EB.

How the Ivy League Broke America

Read on Nov 16, 2024 | Created on Nov 15, 2024
Article by David Brooks | View Original | Source: The Atlantic
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Note: These are automated summaries imported from my Readwise Reader account.
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Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The Ivy League has created a system that rewards wealth and status, making it harder for students from lower-income families to succeed. This focus on standardized testing and grades has diminished curiosity and exploration in childhood. To reform education, we should prioritize traits like curiosity, social intelligence, and motivation over mere academic performance.

Key Takeaways:

  1. Encourage holistic learning that fosters curiosity and social skills.
  2. Address systemic inequalities in college admissions to support diverse backgrounds.
  3. Redefine merit to include personal qualities beyond academic achievements.

Highlights from Article

What determines a society’s health is not the existence of an elite, but the effectiveness of the elite, and whether the relationship between the elites and everybody else is mutually respectful.

  • Struck me as a powerful line. Also reminds me of Brook’s book on empathy.

Our meritocratic system encourages people to focus narrowly on cognitive tasks, but curiosity demands play and unstructured free time. If you want to understand how curious someone is, look at how they spend their leisure time. In their book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, the venture capitalist Daniel Gross and the economist Tyler Cowen argue that when hiring, you should look for the people who write on the side, or code on the side, just for fun. “If someone truly is creative and inspiring,” they write, “it will show up in how they allocate their spare time.” In job interviews, the authors advise hiring managers to ask, “What are the open tabs on your browser right now?”

  • Amazing interview question (but a little invasive)

In chaotic situations, raw brainpower can be less important than sensitivity of perception. The ancient Greeks had a word, metis, that means having a practiced eye, the ability to synthesize all the different aspects of a situation and discern the flow of events’a kind of agility that enables people to anticipate what will come next. Academic knowledge of the sort measured by the SATs doesn’t confer this ability; inert book learning doesn’t necessarily translate into forecasting how complex situations will play out. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist and political scientist Philip E. Tetlock has found that experts are generally terrible at making predictions about future events. In fact, he’s found that the more prominent the expert, the less accurate their predictions. Tetlock says this is because experts' views are too locked in’they use their knowledge to support false viewpoints. People with agility, by contrast, can switch among mindsets and riff through alternative perspectives until they find the one that best applies to a given situation.

  • Love the term of metis. Also, appreciate the importance of agility (and in my experience, people who crush SATs aren’t always agile in the slightest)

As the education scholar Todd Rose writes in The End of Average, this system is built upon “the paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality.” The whole system says to young people: You should be the same as everyone else, only better. The reality is that there is no single scale we can use to measure human potential, or the capacity for effective leadership. We need an assessment system that prizes the individual over the system, which is what a personal biography and portfolio would give us’at least in a fuller way than a transcript does. The gatekeepers of a more effective meritocracy would ask not just “Should we accept or reject this applicant?” and “Who are the stars?” but also “What is each person great at, and how can we get them into the appropriate role?”A new, broader definition of merit; wider adoption of project-based and similar types of learning; and more comprehensive kinds of assessments’even all of this together gets us only so far. To make the meritocracy better and fairer, we need to combine these measures with a national overhaul of what UCLA’s Joseph Fishkin calls the “opportunity structure,” the intersecting lattice of paths and hurdles that propel people toward one profession or way of life and away from others.Right now, America’s opportunity structure is unitary. To reach commanding heights, you have to get excellent grades in high school, score well on standardized tests, go to college, and, in most cases, get a graduate degree. Along the way, you must navigate the various channels and bottlenecks that steer and constrain you.

All material owns to the authors, of course. If I’m highlighting or writing notes on this, I mostly likely recommend reading the original article, of course.

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