Item #1: The headline in today’s business news reads: “Wake Forest to Drop Standardized Tests in 2009.”
Item #2: A professor at Stanford complains to me recently that “Today’s students are institutionalized grade-making machines.”
Item #3: The person I know with the most money in his bank account does not have a college degree.
Item #3A: His wife has a PhD., he reads like a maniac, and they strongly support one another in every way imaginable.
Item #4: One of the most brilliant and creative people I know enrolled in college at the age of 14 and has never gotten a degree. He describes himself as a ’serial dropout’. There is, it seems, always a lot of self-designed drama accompanying his dropping out. He says, ‘The ritual and circumstance with which I drop out creates far more value for me, in terms of building awareness for my personal brand, and in terms of the lasting relationships I make with the faculty as part of this dropping-out process than any degree possibly could.”
Item #5: In my own wallet’s experience, college costs more than it should, given the big fat endowments some of these places are sitting on. My friend, the GeoRat, who has helped his three children pay for five degrees at Harvard, Duke and Notre Dame, claims that Harvard would barely have to nick the interest on its endowment to subsidize every undergrad’s tuition. And of course, let’s not even get started on the federal government’s “Promote ‘Em or Else” support for public education.
Item #6: We recently conducted a GameChangers workshop at a school that spent $2 million on a parking garage that is one of the worst-designed things I have ever experienced in my life, in any medium, on any scale, for any amount of money. It plays more like a practical joke than a practical structure.
Item #7: By my calculations, active correspondence with a university is seven to ten times slower than active correspondence with the private sector, and twice as slow as the federal government. The United States Office of Obfuscation and Avoidance will get back to you quicker than a tenured professor at Cardigan U.
Item #8: In working with thousands of people, in capacities from horse wrangling to international banking, I have never noticed a direct correlation between a person’s job performance and where or how they got their education. A horse trainer who’s a high school dropout is just as likely to do great work as an Ivy League-educated investment banker is to suck ass.
Item #8A: Along that same career path, I have observed that Brown grads are among the most iconoclastic and artful; and students at the Chicago College of Podiatry (a.k.a. “Tootsie Tech”) are the loudest and funniest.
Item #9: The focus of college administrations is capital endowment; the focus of faculty is tenure then status; the focus of students is social life. Teaching is…ummm…teaching is…uh…sorry I was texting my friend, what was the question again?
Item #9A: My partner, Dr. Virginia Kuhn, Associate Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, is a brilliant teacher, who creates multimedia learning environments for her students across the core disciplines, then encourages them to educate themselves via the realization of their class projects. Her role is one of a guide, a facilitator, mentor — an improvisation coach who establishes objective criteria for her students’ performance. The only thing graded is the portfolio of work.
Item #9B: Our friend, T. H. Culhane, who has degrees in anthropological biology from Harvard and UCLA, is currently living and working in Cairo with his wife Sybille, on a project called Solar Cities. T.H. is a fantastic educator who taught for several years in the 1990s in South Central L.A. His role was one of movie producer. He initiated projects where writers would write, designers design, craftspeople build, videographers shoot, editors edit, and bankers write the checks. T.H. produced interdisciplinary class projects like Let’s Build a Hovercraft (Pep Boys donated $7,000 to that one), or Dumpster Theater or Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid Rap or The Secret T-Shirt Silk Screening Biz or Closet Converted to A Computer Room for Closet Geeks. We all know teachers like T.H. They initiate the learning process by breaking down preconceptions of what learning is supposed to be, opening minds to the idea of what learning can be.
Item #9C: Our friend, the Rev. Russell White, of East Orange, New Jersey, used to be a part-time truant officer. One afternoon, frustrated that good students were skipping out of school, he promised three promising students that if they returned to the classroom for the rest of the day, he’d give them their first airplane ride. That was 33 years ago. Today, Eagle Flight Squadron occupies a converted three story firehouse in East Orange that includes an auditorium (seats are airline passenger seats bolted to the floor), a Minorities in Aviation Museum, flight simulators and an aviation library. Today, Eagle Flight owns two Cessnas (named Snoopy and Droopy) and hundreds of uniforms and flight suits donated by the Air Force Academy. It has put over 3,000 students through flight training 21 of its alumni have graduated from the Air Force Academy, and over 500 Eagle Flighters have gone on to careers in the aviation industry.
Item #10. The world’s richest person is a college dropout.
Viola Spolin said it as well as anyone in her book Improvisation for the Theater: “If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he chooses to learn, and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach him everything it has to teach.”
Tags: College Education, Eagle Flight, East Orange, Learning, NJ, Rev. Russell White, T.H. Culhane, Teaching, USC, Viola Spolin, Virginia Kuhn, Wake Forest
What a serendipitous click that brought me from LaPlante to your website. GREAT post. Thanks for the fodder, as I already preach about 1/2 of these concepts through observations of my own. The other half will make me look so much smarter…like I have a PhD, no less!