Want to revolutionize education? Figure out a way to 1) reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them. Some kids really do want, and thrive in, extremely structured, rote learning environments. Some kids really do want, and succeed best in, environments geared for professional advancement. And others want self-directed learning.
The education system failing one student doesn't mean its failing all students.
Ever seen a group of 3 year olds in a sandbox?
Most people may not be tinkerers, but it seems to me that most people have the potential to be. It is also a matter of historical fact that our school system was explicitly designed to train a population that would endure working in a factories.
I remember one class I was a tutor for while I was in grad school. I wrote up sample answers for the final, and I took a step that is seldom taken - for each question I wrote down 3 different answers using 3 different techniques. (Normally, of course, the person writing sample answers just tries the approach that is probably going to be easiest.)
It was a shock for the students. In a second year college course at an Ivy League college (Dartmouth College in this case) it was a revelation that there wouldn't be just one way to answer a math question. They had thought that if they tried one approach and the math prof another, that was proof that they had failed to understand the subject. It isn't. But far too many adults are walking around without understanding that.
So when I see people say that the solution to mathematics education is to just get kids to explore, my reaction is "meh." At 28, I can do all the math I learned just fine, even though I learned it in an answer-seeking way. Had I been left on my own to just try and see the underlying nature of how it worked, I probably wouldn't be able to do even that much.
every child is curious, we just beat that out of them because the questions sometimes make adults uncomfortable
This fits quite well into the "if you can measure it, you can change it" paradigm.
Shameless self-promotion: My startup, Geddit, is seeking to do exactly that, and empower students to take more control over their learning experience. http://letsgeddit.com
We're pretty basic at the moment but the feedback tool has got a good reception from both teachers and students in the classrooms we're live in - the next step is delivering the data mining and analytics.
Lots of adults aren't curious, but it seems like most small children are. What's going on there?
But there's another side as well: Watch children at play, and you'll see that children frequently sort themselves into leaders and followers. Children are often curious, but very often they're also looking for someone to give them cues and direction and structure. Children are complex; people are complex.
Except that the education system is failing all students, at least here in America. Some countries expect high school graduates to be able to do basic calculus; in the US, we barely expect high school graduates to be able to do basic algebra. The average literacy in the USA is middle school level.
"Most people aren't tinkerers. Lots of people aren't curious"
I would say that the education system shares some of the blame for that. American schools punish curiosity and creativity. We live in a country where a student who finds the correct answer using a logically sound approach may still get marks off because they used a technique they did not learn in class. Not only are curious and creative students harmed by that, but all the other students who see curiosity being punished learn not to act on whatever curiosity they possess. By the time a student is in high school, they have been subjected to years of training to suppress their independence, curiosity, and creativity.
When a student shows aptitude, they should be praised and given more challenging assignments, rather than punished.
However, this leads to the ever-present question "When will I need this in life?" from students who don't care about a given subject. The correct answer to that is always "Because you are the sort of person who asks that question, you won't need it."
Why not, instead, optimize for the most usefulness of knowledge. If a student is interested in math, they should receive extra attention in math, rather than the attitude of "Oh, good. A student that I can ignore because they'll learn it on their own." The correct response is "Oh, good. A student that I should continue teaching because they will remember it five years from now."
This has turned into a bit of rambling, but in summary, schools should focus efforts on people who will use the information given, rather than focusing efforts on temporarily boosting mediocre students who will just forget the information after the test.
From where I sit, schools try to optimize for minimum average independent thought, with knowledge being a secondary goal. A student who receives perfect scores on their exams can still receive a D- in a class; a student who does all their homework, even if they do not get everything right, will likely receive no less than an A-. Schools reward compliance over understanding, and often punish curiosity, creativity, and independence.
There are opinions, there is rarely an absolute truth, but one can be more wrong or less wrong about something. You are more wrong about education than you think.
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_t...
They weren't born they way, these people lost their curiosity because they were put into a society that alienates them from the design process. Proprietary software alienates its users from the software design process and it thereby destroys the curiosity people have about the inner workings of computers. Nonetheless, proprietary software is heavily present in schools because companies like Microsoft give out free licenses to them.
Some kids do want structured, rote enviroments, but there is no meaning in such environments. There's no use of structured, rote math. There's no problems to solve with structured, rote physics. This kind of education is worthless.
Now, you are saying to us, "Some students only excel at pointless activity. Therefore we should teach pointless activity". But what's the value of such education? Better no education at all, which would free the time to something marginally productive.
New Jersey's Youth Challenge Academies have been remarkably successful at graduating children from at-risk environments, who go on to college and successful careers. They are NOT a general model for education, but for the children who get into them, they are a tremendously effective and advantageous educational experience that helps them overcome a background in poverty and gives them the opportunity to do much more meaningful things with their lives.
Finding out what learning environment, inside or outside school, is optimal for each learner is definitely a worthy goal, especially if means are then provided to obtain that environment. Education policy is the issue that drew me to participate on Hacker News,
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4728123
and I'm glad to see that so many participants, from the founder on to the newest member, enjoy thinking about and checking facts on education issues.
To achieve the worthy goal mentioned in the parent post involves changing the incentives now operating in the school system in most countries, both as to direct regulations and as to funding. Mark Blaug, one of the co-founders of the academic discipline of economics of education, wrote about this over the decades of his career: "The education system is a formalised, bureaucratic organisational structure and, like any bureaucratic organisational structure, it strives for maximum autonomy from external pressures as its cardinal principle of survival. While ostensibly devoted to the education of children, teachers, school administrators and local education officers must nevertheless regard parents acting on behalf of children as a force to be kept at bay because parental pressures in effect threaten the autonomy of the educational system. . . . I would hold that the stupefying conservatism of the educational system and its utter disdain of non-professional opinion is such that nothing less than a radical shake-up of the financing mechanism will do much to promote parental power." -- Mark Blaug, "Education Vouchers--It All Depends on What You Mean," in Economics of Privatization, J. Le Grand & R. Robinson, ed. (1985).
I have seen some examples of helpful reforms where I live. The state of Minnesota in the United States had what was called "the Minnesota Miracle" in the 1970s, state legislation that changed the pattern of school finance so that most funding for schools is distributed by the state government on a per-pupil enrollment basis.
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/hrd/pubs/mnschfin.pdf
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/SchSup/SchFin/index.html
The funding reform in the 1970s was followed up by two further reforms in the 1980s. First, the former compulsory instruction statute in Minnesota was ruled unconstitutional in a court case involving a homeschooling family, and a new compulsory instruction statute explicitly allows more nonpublic school alternatives for families who seek those. Second, the Legislature, pushed by the then Governor, set up statewide open enrollment
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/EnrollChoice/index.h...
and the opportunity for advanced learners to attend up to two years of college while still high school students on the state's dime.
http://education.state.mn.us/MDE/StuSuc/CollReadi/PSEO/index...
Parents in Minnesota now have more power to shop than parents in most states. That gets closer to the ideal of
detect the optimum education environment for each student
(by parents observing what works for each of their differing children)
and
give it to them
by open-enrolling in another school district (my school district has inbound open-enrollment students from forty-one other school districts of residence) or by homeschooling, or by postsecondary study at high school age, or by exercising other choices.
The educational results of Minnesota schools are well above the meager results of most United States schools, and almost competitive (but not fully competitive) with the better schools in the newly industrialized countries of east Asia and southeast Asia. It's a start. More choices would be even better.
Yes
"Figure out a way to 1) reliably detect the optimum education environment for each student, and 2) give it to them."
tokenadult, If you wouldn't mind discussing some ideas myself and a friend have, my email is in my profile. We're in the fairly early stages, but the above seems to be the pervading idea and feedback would be great.
Replace the word education in your statement with the word training and you have a good definition of what exists in schools around the world today.
"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order." - John Taylor Gatto http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30fxRwkBbHc
Then one day, on a forum unrelated to homescholling, I repeated the bit about how literacy rates used to be lots higher, before public school was instituted. I made an ass of myself. Yes, I have visited old ghost towns and seen the poor spelling conventions and other physical evidence of low general literacy. Yes, I used to be a history major and I know details like you used a pictorial sign for your tavern because so few people could read and that the purpose of church stained glass windows was to share some of the bible stories in pictorial form with the illiterate masses. I was taken in anyway, as are lots of very intelligent, educated folks.
Yes, I also know that there is a huge, important difference between a real education, which teaches you to think effectively, and mere training, which typically prepares you for a particular job. I have spoken of that many times. (FYI: "liberal arts" is designed to teach you to think. They are called that because they are supposed to be very freeing: If you can think effectively, you have much more genuine choice in life than the average person. Liberal Arts gets pissed on a lot as a really terrible thing to major in. And it may well be terrible, at a lot of schools. I don't really know. I think there is some truth to the idea that "90% of everything is crap".)
These days I find it questionable to quote anything by Gatto. The book was published with a hugely biased political agenda. The publishing house founder is a homeschooling crusader who would love to have public school abolished. For that matter, he would like to also have private school abolished. He would like homeschooling to be compulsory nationwide in the U.S. (if not globally).
That's a much more questionable agenda in my opinion than whatever agenda the powers that be had when they dreamed up public school.
(I homeschooled for many years. I think it can be a wonderful thing. But I see zero reason to believe that compulsory homeschooling would be inherently superior to what we do today. In the U.S. today, homeschoolers are generally rebels, defying the system in order to do right by their children. So they are typically very devoted parents. There is no reason to believe the excellence in education typical of homeschoolers today would remain the norm for homeschooling if it was the only avenue for getting a k-12 education.)
On the other hand, memorizing stuff about how god created the earth in a week about 5,000 years ago was crap I had to scoop out of my brain later on.
School might be a mechanism, but I doubt that's the driving force. Losing a sense of curiosity and play is an ancient phenomenon that predates modern education. When I became a man, I put away childish things was written 10^3 years ago.
If schools are doing X, Y, and Z and students are losing curiosity, stopping X Y and Z might not do any good unless it's part of a broader cultural problem. More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open. If we do decide to curate curiosity in schools, it might be beneficial to understand why curiosity is dying in the first place.
I'm curious if anyone has any insight into what these forces might be and why they're so universal. Unless losing your sense of wonder is a relatively recent transformation, why did humans evolve in such a way that wonder isn't conserved across development?
> More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open.
I think that the problem is actually in how society looks at schools, rather than schools themselves. We think of it like a machine, to be kept fueled and oiled, into which we can feed empty buckets and get them filled. We try not to get involved in the actual machinery, which is full of loud noises and creaking cogs. We expect magic. We expect numbers. We expect efficiency. We expect standards. And this is wrong, all wrong.
Curiosity dies when boundaries are perceived as absolute. If you push at a wall, and it doesn't budge, you stop pushing. It has given you a response, and it's a boring response; you lose interest. You stop being curious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have absolute boundaries, but it does mean we need to give serious thought to why each boundary exists.
1. Part of the issue today I believe is the standardization. Inherent in standardization is depersonalization, lower standards, skewed values and incentives, which leads to a mediocracy, and demoralization ensues, which leads to lack of care, which is directly related to a dying curiosity.
2. Another part is the poor understanding and poor acknowledgement of how humans learn. Meaning the system in places doesn't cater for the basic needs of kids/adults.
3. A third is a potential misalignment or friction between societal expectations of behavior and human nature.
Lastly, just because it could be true that people have always become disillusioned doesn't mean that the school isn't a driving force.
The force that can causes a loss of a sense of wonder is survival. People do not just learn for the sake of learning. They learn because they are a part of a complex system that requires knowledge to survive. At some point, the cost of failure is no longer worth the utility of eventual success. Lots of people quit their jobs to try something new, lose all their money, and file for bankruptcy. If they had simple stuck to what they know, they would be in a better position. Satisfying curiosity is not free in terms of time, money, or happiness.
As we grow up, we start to already know more about the world, so their is a diminishing return on more exploration. We also (becuase of our increased knowledge) would move to being the more productive members of the species, so it makes sense for our efforts to go more into survival so our offspring can devote their resources to exploration.
Exploration and Exploitation in Evolutionary Algorithms: A Survey
http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~shliu/pub/EE_ACM_FINAL_b.pdf
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~pjlamber/Complexity%20Course_file...
2. Being fed a lot of crap by rote, with critical thinking only allowed in the sharp boundaries of the expected outcome for the curriculum.
3. The absolute unfairness and dictator-like behaviour of so many teachers, the mediocre characters, the lame-ass half-knowledge and pseudo-funny anecdotes they poured on the kids in between the lessons and oogling the girls. The lack of bodily hygiene of many.
Yes, there were good teachers too, but they had the chances of a snowball in hell. For me school was mostly a nightmare, I hated it, I ran away from it. Now I hate the fact that everybody automatically assumes I have degrees and whatnot because I'm smart. Fuck education, encourage curiosity... or it'll just be another brick in the wall.
I have witnessed teachers putting down bright kids hundreds of times.
They often cloak it in concern.
A lot of people interpret a smarter person than themselves as a cognitive insult, and will automatically try to bring the person they feel is smarter than them down a peg or two.
This crab mentality is so prevalent, and gifted children feel things so acutely that I would encourage any gifted adolescent to drop out as soon as possible, get a GED and get on with their lives.
They will be 7-8 years ahead of their peers at 23.
A gifted child we be smarter than most of their teachers at all but the best institutions. Their time would be better spent reading books and learning from the eminent experts in their fields than some hack with a teaching certificate.
Living in a place like NYC can replace the social aspect of the college experience just fine.
There is no excuse for tormenting a gifted child with the ordinary school system. It is designed to produce the mid-level workers capitalism needs for it's factories and offices, it is not designed to imbue the best education possible on young minds.
The article mostly looks at it from a 'its boring' angle instead. Which is not nearly as damning.
However, one could equally as well argue that we don't need average people to be able to read or do maths. They can learn it all from videos on Youtube et al anyway, right?
More seriously, the notion that most people can't produce wonderful things is the single most pernicious lie of our times. Everyone is born with more than enough potential to do great things, and the job of society is to give them the tools and encouragement they need to do this.
So, don't sell the species short. We may not need everyone to create new things, but hell, it couldn't hurt, right?
He's complaining about the fact that they don't really know what they've learned, they've just learned to 'say the right things', specifically because of the way they have been taught. Which is precisely the point I'm making.
e.g. "After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn’t know what anything meant."
Here's where the above really starts to hurt: during high school, I got away with avoiding failure because everything is set up for you to 'succeed'. As soon as I went to University the opportunities for failure increased by an order of magnitude and at the same time there was nothing and no-one there to assure you that this is OK and part of the process of learning. The spiral of self-doubt, depression and fear that this created almost completely ruined my academic career.
I got lucky and it all worked out such that I am now a software developer who knows failure and experimentation (on almost any scale) are part and parcel of getting better at what you do, and the impact of this knowledge on one's emotional well-being is immense. It's what I would tell my 18-year-old self if I had the chance.
"The Underground History of American Education" available free online: http://mhkeehn.tripod.com/ughoae.pdf
Radio piece w/ JTG on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKci3_cmlqI
In my case I was one of the lucky few who actually understood derivations after the first class. At home, I thought about half an hour about it, and was able to tell the next "recipe" on the lesson plan. (Side note: Students get rewarded for memorizing algorithms, not understanding them. So even people who are "good in maths" are - even in college - not always good at understanding them.)
Now in university I'm still a bit disappointed. This could be because of my engineering course. We're still just being taught how to do what, but not in a descriptive way. This became extremely bad at differential equations. We weren't even told what differential equations are, and when you use them. It was a mere "you have this, then you have to do that". It seemed very difficult to me, but many other students had no problems. They told me because "it's just: you have this, then you do that".
These two things seem totally at odds to me and it's something I struggle with constantly. How do you ever know if you've considered the problem enough? If you come to a problem you cant solve and go to someone for help there's always a chance that person will ridicule you and put you down, destroying your motivation, because you didn't "fully consider the problem" in his eyes.
It doesn't matter if you didn't fully consider the problem, it matters if the other person will help you. And sometimes, if the other person doesn't know either, he can at least make himself feel good by making you feel bad. Don't let him.
Some people go to gyms, where they exert themselves pointlessly - they're not drawing water, generating electricity, or moving materials uphill.
They seem to think that the process somehow improves them. Modern medicine apparently agrees with them.
If that is not the case with whatever exercises are done in school, perhaps we could get better proof than "it felt".
Finally, I'm also preparing for the SAT, and that, that is a horrible test. It tests you're ability to adapt to a new system/test, I really don't see how it is a good indicator for college applications. It is awful on so many levels and yet it remains the primary test for college admission in the US.
Capitalism is based upon uneven and unequal development so much of the global population is still denied an education and even a basic level of literacy. Those people would love to have any education at all to complain about in the first place.
I feel it is important to put this person's complaints into the context. Nonetheless, I will be the last person in the world to actually defend the education system in first world because it is just based on turning the first world citizens into obedient service sector workers and consumers of products mainly produced in China and extracted from the third world.
> Our system should be producing more adults with this same fearlessness, who go after what they really want from the start in rational, systematic ways. Right now, we tend to produce ‘answer-centred’ people who are terrified of doing things wrong.
Capitalism is not based upon letting people go after what they really want. Capitalism is based upon having a class of people (the proletariat) who are alienated from their own work and for whom doing things wrong means getting fired.
> We need to find a better way to teach children, one that doesn’t kill their innate sense of curiosity and play.
We need a system that teaches children to be alienated from the things around them, their productive activities, their own lives, and their peers. This is demanded by the capitalist mode of production itself and there is no way of getting around this without revolutionizing society.
Qureshi credits John Holt's book How Children Fail
http://www.amazon.com/Children-Fail-Classics-Child-Developme...
with opening his eyes to a different view of education. (The same book was recommended to me by my junior high assistant principal in 1971. How Children Fail was a life-changing book for me, and I recommend it to everyone who has ever been in school.) Qureshi writes, "In the last couple of years, I’ve been going through a process of un-education: removing all the bad habits that school somehow implanted in me:
"Being afraid of failure or embarrassment"
That's crucial. To be afraid to fail is to be afraid to learn. Here's a link to a FAQ I have prepared for my local mathematics students, "Courage in the Face of Stupidity,"
http://www.epsiloncamp.org/CourageandStupidity.php
designed to prevent the kind of misguided approach to learning mentioned in the essay kindly submitted here. School curricula in many parts of the United States (and perhaps elsewhere too, as I note the essay is from Britain?) are designed so that most pupils will succeed in school assignments most of the time. That doesn't provide enough practice in taking on HARD tasks, and inadequately prepares young learners to succeed in either
a) study of more than one really difficult subject at the same time
or
b) successful problem-solving in adult life in private employment, when the problems are often open-ended and ill-defined.
As a parent of four children, and as a teacher of elementary-age pupils, I'm all about first bolstering children's expectations that initial failure is not a sure predictor of never succeeding, and then introducing CHALLENGING problems into their education so that one thing they practice while young is overcoming failure.
AFTER EDIT:
Another top-level comment just asked,
Anyone out there tried home schooling?
Yes. And it was John Holt's writings, beginning with How Children Fail in the early 1970s, that sparked my interest in homeschooling. I have been pleased with the results of homeschooling in the case of my oldest son, now fully grown and making a living as a hacker for a start-up, and I am glad to continue homeschooling for my three younger children.
It would have been nice to read your thoughts on whether he should just get a GED (or perhaps no diploma) and find other ways of educating himself.
But perhaps they would have been similar to this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358559
Albert Einstein had an interesting account of his school experiences in his longest autobiographical writing, the introductory section of a book I grew up having in my home library (because my dad bought the book when he was a student of the philosophy of science).
http://learninfreedom.org/Nobel_hates_school.html
The examination system that Einstein encountered as a student in Switzerland actually allowed him to spend minimal time getting ready for examinations and most of his time independently pursuing his interest in physics. As Einstein wrote, "There were altogether only two examinations; aside from these, one could just about do as one pleased." If his school grades had been based more on daily homework assignments (as in the United States), then he probably would have seen his "holy curiosity of inquiry" entirely strangled by the school system, to use his words.
I did have a few project-based science courses, based more on having to propose something and justify your proposal, rather than giving a pre-determined answer. But I wasn't able to find more than a handful of those, and they tended to only be senior-level elective seminars, with a small number of students. I would guess the trend towards large, lecture-based courses (whether in-person, or MOOCs) will make them even more rare.
When your just starting out its harder, you can't say "explain the impact of European colonization on the Americas" you have to say "When did Columbus discover America?" and yes, poor educators sometimes try to give multiple choice exams because it is easier for them, but that doesn't say anything about the need to measure the effectiveness of the child at learning the material.
But how do you objectively measure creativity and play? You can't. So it's not surprising that American public education is moving in exactly the opposite direction, drifting ever closer to a system where high stakes standardized tests determine your entire future. At the root of this is some deep seated hysteria about being overtaken by China or whatnot. It's madness, but I have no politically viable ideas for fixing the system.
Anyone out there tried home schooling?
I think that there is merit to rote learning. When I practice piano, most of the time I practice scales. Not creative at all - mind numbing, really, but fundamentally important. When I play a piece, it in theory the rote learning (ie. scales) gives me the dexterity and muscle memory to be creative within the piece of music.
I believe that this translates into education as well. I think it's important that people can do mental math quickly. I think that it's important that a computer scientist can implement merge sort or a min heap without having to resort to Wikipedia. They should be able to explain it too, naturally, but I think that the baseline of knowledge is required to be creative with more difficult problems.
I think that the important thing though, which music gets quite well yet academics mostly don't, is to separate the two. You practice scales, and mechanical exercises, so that you have the ability to be creative when playing the pieces. If they were more clearly separated, I think that it might be better, instead of confusing the two constantly. This is where I think the fear of failure comes from. With the mechanical side, failure is almost always bad. If you are not able to play the scale correctly, you haven't practiced enough - this is your own failing. With the creative side, failure is not necessarily bad, and success is not necessarily good. It's an experiment, an expression, and if it falls flat, you get knowledge from it, and if you're always succeeding, you're not pushing your limits. When the technical and creative get blurred, I think that it becomes natural to mistake the creative side as the technical side, and assume that failure is always bad.
My favourite course in school was computer graphics. The final assignment, worth 20% of your grade if I recall correctly, was this: "Make something awesome with what you learned. You'll have 10-15 minutes to demo it to the professor. You have 3 weeks." So you had better be darn comfortable with perspective transforms and normals and writing shaders, which you are, because you've built up that knowledge over the rest of the course. Now with it, you are given a platform to be creative. We were tested on the rote learning stuff - the exams required us to transform vectors and decompose matrices and write down lighting equations, but this was a test of ones creative ability. I think it's almost perfect in this regard, in getting a lot out of both worlds in a way that is focused and guided but not on rails.
I had friends who wouldn't take this course with me in school because they were worried that the courses would hurt their GPA.
The education system believes you still need to go to college, uni etc.
I don't anymore.
I've learnt more outside of college (internet, local groups, friends in the area I'm interested in) than what the teachers can teach (I wish they were researchers rather than "curriculum" pushers).
Granted given the recent changes to fees in the UK, I completely see where you're coming from. I suppose in your situation (as a (presumably bright) A level student in the UK) it would probably only make economic sense to attend a Russell Group University, preferably Oxbridge.
Then, the real returns from education are not (in my experience) economic. Mind you, money is nice, so don't completely ignore economics.
Conclusion: essays don't have a place for comments on the bottom.
The old-style, industrial-era education was based on limiting mistakes and reducing variance. Produce 100 widgets, by deadline X, with low variation. Reliable, low-variance work is still important, but machines do it a lot better than we do.
We've handed the concave world over to machines. They do that stuff far better than we can. Now the only marketable human labor is the convex stuff where the variance-reducing approach that has characterized 200+ years of industrial capitalism fails (because when the input-output curve is convex, you want variance).
The way we do things in the U.S. is ideal for the concave world and utterly incapable of preparing people for convex work, in which autonomy is no longer a rare reward but a prerequisite for producing quality work.
It's not just education that has become outmoded. Our attitudes have as well. We understand natively that both talent (to be judged at best) and character (to be judged at worst) are important in assessing other people (building teams, choosing leaders) but we also conflate superficial reliability with character, to disastrous results. It turns out that the people who most easily maximize superficial reliability ("team players") are often the people of the worst character (psychopaths).
The educational process is designed to (a) inculcate reliability appropriate to a concave world, and (b) prime the smartest people for a world in which superficial reliability will be the main criterion for advancement.
