Glue

I've been thinking about the MIT football team. 

That's not completely true...I've been thinking about education in general. 

I have grandchildren old enough to be looking at colleges. 

I'm seeing this as not my problem and, quite honestly, glad of it. We live in a hard world for young people looking to make their way in the world, but it's been that way for quite a while. I imagine a thousand years ago when if your father was a blacksmith or a farmer you knew at an early age your likely career path. If you were a young woman the plan would be to get married, start having babies, and probably die in childbirth by the time you were thirty or so. Not that attractive, but much less uncertainty.  

I really like not giving advice on possible careers. For one thing, we've spent the last hundred years or so lying to young people. We've told them that good grade, straight A grades, were the key to success. And, that is sort of true, if you're thinking about getting into an elite school. But there's two interesting things about that. A hundred years ago you didn't need to have great grades to get into Harvard or Yale – you just needed to have rich, socially acceptable parents. James Conant, who was president of Harvard for twenty years thought that was a mistake. If you look at history, putting the richest person in charge was almost always a mistake. Just because your great-granddaddy struck oil doesn't make you leadership material. Mr. Conant tried to set things up so the children of rich people could still get in, (which meant he didn't get fired), but he also tried to admit people who'd gotten really good grades in high school. 

Here's the problem. Really good grades in high school don't have much to do with success in life. Study after study shows that a great ACT score has very little to do with success. It turns out that success in school is based on individual achievement, but success in LIFE is how well you work as part of a team.  

What's sort of funny is that this is no secret. I don't know if it's still the case, but for a while MIT required all their students to be part of an intermural sport, because they'd discovered that many of the young geniuses they were admitting were horrible at working with other people, and working with other people is a requirement for most of us. Usually, the most important member of a team is the person who makes sure everyone gets heard. 

I'm not mocking the need for smart people to take challenging classes. We need nuclear physicists, computer scientists and brain surgeons, but my opinion is that the people who yearn to do those jobs are going to do okay no matter what. We should probably grade more on curiosity and compassion than on trigonometry. I think the highest paid profession in the country should be teachers, and if you're paying for the impact on society, I think a pre-school teacher should make more than a college professor. 

I'm not confident any of these changes will be made. The people the current system put in charge are doing okay, and if history teaches us anything it teaches us that the rich, powerful, and influential know how to take care of themselves. 

Even when we know better. 

Copyright 2024 Brent Olson