Tag Archives: Learning

The Smartest Kids in the World – Amanda Ripley

“PISA revealed what should have been obvious but was not: that spending on education did not make kids smarter. Everything — everything — depended on what teachers, parents, and students did with those investments.”

In Korea, one big test at the end of school decides everything: an extreme meritocracy in school creates what is almost a caste system for adults with your entire future decided by how you did on the exam. In Finland, the stress is lower for students but higher for teachers, with only 8 universities giving degrees in teaching, and all of them as competitive as MIT to get into. Both countries, however, are top performers on the international PISA tests, a method of comparing educational achievement across countries, dramatically outscoring the US and others.

The Smartest Kids in the World takes the PISA test as a way of finding out which countries are doing well, and then tries to understand what has led to their success. It’s a whirlwind tour of the high school experience in Korea, Finland, and Poland, three top achievers, and the reforms that got them that way.

Ripley’s bottom line, though she doesn’t say it quite this way, is that reforming education isn’t magic or even surprising. It means agreeing on common goals for the system, training teachers well, making the subject matter rigorous and not being afraid to fail students if they don’t learn it, and above all keeping expectations for students and teachers high. Not rocket science, but it’s amazing how hard the special interest groups in the US can make it.

Lots of things go into a great educational system, but Ripley makes some profound criticisms of the American model. It’s harder to retain varsity athlete status in the US, for example, than to get into teacher’s college, and the average SAT score of teachers is lower than the national average. Somehow, she argues, America has convinced itself that teachers don’t need to be smart, comfortable with their subject, or even have studied their subject. Based on international comparisons, that isn’t true.

It’s a great book. It’s well written, it’s engaging, it strikes a nice balance between storytelling and analysis that makes it an easy read, and it says something important. It’s a little short on data or real evidence, but because tests making international comparisons possible are relatively new, and so that’s not really a surprise. For anyone wanting to think about education and how the system should work, it’s a quick and interesting read.

Excellent Sheep – William Deresiewicz

“The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but are also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose…great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”

“Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to.”

“People go to monasteries to find out why they have come, and college ought to be the same.”

Elite colleges tell their students how special they are, how they were picked from an enormous pool of possible applicants and showed themselves better than all the rest. In 1957, the Dean of Yale took a rather different view: welcoming the new students, he told them how large a pool of applicants they’d had that year, and pointed out that had they rejected every student in the room, they could still have had a great incoming class. Each student, he argued, was responsible for showing why they deserved to be accepted. The modern version has rather a different emphasis.

In recent years, between a third and a half of graduates of elite US colleges with a job head to finance or consulting. In contrast to the popularity of those fields, whole areas have disappeared: clergy, military, teaching, electoral politics, even academia to a lesser extent. Excellent Sheep worries that this stems from the warped perspective promoted by these colleges, that in telling the students endlessly that they are the elite and the special, they rule out whole worlds of possibility by implying they are a waste of a fancy education. Schools, Deresiewicz argues, are complicit in this because they like the fat donations they receive from graduates in consulting or finance, far more than they receive from a happier but poorer graduate who ends up as a minister or teacher.

Where the book suffers is when it turns to broader societal implications. The author’s background is in English, and though that should never be a bar to writing anything, in this case it betrays him a little when he attempts to look at issues of policy, society, and statistics. He also doesn’t really have any insight into structural solutions: his advice to students to go to a second tier school is all very well, but hardly scalable.

The value of such books though is what they make the reader think, rather than just what the author says. Reflecting on my own experience, I’ve largely been spared the lost or aimless feeling Excellent Sheep describes, despite being lucky enough to attend an elite college. My advantage, I think, is no surprise to readers of the blog: that I read widely. Any student seeking to find a sense of self and wisdom through their education needs to get beyond the bubble of their friends and professors, and reading is a great way to do that, to engage in debate with some of the foremost minds of our species, living and dead. Exposure to such great ideas and new perspectives can ground you, and provide a frame of reference very different from your own.

Deresiewicz also suffers from some of the same blind spots he criticizes elite schools for: he makes no effort to find out what students from top state schools do, for example, appearing to forget that schools other than the Ivy Leagues even exist as anything other than an abstraction. Nevertheless, Excellent Sheep’s opening sections are interesting, persuasive, and well-written. For those alone, the book is worth reading, and I recommend it. If the second half falls a bit short, that’s not the end of the world. As a book that makes you consider your own education – or lack thereof – it’s well worth it.

Deceit and Self Deception – Robert Trivers

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – The Brothers Karamazov

One of a number of debates that rages among biologists, social scientists, and various other disciplines is the role of evolutionary theory in explaining behaviour. Almost everyone respects the power of evolutionary theory to describe humanity, but the trick lies in using it properly. Evolutionary biologists like Trivers or Steven Pinker use it widely, and point out that many of the criticisms of their work seem to consist of dislike of the conclusions, not critical argument. There may or may not be difference between the sexes, they say, but disapproving of them doesn’t make them nonexistent.

More sensible critics, however, have a legitimate source of concern. Choose any behaviour, and a reasonable sounding justification from evolution can be concocted to explain it. Of course, such explanations can’t be tested, and it’s usually pretty easy to come up with multiple, conflicting explanations of any such behaviour. Given that, evolutionary explanations may be cute and fun, but it’s not clear they’re much use for anything.

In Deceit, Trivers makes a fairly simple argument: that we have evolved to deceive ourselves, and that such self-deception helps us deceive others and improve our lives. The rest of the book is stories and anecdotes illustrating that point, from the animal kingdom, from politics, and from human behaviour. In West Africa, for example, there are five species of poisonous butterflies. One species has evolved to mimic them: all of them. The mimetic females lay five different kinds of eggs, each of which will mimic a different poisonous species. That way, instead of doubling the frequency of a single poisonous species and making it worthwhile for birds to learn to tell the difference, in any given forest the frequency of each mimic matches the frequency of the model. Some caterpillars, in contrast, curl up like ant larvae and wait to be taken in the nest and fed: once there, they emit the scent of newborn queens, to ensure they get more food than the real ant larvae.

The book is entertaining and has some engaging anecdotes, but you already know the main thesis: it comes as no surprise to anyone who reads fiction that we deceive ourselves, given the essential role it plays in much great literature. If you’d like a deeper look, though, you can get the book here.

Taking the Path of Zen – Robert Aitken

“You will have learned how to begin, at any rate, the task of keeping yourself undivided, for it is thinking of something other than the matter at hand that separates us from reality and dissipates our energies.”

How should we meditate, if indeed we want to meditate? Many attempt a rigorous focus on their breathing, or on some mantra. Though this isn’t bad, in The Path of Zen Aitken argues it’s problematic. True meditation, he suggests, is not just about focus: that implies there are two things involved, you and the thing you are focusing on. Instead, he believes meditation is about becoming one with something, a feeling of unity with your breathing comparable to reading a great book where you lose all track of time or space. Posture, hand positions, how to count; these are useful tools to achieve meditation, but are not the point.

If this sounds a lot like the modern concept of Flow, I’d agree completely, and actually there’s a lot in this book, one of the classic introductory books on Zen, that are echoed by modern themes. The idea of requiring deliberate practice to get good at something, for example, Aitken lists as one of the three concerns of the Zen student: the other two are that being alive is an important responsibility, and that we have little time to fulfill that responsibility. Even Obama’s self-imposed routine and restriction to only blue or gray suits has a Zen correspondence, as Aitken suggests minimizing the decisions you make in life in order to maximize the energy and self you can put in any given activity.

Zen can often be portrayed as an abstract, gnomic art, filled with riddles. To some extent this is fair; students are often expected to interpret the Koans, brief parables that demonstrate some fundamental principle but often seem enigmatic or trivial at first. At heart, however, Zen focuses on meditation, which it calls Zazen, as a way to focus the mind and achieve self-mastery. Aitken’s book, meant to capture the first few weeks of a retreat at a monastery for a new student, does an admirable job presenting the information accessibly and appealingly. It won’t turn you into a Zen master, but it might help you put a foot on the path.

You can get a copy here (or in the UK or Canada) – or just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list to keep up to date with subtly illuminating reviews!

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen R. Covey

In part one of what will be a week of self-improvement books, we turn to a classic: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Published in 1989, it has sold 15 million copies in 38 languages, a serious bestseller. Covey has been tremendously influential, going so far as to having been invited by Clinton to Camp David for a consult.

With all that said and despite an indirect Clinton endorsement, a lot of it seems old hat. One thing I found particular interesting (as well as classical – the Stoics would have been proud): a focus on principles as a way to guide and shape our lives, instead of just techniques or skills.

Covey surveyed the past 200 years of self-improvement literature, and he points out that older self-improvement literature focused on character; readers should aim to improve their courage, humility, temperance, etc. More recently the literature has turned to personality, arguing people should improve their image and adopt a positive attitude. Covey rightly points out the flaw: if you want to be trusted, the correct method is to become trustworthy. Adopting a positive attitude or improving your image can only work for so long before you are found out. I think it’s a point worth thinking about: in the end, quick fixes of modifying appearances or adopting superficial behaviours isn’t the way to self-improvement. Improving yourself is.

Covey also came up with the phrase abundance mentality: if you believe there are enough resources to share with others, you can find win-win solutions, while if you believe only in zero-sum games, you feel threatened by the success of others, instead of enjoying it. Rachman (author of Zero-Sum Game, on the concept of win-win in international relations) would definitely agree.

If you’re interested, by the way, the 7 habits are to be proactive; begin with the end in mind; put first things first; think win-win; seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergize; and sharpen the saw.

Later this week we’ll talk about a more modern self-help book; how to be a productivity ninja!

The Blank Slate 2 – Steven Pinker

Having reviewed The Blank Slate earlier this week, I’d thought I’d share a few choice quotes.

On the influence of genetics:

“Familiar categories of behaviour – marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on – certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.”

“When it comes to explaining human thought and behavior, the possibility that heredity plays any role at all still has the power to shock. To acknowledge human nature, many think, is to endorse racism, sexism, war, greed, genocide, nihilism, reactionary politics, and neglect of children and the disadvantaged. Any claim that the mind has an innate organization strikes people not as a hypothesis that might be incorrect but as a thought it is immoral to think.”

“‘Nature is a hanging judge,’ goes an old saying. Many tragedies come from our physical and cognitive makeup. Our bodies are extraordinarily improbable arrangements of matter, with many ways for things to go wrong and only a few ways for things to go right. We are certain to die, and smart enough to know it. Our minds are adapted to a world that no longer exists, prone to misunderstandings correctable only by arduous education, and condemned to perplexity about the deepest questions we can ascertain.”

On the modern emphasis on culture:

“Much of what is today called “social criticism” consists of members of the upper classes denouncing the tastes of the lower classes (bawdy entertainment, fast food, plentiful consumer goods) while considering themselves egalitarians.”

“The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people’s stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.”

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

“More than anything else, the self represents the hierarchy of goals that we have built up, bit by bit, over the years.”

A personal injury lawyer attends a speech opening a new modern art sculpture in Chicago. While most of the audience dozes, he appears to follow the speech with rapt attention, his lips moving rapidly. When a companion asks him why after the speech, he admits to calculating the total personal injury claims that will arise from children climbing the statue. Is this lawyer lucky, able to transform everything he sees into something relevant to his own life and skills and so enjoy it? Or unlucky, deprived of the opportunity to grow by focusing only on what he already knows (and also somewhat morbid)?

I started Flow with some trepidation. The concept of flow is impressively widely referenced, but I worried that trying to stretch a simple idea into a full book might be trying to make money from it without adding value. Flow, by the way, is the happiness and energy we get when are absorbed in activities that match our skills to difficulty (see above graph). To be truly happy, by this logic, we need lifelong learning to keep upping the difficulty of our activities: passively watching TV cannot bring happiness. Whether what we do is history, philosophy, mountain climbing, or welding, we can find flow in it if we are careful to set goals, watch for feedback, and immerse ourselves in it.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, as the book focuses on what lessons the concept of flow can give us for how to optimally experience life. Most of that, of course, is still fairly obvious (try to get flow in your own activities!), but the author has some excellent off the cuff remarks. He argues, for example, that one of the reasons young people struggle today is that they no longer have challenges or responsibilities commensurate with their abilities: unable to reach flow through schoolwork, they turn to alternate sources of enjoyment, like delinquency or drugs. He worries that the change in professions from hunting/gathering to farming to industrial has seen a steady decline in the simplicity of finding flow in one’s work, as feedback and goals become abstract and delayed in time (Shop Class as Soulcraft would agree). Similarly, I’m not sure many of us have a ready answer as to whether the personal injury lawyer is lucky or not.

The book is by no means life changing, and a lot of the content is available in other places (I’m looking at you, Marcus Aurelius). Still, it was quick and more engaging than I had expected, and though simple we can probably all use more structure in how we think about finding meaning and pleasure in our work and our leisure.

You can pick up a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just subscribe to the Subtle Illumination email list and work on feeling flow while reading!

Pragmatism – William James

“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”

Pragmatism is a 1907 collection of lectures given by William James, the psychologist and philosopher, on the subject of Pragmatism as a philosophy of life. He positions it as a middle ground between rationalism, a philosophy based on abstract principles, and empiricism, which trusts only observable facts. Pragmatism, he argues, takes the best of both worlds; it believes only what has practical consequences. To take his own words, Pragmatism is to “try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences…If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then then alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”

Having defined his theory, he then applies it widely, to free will, the existence of God, the nature of truth and salvation, and other ideas. God, for example, he argues we should believe in; religion has no practical consequences except to give us hope and happiness, and so by pragmatism it is true (pragmatic truth is only distantly related to matching some sort of concrete external fact). He’s a gifted writer, and clearly brilliant, but the lectures themselves can be somewhat opaque, particularly his discussion on the nature of truth. Still, few of us today, I think, wrestle enough with problems of free will, whether the universe is one or many, or the existence of God. Yet, these are profound questions that occupied our greatest minds for much of history.

Apart from the main thesis, there are also some great tangents. Reflecting on modernity, for example, he worries that:

“The BEING of man may be crushed by its own powers, that his fixed nature as an organism may not prove adequate to stand the strain of the ever increasing tremendous functions, almost divine create functions, which his intellect will more and more enable him to wield. He may drown in his wealth like a child in a bath-tub, who has turned on the water and who cannot turn it off.”

Or on the subject of God;

“I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life. They inhabit our drawing-rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling. They are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So we are tangents to the wider life of things. But, just as many of the dog’s and cat’s ideals coincide with our ideals, and the dogs and cats have daily living proof of this fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own.”

William James is, I think, an underread one of the Wise – plus, his books are free on kindle!

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – Amy Chua

Happy New Year, all! I hope everyone had time to squeeze some food and family into the holiday between all that reading we had to catch up on.

Living life to the fullest is “not about achievement or gratification. It’s about knowing you’ve pushed yourself, body and mind, to the limits of your own potential.” – Lulu Chua (Amy’s daughter)

When this came out a few years ago it was enormously controversial, but I’m afraid I’m a little behind. In brief, it chronicles Chua’s attempts to raise her children with what she sees as Chinese levels of discipline: when her six year old daughter gets tired of practicing piano after only an hour, for example, she threatens that “If the next time’s not PERFECT, I’m going to TAKE ALL YOUR STUFFED ANIMALS AND BURN THEM! [emphasis original]”

Clearly, vast amounts of criticism were directed her way: for some reason, many parents do not approve of forcing your children to practice music so much they gnaw on the piano out of frustration. To my mind, however, reading Tiger Mother in an effort to learn about Chua herself is a waste of time. Chua admits the book is hardly a complete picture, and I’m not sure it’s productive to worry about her relationship with her children. The book is fascinating, though, as a way to provoke your own thinking about parenting.

Chua argues there are two possible styles of parenting, stereotyped as Chinese and Western. Chinese is high discipline, high expectations, while Western focuses on praise and having fun. Since nothing is fun until you’re good at it, she argues, Chinese parents force their children to practice until they’re good. They also have almost unlimited belief in the abilities of their children: if the child fails, therefore, they must not have worked hard enough, and so should be punished. To this difference she traces the difference in outcomes of children.

If my economics side can come out for a moment, my only real complaint is that Chua is clearly a lawyer. The book is only anecdotes: I would have loved even a few statistics. I suspect, for example, that “Chinese” parenting has a vastly higher variance than Western: drive your children that hard, and they either succeed wildly or fail miserably. It would be interesting to see if that’s actually the case in the data.

In the end, I’m sympathetic to the view that Western parents expect too little from their children, and that children might respond well to having more expected of them. Interestingly, for all the criticism lauched her way in the West for her harshness, in China, apparently, it was marked as a how-to book on relaxed Western parenting. The truth, surely, is somewhere in the middle.

You can get your copy here (or in the UK or Canada).

The Economic Naturalist – Robert H Frank

“Mathematical formalism has been an enormously important source of intellectual progress in economics, but it has not proved an effective vehicle for introducing newcomers to our subject.”

The Economic Naturalist is one of the many pop-economics books out there, perhaps the most famous of which is Freakonomics. It’s one of the ones I haven’t read though, so I thought I’d pick it up, and I was pleasantly surprised. Frank used to instruct his students each year to find a seeming puzzle in the world and explain it with economics, the best of which have been collected here. If somewhat basic, it is at least entertaining.

Frank opens by worrying that economics students rarely remember what they are taught: associating economics with math and diagrams, they can’t actually apply it to the real world. Seeing as how this is a current subject of debate in the profession (see the Economist), I can hardly argue. Econ provides basic concepts of considerable value, and if students don’t leave with some understanding of opportunity cost, comparative advantage, etc., then I’m not sure it matters how good they are at calculus.

The entire book, then, is questions asked by his students and answers in response to them, often based on the original essay the student wrote. Questions vary from why drive-through ATMs have braille on them (cheaper not to produce different ATMs for drive-throughs ) to why milk is sold in square containers and pop in round ones (milk requires refrigerated shelf space, and so needs to be packed on shelves as efficiently as possible: pop is carbonated, and round shapes are more solid).

The essays are fun and in some cases enlightening, and are organized around key economic concepts, to illustrate their application in the real world. After the first half or so though, it all gets a bit wearing. To be fair, I suspect that’s because I already know the concepts; for a newcomer in the field, it might be considerably more entertaining. Still, I’m not sure it competes with the like of Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist, or Freakonomics for that matter. An entertaining read, but I think I’d rather read more about economics education directly. For those with less background in economics though, it might be a fun introduction to the field.

You can get a copy here (or in the UK or Canada). Or, just sign up for the Subtle Illumination email list and get social science delivered to your door!