The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [4]
Is this really the best life advice we can give young people? As with “plastics” in The Graduate, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if our advice couldn’t use a bit of updating and refining?
■ DO YOU WANT TO CHASE DEGREES, OR DO YOU WANT TO CHASE SUCCESS?
For people in the industrialized world, middle-class and above, the primary focus of our waking lives between the ages of six and twenty-two is—to a first approximation—grades. To a second approximation, the agenda also includes narrowly defined extracurricular activities, such as sports and music and volunteering, which look good on college applications and entry-level resumes. But if you ask, what is the primary thing parents, teachers, politicians, and society want us to focus on during sixteen years, roughly between the ages of six and twenty-two, the answer is plain and simple: get good grades.
Have you ever stopped to ponder how utterly bizarre this state of affairs is? How in the world did we all get so convinced that academic rigor constituted a prerequisite, necessary, and sufficient training for success in life? How did we all get convinced that this one end merited devoting sixteen of the best years of our lives toward it? That we should spend almost our entire youth—potentially some of the most creative, enthusiastic, energetic, and fun years of our lives—in pursuit of little numbers and letters certifying our academic intelligence?
Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, has pondered this puzzling question a lot. In a video talk in the famous TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) series, entitled “Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity” (which became one of TED.com’s most downloaded talks ever), Sir Ken says: “If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say ‘What’s it for, public education?’ I think you’d have to conclude—if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners—I think you’d have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn’t it? They’re the people who come out the top.... And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn’t hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They’re just a form of life, another form of life.”1
Libertarian critic of our current educational system Charles Murray makes the point another way: “We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a limited number of people.”2
These critics are saying, essentially: training to become a college professor and academic scholar is fine for those who truly wish to do so. But if you’ve already gone through college, you are now the product of a system and cultural norm that holds that, in order to prepare for success in life, you must spend sixteen years of your life essentially training toward an ideal of academic perfection.
If you haven’t noticed already, this is a silly system. It’s silly for a very simple reason. For most fields you’d want to enter—aside from, say, research science—beyond basic levels of academic intelligence, developing additional academic intelligence will have virtually no impact on your life prospects and success. Developing your practical intelligence will have far more impact on the quality and success of your life.
In a core section of his book Outliers: The Story of Success, for example, Malcolm Gladwell argues meticulously that, above a certain IQ (around 120, which is considered “above average/bright,” but not even “moderately gifted”3), additional