Nov

1

While students at [US elite colleges today] are smart, gadget rich, and Internet sophisticated, they don't seem to use their opportunities in any meaningful way. — A 1971 Yale graduate.

In my recent experience, the university professor who is willing and able to encourage original thought and work (especially at undergraduate level) is exceptionally rare. I've found academic staff to be very supportive of extra-curricular academic effort, but they will not reward it on the test. The final grade is for depth of regurgitation and some ability to manipulate that knowledge to circumstances, never for originality or poking flaws in straw men and pet theories.

It's economics, though — all the employers at the most desirable jobs filter interview opportunities by grades. One's not going to get a gig at XYZ bank, firm, consultancy etc. unless he can pony up the threshold competencies as they see it.

This reinforces T@leb's argument that life is becoming over-optimised, reducing the slack in the system that's necessary to absorb the impact of the unforeseen. I have seen this myself recently, having interviewed a kid who was near top of his class at IIT and IIM, top of his class at a top tier MS in quant finance, straight As and a bonafide mathemagician. But he had zero intuition about the mechanics of the market, the vig or anything else. Everything was an equation to be solved where one simply cranks the wheel and spits out the answer.

We're getting more and more book smart kids, and fewer street smart ones. There's a happy balance between the two somewhere but, for now, society rewards following the formula…

Jeff Watson replies:

As long as there are streets, there will be street-smart people.

Apparently, every generation has had problems with the succeeding generations. This has been going on for thousands of years, and the obvious, upward drift of mankind has been missed by the elders. Somehow, I think the next generation will muddle through and the upward drift will continue.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Attributed to Socrates by Plato


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3 Comments so far

  1. Rocky Humbert on November 1, 2009 2:49 pm

    Mr. White quotes a 1971 Yale graduate…

    Let’s reminisce about the spring of 1970 when Yale tuition cost $2000, and courtesy of Bobby Seale, Kingman Brewster declared classes and final exams to be “voluntarily optional.” Now that was enlightened education … (except perhaps for the poor slobs for whom $2000 was a lot of money, and who needed to finish their science labs so they could get into medical school, or find a paying job after graduation.)

    And let’s hope for Mr. White’s sake, that should he need open heart surgery, that his surgeon will be one of the sort who completed their mundane laboratory work — and not one of the sort who instead spent their time engaged in scintillating and provocative debate with his professors on the New Haven Green…

    Ah, the good ole days.

  2. Reid Wientge on November 2, 2009 3:34 pm

    Bigger government, nanny state, pc - encroachments on the society and culture all conspire to destroy the individual. The risk in society today is being individualistic. Savy and street smarts, success without societies imprint, are dead give-aways of uniqueness. What if ones thoughts are in opposition to the admission boards criteria? Is squash a positive or negative? Why risk it when you can play soccer? To think is to err!

  3. Reid Wientge on November 2, 2009 3:40 pm

    How do American street smarts stack up against middle east street smarts? or Chinese? or Russian? My street smart kid can beat your street smart kid! At some point we will have subsidized and welfare-ized and pc-ized our savvy into oblivion.

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