Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance- Angela Duckworth
/Grit is on the Education Booklist. Click here to buy the book.
The following is in response to Angela’s desire to know what Geoffrey Canada thought was the best way to dig kids out of poverty.
Geoff Canada : “I’ll tell you straight. I’m a father of four. I’ve watched many, many kids who were not my own grow up. I may not have the random-assignment, double-blind studies to prove it, but I can tell you what poor kids need. They need all the things you and I give our own children. What poor kids need is a lot. But you can sum it up by saying that what they need is a decent childhood.”
Here is a TED talk given by Geoff, which is mentioned in the book.
Why, why, why does our education system look so similar to the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now -- and it's because we're clinging to a business model that clearly doesn't work.
Click here to buy Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
21 Lessons for the 21st Century
/The Arrogance of Being Right Magnifies the Risk of Being Wrong
/“Blind certainty- a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
The point here, is that I think this is one part of what, ‘teaching me how to think,’ is really supposed to mean.
To be just a little less arrogant, to have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties.
Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.”
- David Foster
Commencement Speech to Kenyon College class of 2005 written by David Foster Wallace
Question Your Assumptions
/Beau Lotto says, "...your brain only ever makes small steps in its ideas. So whenever you’re in a moment it can only actually shift itself to the next most-likely possible. And the next most likely possible is determined by its assumptions. We call it the space of possibility. You can’t do just anything. Some things are just impossible for you in terms of your perception or in terms of your conception of the world. What's possible is based on your history. So what that means is, where does that leave us with creativity, which we have this concept that you’re linking two things that are very far apart? But if the brain never does big jumps, what’s really happening? And the idea is that, for the person being creative, all they’re doing is making a small step to the next most likely possibility based on their assumptions. But when someone on the outside sees them doing that they think, 'Wow, how did they put those two things that are far apart together?' And the reason why it seems that way is because for the observer they are far apart, they have a different space of possibility. And in their space of possibility they exist way over here. So creativity in this sense is only creative from the outside, not from the inside. For the person being creative they’re making a logical next step. The difference is that their space of possibility is different. They have different assumptions, different biases. In fact they might have a more complex space of possibility, because they have more complex biases and assumptions. Maybe they had a more open attitude to when they experienced other cultures, et cetera, and they assimilated more complex assumptions. So they have more directions in which they can move within their space of possibility. So we interpret that as them being creative by linking things that are far apart. But, in fact, it’s a logical process of making small steps, changing your space of possibility by identifying and then questioning your assumptions."
It is great to have the intention of helping people, but simply having the intention doesn't make the following action correct. We always need to carefully analyze whether our actions are accomplishing what we intend, and we must always ask ourselves if there is a better solution we are not seeing. It will likely take many steps and many failures before we get to the desired creative leap, but we must always scrutinize what we think is right, even those solutions which seem so obvious on the front.
Food Education in School
/Jamie Oliver's wish is for "a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity."
8:32: "What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK?"
8:53 "School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually -- have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances."
12:00 "We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period."
16:23 "Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah?"
16:47 "Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills."
19:15 "There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education -- there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well."
Food Directly Affects Education
/This is a great talk highlighting why we should care about how food affects children. Sam Kass says, "Food is that place where our collective efforts can have the greatest impact." However, good intentions alone don't decide the effectiveness of our responding actions.
Where do we go from here? How do we ensure all children have the best food possible?
Steven Pinker's questions regarding consciousness
/Steven Pinker raised these questions on consciousness in How The Mind Works:
“If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
What if we took that program and trained a large number of people say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousness of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and lighthearted?
Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure you might label grass a ‘green’ and tomatoes as ‘red,’ just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is ‘no on home’ who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of our brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?”
Changing the World
/Making the world a better place depends on understanding the constant struggle each of us must go through to answer: who am I? why am I here? and what should I do? To make the most amount of positive change today means helping the most amount of people actualize their full potential by building the ability to effectively engage in this struggle. Although every person has the opportunity to maximize their potential, we must create a world that functions to make self-actualization the path of least resistance for everyone. The most effective, efficient, and positive change the world needs today will come from expanding the collective potential of humanity.
“Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. Or risking oversimplification, individual selection promoted sin, while group selection promoted virtue. So it came to pass that humans are forever conflicted by their prehistory of multilevel selection. They are suspended in unstable and constantly changing positions between the two extreme forces that created us.”
Learning more about your own unique internal conflict and how to live with it is the start towards becoming the best you are capable of becoming. As Josh Waitzkins puts it in The Art of Learning, “those who excel are those who maximize each moment’s creative potential.” Present awareness is the foundation for strengthening one’s knowledge of the subtle nuances of the internal state and gaining the confidence to positively influence the world, it is the means by which people begin to understand their limits and how to go beyond them. Leading people toward becoming the best they are capable of becoming begins by understanding the unique combination of forces and environmental circumstances that will most likely lead to the strengthening of a system-for each unique individual-which affords them the desire to actualize their full potential and the opportunity to take the path which will ultimately lead to that outcome.
How do people figure out what is the right action for them in each moment (is it always a conscious process, are we absent of free will, or is it a mixture of both?) It seems to me that we only have the ability to set intentions and, over time, as we become masters of setting intentions and attending to how they affect our experience moment to moment we begin to affect the structures in our brain-its wiring-such that our actions moment to moment eventually become those we ultimately intended. I don’t know what the meaning of existence is so I don’t know its implications for how people should live, but so far it seems purpose isn’t found in the meaning but rather in the process of searching for it, of engaging in the internal struggle common to every person, and of eventually overcoming ourselves to experience a momentary glimpse of truth. I’m led to believe that to make the world a better place we must strive to help more people fulfill their full potential so they have the best resources to engage in this struggle, and eventually after working very hard more people will be able to direct their attention and energies on actions that lead to self-growth and benefit for the whole world.
A lot of people are talking about making the world a better place without fully recognizing the uncertainty behind what that actually means, which isn’t surprising because a lot of difficult questions must be addressed-some that may even be unanswerable. But the first step to change is recognizing there’s a problem in the first place, and people all over the world are recognizing that the collective capabilities available in the world are not matched by the benefits people are actually receiving. The only way we are going to change the world is by doing it together, and the first step to ensuring change goes down the most effective and moral path is making sure every person has the ability to function at the full capacity naturally granted to them.
In an upcoming post, Food and Education, the institutions hurting human potentiality the most will be analyzed to shine light on fundamental questions that must be addressed when trying to implement any change. To receive an update when this post comes out please subscribe below.
Questions addressed in this post:
“Success is peace of mind which a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”