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Did Your Valedictorian Become Rich?

By contrasting the attributes of academically successful students with the attributes of commercially successful businesspeople, a team of researchers has recently determined that the skills required for commercial success are “mainly verbal.”

“Employers are already saying that a degree is not enough, and that many graduates do not have the qualities they are looking for: the ability to communicate, work in teams, adapt to change, to innovate and be creative. This is not surprising…The traditional academic curriculum is not designed to promote creativity. Complaining that the system does not produce creative people is like complaining that a car doesn’t fly… it was never intended to. The stark message is that the answer to the future is not simply to increase the amount of education, but to educate people differently.” – Professor Ken Robinson of The 21st Century Learning Initiative, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists and educators committed to educational reform.

Academic Success involves:             Commercial Success involves:
– Largely solitary study                               – Working with others
– Generally uninterrupted work                – Constant distractions
– Concentration on a single subject          – Understanding in many different disciplines
– Much written work                                    – Mainly verbal skills

” The factory was the inspiration for our current educational model. But America’s old-fashioned factories are dead or dying and the limitations of America’s traditional factory model of education have become manifest… and they are crippling.” Dr. Albert Shanker, President, American Federation of Teachers, 1999

The Old Assumptions
– Intelligence was largely innate, as was creativity
– Learning was seen as being strictly logical, objective and linear
– Learning was dependent on class time, and the technology of pen, paper and textbooks

“Get rid of that damn machine model. It’s wrong. The brain is a biological system, not a machine. Currently we are putting children with biologically shaped brains into machine orientated schools. The two just don’t mix. We bog the school down in a curriculum that is not biologically feasible.” Professor Robert Sylwester

“It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to rank and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the engagement of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.” Albert Einstein

What these people are saying, in a nutshell, is that America’s system of education was built upon a strong cultural bias toward the left hemisphere of the brain, the part that provides us with linear, sequential logic. Unfortunately, neurologists have now discovered that the brain’s right hemisphere, the intuitive, “artsy” half of the brain is perhaps even more important in the learning process than the logical, left hemisphere. So how and when did America develop such an out-of- balance bias toward the left? The answer to that question will astound you. Read about it in next week’s Monday Morning Memo, “Left, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right.”

Merry Christmas,

Roy H Williams