This afternoon I sat in an auditorium at my sister’s high school and watched a live stream of Malcolm Gladwell’s speech to the students going on in the adjacent gymnasium (cool, right?). He spoke mostly of his new book, Outliers, and more specifically about the three “constraints on capitalization,” as he puts it. Capitalization, for him, is the success achieved by someone when presented with an opportunity (he gave the example of a football player from Memphis, who, like many of his friends, had an exceptional skill to play football, but unlike his friends, was just picked in the first round of the NFL draft two weeks ago. If 10 students at his high school were exceptional at football, but only 5 went on to, say, accept football scholarships to colleges, that sample set’s “capitalization rate” would be 50%). The concept of capitalization aside, Malcolm spent a lot of time hammering home his thoughts on education, specifically as it adhered to finding one’s “it” thing, the subject that you truly adore. His research found that people like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, had two things in common. First, they were all born in 1955 and therefore hit Silicon Valley just as the computer revolution was taking off in the mid-70′s. But perhaps more importantly, they all absolutely LOVED computers, so much so in fact, that they spent more than 10,000 hours of true practice with them. These two factors played into his theory of constraints, of which there were three–poverty, “stupidity,” and attitude. Poverty was really a distillation of the broader concept of “opportunity,” people in poverty simply aren’t exposed to as many opportunities (however you define them) as wealthier people. For those four titans, “poverty” was eliminated by their birthdays. The stupidity constraint was trumped by their being pioneers (stupidity usually referred to society inhibiting a person based on some stupid criteria, it is essentially bias). However, the attitude constraint is what interested me most, and those four guys had the perfect attitude: a head-over-heels love affair with technology.
Malcolm also discussed the discrepancy between Asian students and American students on math aptitude tests. In his book, he discovers that the reason for the Asians’ superiority is simply their discipline to spend more time on the subject, apparently excellence in math is simply a function of the amount of time and work you are willing to put into it. That note got me thinking about the American school system, and its true failure at inspiring students to be passionate about something, ANYTHING in the curriculum. With more and more information becoming readily available and fun to consume on the web, students might be able to discover a passion for a particular subject quicker than ever before. What the system should embrace, therefore, is the ability for a student to pursue that subject for which they feel more passionately about to a higher degree, with more time dedicated to that than any other subject. Of course, not every middle or high schooler KNOWS what they love at that point in their life, but some do, and if encouraged, more should. Ultimately, my thoughts were running towards the general idea that our school system needs to be overhauled to embrace Internet learning and collaboration tools, and more progressive approaches to developmental education. The guys over at Union Square Ventures of course already host the extraordinary annual conference, “Hacking Education,” to discuss these very changes (and many more insightful ones), but that’s still a very niche discussion. While the tech community seems to “get it,” its 1) hard to push that thought experiment to the general public, and 2) even harder to propose, pass and integrate a new system through the government. And maybe government isn’t the answer here, and this change needs to happen on the charter or even private school level and work backwards, but whatever the process, it needs to be discussed in a more public forum. One thing’s for certain, if you have the opportunity to see Malcolm Gladwell speak, do it. He’s exceptional.
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