” he responded.

I’ve been carrying around the hanging chads of my past like emotional baggage. Admittedly, at the time, I was just a gung-ho, extremely conservative, incredibly religious voter. As the years roll by, though, the implication of that chad (or today’s I VOTED! sticker) and what people might perceive as my social and ethical philosophy has been a nightmare.

Don’t get me wrong: the implications of my voting choices were intense early on. I was filling out that Florida voter punch card from my dorm room at a women’s liberal arts college in western Massachusetts. I knew what it was to have a political philosophy that wasn’t exactly the same as those of my peers.

Not that I had much of a “philosophy” at the time.

Nevertheless, the alienation these days is worse.

Before You Bail on Me

Let me get it out of the way and say that I don’t think Republicans (the big brand and its spray tanned leader, at least) are my peers anymore, either. In fact, I don’t know if modern Republicanism ever embodied what I think; I definitely see now that I’m a fiscal conservative and social liberal. As I’ve been watching this election unfold (and as I find myself coincidentally once again in Palm Beach County, registered as a Republican, feeling like a stranger in a strange land and having to choose between one of these blow-hards), I’ve been giving a lot of thought to the general deterioration of political discourse and critical thinking that goes along with it. After all, this is my blog and I’m bracing for the potential backlash this is going to bring even as I write it.

My objective here is actually to ratchet up the level of critical, concrete thinking both within and between parties—as in, I’m seriously hoping to affect the next conversation you have over coffee about your political values and direction—and I’m sticking my neck out to do so.

I repeat: this is not  game of Political Red Rover. You don’t have to come over. I just want to start some interesting conversation.

That being said:

We Have No Joint Sense of Purpose As A Nation—and between Parties

In theory, people of all parties should be working towards more or less the same fundamental ideals (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, anyone?) and arguing over ways to get there. That means that my Obama-supporting friend and I should actually have basic ideals about public welfare and society that more or less line up. We probably do. That’s what makes us tolerable to each other, at least from a political standpoint.

It’s easy to imagine that back when the colonies were recently independent, early Americans had a sense of joint purpose, like, “We’re here to build a country from scratch,” (not to oversimplify). While even at that time there was plenty of difference of political philosophy, building a strong United States was paramount to virtually everyone; after all, most people had risked their lives (or their family members had) to do so.
Compare that to today. That sense of civic duty and engagement, the feeling we’re still creating and ironing out the longevity of a nation that protects its people and lives without a monarch, and the reality that we’re still participating in the greatest governmental experiment in history are all largely absent from the fiery fights we have with everyone from our worst enemies to our own grandmothers.

Now, this all hinges on one main idea (conceivably an idea that many Republicans no longer hold dear (or, worse, that they’re being portrayed as having forgotten)): the success and continuity of the whole might require trumping the needs and desires of the individual.

It’s not all about me. It’s not all about you, either.

Republicanism can make sense in light of the fundamental ideas that we’re all in this together and that what happens to my neighbor actually affects my own wellbeing, so it behooves me to have his best interest in mind. When that’s abandoned, things go wrong.

Next time you get into a political spat with someone, stop and establish what their objective is for the country (and I mean addressing education, poverty, wealth, quality of life, freedom)—and see if you can articulate your own. It may turn out that the guy you’re arguing with really is a total jerk who ought to be punched, but at least you’ll have defined your terms on your way to that assessment.

In light of that, I want to make a few comments on my conservatism:

I Don’t Want Lower Taxes So I Can Horde Money…

…and go shopping at Givenchy for extra handbags while children are going to bed hungry and unable to read.

Not that I don’t like bags.

As far as I’m concerned, my main reason for desiring lower taxes is because I don’t want the government directing my charitable giving, and I’d like to be able to give more, more comfortably, even when the recipients of those gifts don’t count as a tax deduction.

This may sound very pollyanna, but I don’t simply mean I want to give my wealth to my children without the state being involved (although that’s true, too). I mean that if my family members and friends—parents, siblings, whomever—need me, I would like to have more to give. If the local food bank is in need, I’d like to have more to give. Moreover, I believe distribution of funds can be more efficient (and therefore more effective) when the government is not involved.

This, again, goes back to general purpose: what the heck are we doing here and what can we do to contribute? I legitimately want to be freed up to give freely, and if any of you know me personally, you know that I do, sometimes at great personal cost. Heck, I’ve even offered a kidney to a Twitter friend (a liberal, no less!). I put my money where my mouth is, and I think as a conservative that has to come with the territory.

Generosity has to be a fundamental tenet of a functioning fiscally conservative government. That for many Republicans giving generously isn’t a key piece of the equation points to why things are so broken (and why I’m usually mortified to admit I have anything to do with them).

So If the Government Shouldn’t Be Handing Out Money, Who Should?

Social organizations should be distributing the cash. There’s a problem in making that happen, though, I know. It has a lot to do with values and, again, a disintegrating sense of social responsibility, often assumed to be or portrayed as specific to those on the right. I also think it’s why we fight so quickly and so harshly; politics is quickly becoming the new religion. According to Gallup, the number of Americans who identify as having no religious affiliation has increased from “near zero in the 1950s to 16%*” in 2010. Now, this is obviously not a majority, but I think it does reflect a secular shift in our culture. Despite less affiliation with religion—the way man sorts through who he is in relation to the universe and other people—there are still ethical and social issues that need to be resolved, and politics has become the arena in which we hash them out.

As a conservative, I don’t necessarily think that’s best. Philip K. Howard makes a fascinating observation in The Death Of Common Sense that speaks directly to this legislation of behavior and attitude:

Plato argued that good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will always find a way around law. By pretending that procedure will get rid of corruption, we have succeeded only in humiliating honest people and provided a cover of darkness and complexity for the bad people. There is a scandal here, but it’s not the result of venal bureaucrats. (p. 99)

We can’t legislate that citizens be better people. Moreover, we can’t force people to not exercise every right they have to the nth degree (fly everywhere in a private jet, consume unknown quantities of artery-clogging beef product at Taco Bell, etc).

When we talk about why the government “should be doing something,” we should more carefully look at why we as individuals are not doing whatever that is.

Shut Up Already

OK, I will. But I want to leave you with this: at the end of the day, I believe our political discourse is a direct reflection of how much respect we have for one another. I’d say the vast majority of my friends are liberals, and I deeply respect them, largely because the kinds of people I’m friends with are people who hold dear personal responsibility, discipline, delayed gratification, and critical thinking.

Those ideals are what allow us to talk calmly about ways to grow into a society and culture of which we can all be proud—and they’re the only sort of conversations that will ultimately get us somewhere as a Union.

Try it sometime.

Sally and Marcie

For anyone who knows me personally, it should come as no surprise that I spent a portion of my holiday weekend tucked in to the December/January ’12 issue of Garden and Gun magazine. This issue’s cover model is a very handsome black Labrador retriever named Deke, a hunting dog trained at the famous Wildrose Kennels in Mississippi.

Luna

Our house is crawling with dogs—we currently have seven—so anything about training dogs, dog psychology, or getting your pack to do anything you desperately hope it would do appeals to me. The owner of Wildrose, Mike Stewart, who is legendary for turning out doggies who absolutely love to listen and work for their masters, offered some tips at the end of story.

As it turns out, being a great dog leader is just like being a people leader! ( And you thought this post was just an excuse to make you look at photos of my mutts.)

“The way I see it, most dogs are just out for a good time. I equate them with frat boys at Ole Miss. Yeah, it’s fun to stand around with a plastic cup of beer and a cigarette. But if you show them there’s value in work beyond that, if you stop that behavior and show them there’s more that’s possible in their life? Motivate them to see other, bigger rewards? Well, both the frat boy and the dog might very well adopt the new behavior. Then you reinforce it, and that new behavior is still fun. It’s just a different kind of fun.” -Mike Stewart, Wildrose Kennels

The Pud'

The special thing about effectively leading (or managing or teaching or parenting) is the ability to connect the work or discipline needed for a new skill to the excitement and personal satisfaction that that new skill can bring. In fact, not only does effectively teaching a new skill foster enthusiasm about that particular skill, but it also creates enthusiasm around the entire experience of learning and being productive.

Getting this “different kind of fun” to register is what keeps [some of] my dogs heeling off-leash and what can ultimately keep a waffling high school student from dropping out. It propels an Australian Shepherd through a Fly Ball course and keeps a piano student seated at the bench for an extra hour of practice. It keeps a seeing-eye dog faithfully leading its master and a CEO keeping her team on task.

…and it drives people coming out of a long holiday weekend back to their desks.

Curiosity begets curiosity. Discipline with reward begets more discipline. Achievement begets achievement.

Astro

When we see no reason to do new work, when we don’t value what it is we’re creating, and when the task at hand seems disconnected from a more worthwhile world around us, it makes all the sense in the world that we’d do the same thing a dog naturally does: lay around and nap.

How do you make the connection to a “different kind of fun” for those you lead? For yourself?

Stevie

I have had it. This conversation about the value of college has gone absolutely off the rails. I’m so ticked this morning I’m having trouble writing coherently. I guess this makes sense, because anger is rooted in fear, and I have finally become terrified for the future of education in the United States.

I found a book review in Time the other day of Michael Ellberg’s much anticipated The Education of Millionaires. You can read the brief article and check out the absolutely infuriating comments here.

It’s worth reading, but if you’re not going to, you know need to know that  Gregorian’s article is plastered with comments from young men skewering him for pointing out that:

…what is forgotten in the discussion about dollars and cents is that the purpose of education, whatever its cost or its source, is not simply to enable one to earn a living but to prepare one for living over the course of an entire lifetime with all the ups and downs that come our way.

News Flash! Education is about preparation for living. It’s about WHAT THE HELL YOU DO ALL DAY. Education is about why you bother to get your ass out of bed, how you choose to spend your time, what you value, and how you interact with the world. It’s reflected in how you treat others—people you know and people you don’t. It’s reflected in what you have to offer the world, in the quality of work you do. It’s also reflected in the puzzling and ubiquitous choice to subsist on a diet of ramen or BigMacs and own a 62” television with a full cable package instead of investing in nutritious food and a library card.

It’s pretty easy to make college the target: I’m sure any minute now we’ll see “I have a $120,000 degree and all I got was this lousy sweatshirt” hoodies sold on street corners. But we’re not really fighting about college, people!

We’re having a big, embarrassing, ugly fight about what we value.

If you think about it, it makes all the sense in the world that Gregorian’s readers think he’s a nut for thinking education is about preparation for life. After all, the cultural message we’ve been sending to students for decades hasn’t been saying anything like that. We’re finally seeing the product of several generations of Americans who have grown up in a consumer culture whose public education system has told them that the point of their educations is to grow up and get a job so they have money to spend on useless shit.

When the majority of signifiers of success and glory that we present to kids are based on things don’t require excellence (Ms. Spears and Mr. Bieber, anyone?), how could we suddenly expect excellence to suddenly matter to them?  When we worship people for being beautiful and rich, not skilled and productive, why would anyone aim to be anything but beautiful and rich? Why would anyone think an education is worth anything more than the salary it puts back in their pockets?

Expensive education is laughable when the national cultural ethos revolves around Kim Karadshian and Snookie (who, unlike me, is a New York Times Bestselling Author).

Gregorian probably could have chosen a better phrase than the “ups and downs” of living. It’s a bit gee-whiz for talking about the Stuff Of Life. But that’s what’s coming to a head here. College has become an easy Wizard to stand up to, but we should be a hell of a lot more concerned with the directionless values and lever-pulling that’s going on behind the scenes that’s making us think that way.

The aftermath of dismissing an exploratory, art and literature filled education is not only going to hit each one of us in the wallet when our economy can’t keep up in global competition, but it’s also going to continue to hit us where it matters more, in the head and the heart.

In rallying about the uselessness of true education we forget why To Kill a Mockinbird is as relevant now as it was sixty years ago. We argue that the Disney Concert Hall is as important as a storage facility–never mind Ghery’s exterior. We tell Sydney Poitier to stick it and Sally Mann to hang up the camera. We tell Steve Jobs that Apple could be ugly and get along just fine. We tell 826 Valencia not to bother teaching urban youth to write creatively and Art Basel Miami to shut its doors.

We tell women to stay home.

We tell children to be seen and not heard.

Instead of lambasting someone for thinking that higher level education is about preparation for living, maybe we should shut our big traps for a second and consider that maybe it is.

Question is: what are we going to do about it?

(…or, Why The Drive-Through Habit Portends Terrible Critical Thinking)

Since I teach high school students all over the United States, it’s pretty noticeable when they’re uniformly unfamiliar with something. For almost ten years I’ve been explaining to students from Boca to Toronto to Palm Springs the same term. I mean, every time it comes up I’m thinking, “Well, here we go again.”

I’ve been kvetching about this in my head for a good decade, and finally this week I figured I should share with the rest of you. No time like the present! After all, many of the students I teach come from [insert trumpet aire here] The Finest High Schools in the United States. If they don’t know something, it’s because we’re not teaching them (…and I mean you and me and the rest of culture, not Mrs. Samuels down in the English department). These kids are like little litmus tests for our collective ability to think, and, friend, let me tell you: it ain’t looking good out there.The words that stump ‘em, over and over? “Mutually exclusive.” You may be surprised at how few of them can explain mutual exclusivity at its most basic: you cannot have one thing if you have the other.

While the concept pops up in a reading comprehension section on the SAT, mutual exclusivity isn’t a literary term. It’s a key ingredient of critical thinking, and in our culture we just love to pretend it exists where it doesn’t and ignore its presence in other situations.

Why? Because, counter-intuitively, ignoring things that really have to be mutually exclusive can make it much easier to form an opinion about an issue and stick to it, and, as you  may have noticed, we’re far more into our opinions than our thinking. Ignoring mutually exclusive parts of a problem is a way to be mentally lazy, the downside of which is pretty bleak; not only are we having stupid arguments, but we’re not collectively getting anywhere anymore (government shutdown threats, anyone?) and we’re not equipping our kids with problem solving skills, either.

I thought I might draw up a little case study of this is in action.

The Debate over Nationalized Healthcare

If there’s one thing we’ve heard an awful lot of yammering about since the Clinton administration it’s the healthcare situation in the United States—and rightly so. I mean, this is a huge issue. Oddly enough, though, I have yet to see an article on the cover of Time or Newsweek called “Choose One: The Right to Consume Unlimited McRibs or The Right to Unlimited Healthcare.”
Really, that’s the heart of the healthcare debate: two mutually exclusive behaviors.

Michael Pollan wrote a great Op-Ed in the NY Times a few years ago called Big Food vs. Big Insurance, in which he points out that because of our obesity and smoking,

three-quarters of health care spending now goes to treat ‘preventable chronic diseases’. [emphasis mine]

According to the Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease,

Heart disease, the number one cause of death in the United States and 17 percent of U.S. health spending, is estimated to affect 40 percent of U.S. adults or 116 million people…

It’s pretty common sense that a group of people cannot eat unlimited fast food, consume untold quantities of saturated fat and salt, smoke cigarettes, and hope to maintain high-quality affordable health care for anyone, even for people who got sick through no fault of their own, like those with lupus, cancer, or MS. We can either: A) subsist on fat, salt, smoke, and TV or B) expect unlimited affordable healthcare for all in times of illness and disease.

However, when’s the last time you heard people arguing about government healthcare spending and heard any of this come up? Ignoring mutual exclusivity keeps the issue muddy–and safe. Common sense is a pain in the butt! It’s much easier to quote rules and ethics— e.g. It’s unconstitutional to force citizens to purchase things or It’s unethical to let someone die of ovarian cancer because she didn’t have access to screening—than to acknowledge a fundamental divide at the top of the argument.

Our sloppy thinking actually affects our ability to come to clear, reasonable conclusions. Obviously.

A focus on the mutually exclusive–”we have to pick one or the other and work from there”– throws a monkey wrench in our “I have the right to do whatever I want” mentality and disrupts our penchant for black-and-white, pick-a-side decision-making. Acknowledging mutual exclusivity in the healthcare debate makes the conversation more nuanced (hate to acknowledge that the drive-through lifestyle actually helps funnels money away from cancer research, you know?) and leaves the onus of responsibility directly on our own shoulders, so we scrap it.

We’re doing this all over the place.

By ignoring the 900 pound gorilla in the debate–those things we have to choose between–we’re modeling really shoddy thinking for the next generation—the generation that will ultimately be making decisions about our own welfare and carving out our society’s place in the global community.

At this rate it’s difficult to say that what they’ll be doing is “making decisions” if they’re unfamiliar with the most basic of critical thinking skills. It’ll probably be more like throwing ideas up against the wall in the hope that something sticks. They’ll be lacking strategery, if you get my drift.

If we teach them to be just like us—lazy thinkers–we can only expect that they’ll return the favor with poorly explored decisions in the future.

Funny how stuff jumps out at you right when you need it…

This week I’ve been reading Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein, the biography of Pulitzer Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein. If you’re a follower of my Artist Series of interviews, I’m sure this comes as no surprise: I like to be all up in the metaphorical grills of incredible creators and artists and, since Ms. Wasserstein is no longer with us, this is as close as I can get for now.

Warning: this is not an essay on why it’s so wonderful that Wendy won the Pulitzer.

To catch you up to speed, Wendy grew up in New York—went to Ethical Culture and graduated after a rather academically tumultuous experience at Mount Holyoke. She got into writing plays while at MHC, returned to New York, enrolled at City College’s inaugural creative writing program and studied with the Joseph Heller (the genius behind one of my favorite books, Catch-22).

Heller himself wrote her recommendation for her masters program at Yale, and she attended Yale while Christopher Durang, Sigourney Weaver, and none other than Meryl-freakin-Streep were there. Sounds incredible, right?

If this happened to me I’d have “J. Heller loves me” tattooed on my forehead, which is to say I can only imagine that when Joseph Heller writes your recommendation that you have a sense that you’re going in the right direction.

For Wendy, Yale was a disaster. The dean loathed her work–he went so far as to tell her it was a mistake to have admitted her. The major presentation of her work was miscast and bombed. She didn’t get one stinking award at graduation. In fact, according to Salamon, the dean didn’t even mention her existence when he wrote a memoir about his years at the school.

Shortly after graduation she wrote a girlfriend a note,

Here I am [at my mother’s], a graduate of Mount Holyoke, City College and Yale and considering a career in Frozen Yogurt.

She continues to kid, and then she says it:

Also, Ruthie, in truth I don’t think I’m that good, and I guess after these years of educational pursuits I’m far more critical. [p 137]

Oh, did that ever feel good to find! Here she was, thirteen years away from the most prestigious prize in play writing, and she thought she sucked! In fact, because she’d been so well educated, she kinda knew she did.

What a relief!

We never hear stories about how Thomas Edison felt like he was a lousy light bulb inventor. We just hear that he slogged on with a happy-shmappy smile through something like ten thousand iterations until he hit the light bulb jackpot. It’s so misleading! Who the hell can be that rah-rah all the time?

The beautiful thing here, though, is that even though Wendy thought she wasn’t very good, she stuck it out. She knew she had something and she kept slogging through.

She didn’t exult in her failure. She hated it. Frankly, to read about it, it’s all very nauseating. She was not the Steve Jobs of the theater. She was someone who, albeit jokingly, thought, maybe I need to scrap this whole play thing and get into soft serve.

Since I’m not dead, I’m not interested in publicizing my own hemming and hawing and sense of inadequacies, but I will tell you that I’ve considered the ol’ frozen yogurt franchise more than once over the past few years. The great news is, I can think I’m not that good and still keep going.

Every day seems like one giant face palm lately, but I can still mutter, “See you from the prize podium in 2024.”

Maybe you’ll be up there with me?

This summer I’ve been reading The Corrections by one of the great writers of our time, Jonathan Franzen, so I was particularly anxious to read an excerpt from his commencement address at Kenyon College this spring, which I found in The Week.

I’ve been hanging on to the following thoughts of his for a while and had originally intended to use them as part of a larger piece on authenticity and publicity, but I felt like they couldn’t be more poignant as everyone waits for what Mashable essentially dubbed the biggest rollout on Facebook since Facebook itself.

Franzen:

…since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors…

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.

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If you use the web with regularity, which you probably do, you’ve likely developed fluency in Ad Hoc Searchese, that loose, disjointed language we all use to tease out search results that suit our needs. Whether you’re searching for restaurant vegan Upper West Side brunch or cancer treatment homeopathy stage 3, your use of minced up English is ubiquitous.

The practice is born of necessity: even with your supposedly refined search phrase, you’ll probably end up searching more than once for the same information. Think about how often you refine or rephrase your queries when your search results are way off base. The struggle to find great search results echoes one of the most challenging aspects of learning in any arena: the effort to precisely describe that which you do not already know.

Think about it. At this point, search engines can really only offer query results if you’ve perfectly described for the engine what it is you don’t know. I had a conversation this summer with the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz, about education, intelligence, and search’s Big Brother hand in it all.

“…The key challenge of search is that it doesn’t understand language all that well. It’s a really hard problem to solve: it’s semantics. We’re trying to give machines the ability to understand all the colloquialisms and  idioms that we use—the different ways that we connect words and objects together—so that [those machines] can begin to understand and have those kinds of conversations with us.

Today, the machine is all based on math. If you punch in ‘cognitive neuroscience,’ you’ll get a bunch of results, but those results will [be based on] the simple math of how many times other words appear in the context of those other two words. So, there’s not a lot of ‘human’ behind those results. “

If you’re not already considering the significance of this, it’s time to start. Why? Search engines have become the de facto libraries of our age and largely drive our self-education. It’s not the way we used to learn, and the good news is that it won’t always be like this. We’re in a time of transition, and it’s imperative that we understand the nature of the transition so that we can move into the next phase of search without falling apart as learners in the meantime.

Any child of the ’80s or earlier probably recalls a class trip to the school library during which the librarian delivered a crash course on how to use the card catalogue. The catalogue really only offered three ways to search for books: title, author, and topic. For today’s students, though, the web is a cross-referenced card catalogue of the world—and it’s cross-referenced by every word in the language. There’s very little in the way of a definitive starting place for research; using the internet for information and education isn’t a title, author, topic practice.

As it turns out, your pidgin search queries will eventually become a thing of the past: search engines are working to offer a more natural, holistic approach to user’s information acquisition. Lessons on creating long tail search terms will (happily) become obsolete; the introduction to research as we know it will become a thing of the past.

Is Easier Search Better Search?

Sure, it’ll be easier, and easier is nice, but there’s much more to future search than ease. This more holistic, semantically driven search engine also means much broader access to information that’s both deeply meaningful and likely to promote consideration and further exploration. Instead of the frenetic experience of continually rephrasing search terms and hoping to find relevant facts, search is going to be bent on delivering ideas and solutions. In essence, the very same search that’s been accused of making us stupid [see The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains] may actually begin to help make us smarter—and wiser.

“For those who have a hunger for wisdom…[this holistic, semantics-driven] search can help. In order to make a good decision you have to have as many facts or as many viewpoints as possible. You have to be able to look at multiple viewpoints, rationalize them, [and] maybe have some cognitive dissonance as you can’t quite make sense of these two things…but at least you understand the choice you’ve made,” says Weitz.

As an example, Weitz offers a hypothetical story about a controversial issue, like deforestation or extinction. A holistic search engine, like those engines currently in development, will be able to find those outlier pieces of information that are relevant to our decision-making—like an article that holds a linchpin piece of information about rebuilding habitats—and it will bring that article to the querier’s attention no matter how inconsequential or repetitious the rest of the article is. Today’s search engines would leave that article in the dust, but in a few years that article will show up in results because it’s truly relevant.

If you’re searching with current technology,

“…your actually finding that little tiny piece of data that’s only mentioned in, maybe, one in a thousand articles is unlikely, whereas a search engine, [as it begins to] make these correlations and build these bridges between pieces of information, could begin to expose that to you. The magic of search in helping people get smarter or contributing to their wisdom is that it can begin to expose things and bubble things up that you wouldn’t necessarily have found otherwise,” said Weitz.

Still, to anyone interested in promoting critical thinking, removing the need to describe what one doesn’t know—potentially eliminating the need for deductive, Socratic inquiry—can be disarming. It’s the funny, beneficial underbelly of our ad hoc search language: it makes us work to find information. It compels–forces, even–to assess what we know and what we don’t know. In fact, using crummy search in its current form is probably good mental exercise

According to Weitz, in the coming years search will become so integral to our daily lives that we won’t even be saying “search” anymore.

“Remember how we used to have to “dial up” to the web to ‘get on’?” he quips. “Now you’re always on the web. It’s just what you do… and the same thing will happen with search. You’re always kind of doing it, whether you know it or not.”

So if the search engine is going to become so effortlessly incorporated into our lives and so semantically driven that it’s actually synthesizing ideas for us, where will we come in? What does this mean for thinking and teaching others to think?

“I think, for teachers, there will be less instruction around how to create a proper Boolean query…” says Weitz. Future searches will, “be much more of a ‘speak to it as you’d speak to anybody else’” experience for the searcher. “I think what’s going to become incredibly important in search for kids is not so much the act of searching–it’s  knowing what to do with the results once you get them.”

For the first time, you really will have information right at your fingertips—cohesive, connected, meaningful information. There won’t be anything standing between anyone with an internet connection and virtually anything he or she wants to know. Preparing students for that reality—a web experience that can serve to make them smarter—is the task at hand.

“You probably do hundreds of searches within a given week– you get all these different results, and [it’s most important to] actually know how to capture the ones that are most relevant and most interesting to you. What do you do with them? How do you store them? How do you tag them? How do you curate them? How do you link them to something else you saw previously to contribute to a larger understanding of a topic?

“Critical thinking… simply becomes more important as you have to work less hard to find data and services on the web. That’s, to me, probably the  most important thing teachers can teach six year olds right now. I know with my six year old, I’m teaching her that every single day.”