Well said. It seems like the entire PhD experience is an exercise in discomfort. But you’re right, without leaving our comfort zones we’ll never get away from the outdated conventions of pedagogy.

Well said. I have felt the same. It is weird that education is one of the few fields that experiences such extreme pressure. If you get a decent job at some local company, nobody is going to say “ha, that’s not a Fortune 100 company”, they’re going to consider the specifics before determining if it is a good job. But when it comes to education, it is common to hear someone dismiss a college outside the top 25 rankings (even if it is a bad fit for you, and the college you chose is perfect).

You internalize this to such a degree that you feel like a failure yourself if you can’t make it. What a toxic system…

Excellent post. I just wanted to touch on the global outreach.

Clearly that is one of the core missions of a university, and is generally a good thing. Especially programs like the one NYU runs to find brilliant talented kids in developing nations and give them full scholarships to study in New York City. But I question the motives of some of those schools building fancy new campuses on the other side of the world.

For example, the ones which build new campuses in the UAE; are they really concerned about helping the cause of educating the world, or is it a good way to bring in a little extra revenue for their main campus? You see the same with some schools and their online programs, which are clearly all about the money. Don’t get me wrong, some schools do a great job and really are doing it to improve access. But some are using these programs to fund their main campus, and that isn’t at all fair to the other students.

I guess I am a bit jaded because traditionally such schools were a product of elitism, and the idea of cultural exceptionalism. If you look at the university system of Saudi Arabia or UAE, they certainly do not need help building exceptional universities. Some of their schools are at the very top the Shanghai Rankings. So what do these new American schools offer besides being able to say “we’re American”?

My parent’s went to such schools in their home countries, it was considered a great honor to be taught by American or British teachers instead of locals – and the idea that said teachers would naturally be better, simply because they’re American / British, smells a bit of colonialism. I mean VCU just opened a campus in Qatar, VCU is the 4-5th best school in Virginia, not even in the top 100 in the US, what does a nation like Qatar, with the incredible Qatar University, gain from hosting VCU of all things?

Fantastic. There seem to be a number of these now.

That’s a great way of putting it. I am not pessimistic with regards to my own class, I hope I can be a positive influence. I am just a little skeptical of the folks who claim they can fix everything. The problems we face will take generations to fix. But as long as teachers like us do our part, we’ll get there.

Thanks. It does get old quickly. It is also a significant problem that the real experts are rarely charismatic enough to put on a “show” like this, or interested enough to try. Richard Feynman being the obvious exception.

The problem is, if we make a show out of it, at some point sensationalism will start to creep in. It can sometimes be useful, especially in tackling a problem, but it also alienates a lot of people. I remember a decent TED talk about antibiotic resistance. It was legitimately frightening (and quite accurate), but I’m sure that someone on the fence would likely dismiss the entire subject as pseudo-scientific hysteria.

In regards to parent advocacy, have you ever heard of the Abecedarian project? I get to see a lot of odd research come through the Biocomplexity Institute, but the most interesting presentation I ever got to witness was by the Drs. Ramey (now at VT Carilion, formerly UNC).

They measured the impact of brain games on developing children (15 months – 5 years). The control group still got a lot of cool stuff like free nutrition and medical care to ensure that these did not confound the study. The test group also got a few hours per weekday of brain games aimed at stimulating development. They also divided up both the control and test groups by educational attainment of the parents (some high school, finished high school, some college, finished college).

I’m going from memory, but if I recall correctly, for the control group, the kids with parents who didn’t finish high school had an mean IQ in the lower 80s. The kids of high school graduates were around 95, the some college parents had kids in the low 100s, and the kids whose parents had degrees had kids with mean IQs of 110. For the test group, all the scores fell between 105-110. The kids of the high school drop-outs saw the greatest improvement (almost 25 points, which is almost two standard deviations). The kids of college graduates saw no change at all. They measured the kids again 30 years later and there was no significant change – the effect seems to be for life. Also, the test group kids had similar outcomes to the control group kids of college graduates in terms of drug-use, graduation rates, career success, obesity, incarceration, etc. In general, the kids of college graduates saw almost no benefit, but the rest had their lives improved to match.

The obvious primary conclusion is that we can severely reduce the disparity of outcomes and greatly improve equality by funding a national pre-school system. But the second conclusion is that at a population level, nurture is more significant than nature. Of course there will be significant variation kid to kid, but the kids born to involved, educated, and well-off parents (with money and time to spend) have a huge advantage over the others (unless we take steps to lift the others up too).

So when Mr. Godin suggests that “great parents leads to great performance in school” is just a myth, I think that is categorically wrong. On the contrary, until we recognize this fact, we cannot properly tackle inequality.