Dangerous advice for young people

A friend shared this on Facebook a few days ago:

My comment was "harsh" and I found myself in the minority for thinking so...

A number of years ago, there was a popular graduation address that had a whole string of these "grow up" realities and I carefully took the time to respond to each one. I'll be damned if I can find that, what I am sure was brilliant, bit of prose. But while looking for the exchange, I did run across this response to one of cartoonist Jessica Hagey's articles in Forbes:

From Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught in School (Forbes) by Jessica Hagey

1. The people in charge have all the answers
2. Learning ends when you leave the classroom
3. The best and brightest follow the rules
4. What the books say is always true
5. There is a very clear, single path to success
6. Behaving yourself is as important as getting good marks
7. Standardized tests measure your value
8. Days off are always more fun than sitting in the classroom

Hmmmm. I'd agree with all of these based on my experiences. Go Jessica!

But I'd also add a few...

1. There is one right answer to every question. At least to every important question. In fact those who can come up with the most right answers will do well in this economy. 
2. The purpose of your education is make sure you can get a good job. The real value of education is to help make sense of the world, to open your eyes to new points of view, and to help you hone skills that will allow you accomplish tasks you feel are personally important.
3. The more money you make, the happier you will be. Once you make enough money for the basices, making a difference, not making money, will make you happy.
4. Heredity is fate. There will always be "the first person in the family to ____________" scenarios. Not enough, but enough to know it's possible. And your school experience does not have to be the same as that of your big brother or sister.
5. Popularity = success. Listen to Springsteen's "Glory Days". At least three times.
6. You have to be smart at everything. Good at math and science, but poor at English and social studies. Don't sweat it. Really smart people tend to be smart in the intersection of two fields, say technology and health. Focus on your passions.
7. Classwork is more valuable than extracurricular activities or a parttime job. There is still too much learning for the sake of doing better at the next high level of education. You'll learn life's best lessons on the basketball court or your first paying job.
8. You should like every teacher you have. This is impossible. You should learn how to work with every teacher, however, since one day you'll need to learn to work lots of people.
9. Objectivity trumps passion. It's the Captain Kirks, not the Mr. Spocks, that discover new worlds.

What dangerous things were you taught in school?

And why can't I find that list of "realities?"

Intelligence Deficit Syndrome

In his post Complexity-Induced Mental Illness, Scott (Dilbert) Adams, writes:

My guess is that I’m somewhere in the top 25% of humans that can survive high complexity without going mad. And I’m starting to feel the water line touch my chin.

As just one example, this morning I decided I will never again try to watch television with other people. It got too complicated. For starters, I can never find anyone at the same point in their binge-watching of a series. Secondly, I have to figure out if a show is on a premium channel, DVR, On Demand, NetFlix, or whatever. Then I have to find the episode where I left off. Then I have to hope my technology for serving up the show works. My TV takes about five steps just to power it on. If I am watching on my computer, that’s another level of complication. Rarely does “watching television” work smoothly these days.

I noted this complexity problem many years ago. I called it IDS - Intelligence Deficit Syndrome - the ability that technology has to make a person feel less than competent. Here are some examples I gave back in 2000:

See if any of these “technologies” have given you IDS:

• Having to use over 20 numbers to make a long distance telephone call. The number string for me to dial out from a hotel using my credit card looks something like this: 9-1-800-228-8288-507-555-1234-863-037-7459-2468 I count thirty-six numbers I have to remember.
• Having a stove with burners set in a rectangular patter and knobs set in a row. I have to look at the little diagram beside the knob every time I light a burner.
• Having one car with the wiper lever on the left side of the column and one car with the wiper level on the right side of the column. I wipe when I want to dim, and I still haven’t quite got the wash to work on a consistent basis.
• Pushing a glass door when you should have pulled on the door.
• Scorching yourself because you don’t know if counterclockwise makes the water in the shower hotter or colder. This is a common vacation trauma for me.
• Knowing what fewer than 50% of the buttons do on the VCR’s remote control. And I never remember how to get out of the on-screen menu. At least my deck doesn’t blink 12:00, although I haven’t changed the time to accommodate for daylight savings time. Let’s see, is that fall back or fall forward. Damn!
• Worrying that dragging the little disk icon on your Mac to the trashcan icon will erase the files on the disk. For some users I’ve made an alias of the trash icon and gave it a symbol that looks like an arrow. Eases the fear.

With the possible exception of a few 8-18 year-olds, most of us at some time suffer from IDS.

 

The punch line in my talks about IDS was about the garage door opener pictured above having three buttons - one to open and close the garage door and the other two to exacerbate my feelings of intelligence deficiency.

And the world only seems to grow, more, not less complex. My phone takes a 650 page book of tips by David Pogue to master; my bike computer has a dozen function controlled by the combination of pushing only two buttons; and the MicrosoftOffice toolkit gets increasingly complex with each new release.

At work, staff are faced with websites full of links to how-to instructions. Making a hiring request requires mastery of one system; OKing employee leave another; checking budgets still one more. Teachers use the SIS, the CMS; and, and, and ...

It's enough to drive a person to drink.

Which was exactly Adams's point in his blog quoted above.

Is growing complexity just an inevitable upward spiral - along with its attendant psychological toll on most of us? 

Physicians who major in the humanities?

 There are three great questions which in life we have to ask over and over again to answer:

   Is it right or wrong?
   Is it true or false?
   Is it beautiful or ugly?

Our education ought to help us to answer these questions.

                                                                                                     John Lubbock

In English Majors Can Be Doctors Too, Mindshift May 28, 2015, Julie Rovner reports that New York's Mt. Sinai's medical school admits medical students from liberal arts programs as well as those from the science-oriented pre-med programs.

The HuMed program dates back to 1987, when Dr. Nathan Kase, who was dean of medical education at the time, wanted to do something about what had become known as pre-med syndrome. Schools across the country were worried that the striving for a straight-A report card and high test scores was actually producing sub-par doctors. Applicants — and, consequently, medical students — were too single-minded.

Kase, according to Muller, “really had a firm belief that you couldn’t be a good doctor and a well-rounded doctor — relate to patients and communicate with them — unless you really had a good grounding in the liberal arts.”

So Mount Sinai began accepting humanities majors from a handful of top-flight liberal arts schools after their second year of college. These students are expected to continue to follow their nonscientific interests for the remainder of their college careers.

Hmmm, a doctor who can relate to his/her patients? A doctor versed in the humanities rather than chemistry?

Despite the movement for STEM programs to transition to STEAM programs (adding an A for the Arts), I am concerned that our drive to turn every student into a computer programmer or engineer will fail to recognize that the understanding of human nature derived from reading literature, philosophy, history, and religion is critical.

• I want my doctor to treat me as a whole human being, not simply an organism consisting of complex chemical reactions.
• I want my computer programmers to understand the need for a human-oriented interface on the systems they design.
• I want bridge engineers to look at both function and form and create structures that are safe and aesthetically appealing.

I would bet dollars to donuts, it will be the ability to relate technology/science/math to the human condition that will make tomorrow's workers job secure.