Here’s a great New York magazine interview with Scott Galloway, a marketing professor at NYU Stern School of Business… and the man who accurately predicted Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods and WeWork’s valuation bubble. It covers something that a lot of parents of college-age kids have been pondering during coronavirus lockdown: if my kid can’t be on campus, why am I paying the big bucks for School A vs. the much more economical School B?
There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.
It’s like, “Wait, my kid’s going to be home most of the year? Staring at a computer screen?” There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level.
excerpts from the article linked above.
Lots of interesting food for thought. Galloway predicts that the tech titans (Amazon, Apple, Google) will get into the higher ed game. Well worth a read.
And from the student side, Seth Godin has long advocated for changes in our factory model educational system. This coronavirus crisis also provides us with an opportunity to rethink… nay, reimagine, how schools are set up. His manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams, is quite thought-provoking. You can download a PDF version here.
In the post-industrial model, though, the lectures are handled by best-in-class videos delivered online. Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized, and isolated on the long tail and delivered with focus. What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate.
Seth Godin in Stop Stealing Dreams
The world has changed. Colleges, and all schools, need to change as well.
For better or for worse (and it’s mostly for worse), most of our news is delivered visually. And the old axiom of “if it bleeds, it leads” is more apt than ever before. People with their faces pressed against the statehouse doors? That’s a great photo op. White guys with assault weapons holding up signs? That makes for a clickbait-ready 30-second video loop. A crowded bar in Wisconsin is a novelty in novel coronavirus times, a car wreck that our eyes are drawn to.
George Romero’s next zombie film “Day of the Soon-to-be-Dead of COVID-19”
But while these fringe folks are dominating the latest news cycle (along with the Oompa Loompa in Chief), let’s not forget that the vast majority of Americans are acting in ways that are healthy, courteous, civil. Staying home. Limiting their contact with non-family members. Social distancing. Wearing masks in public. Respecting the rules that are set up to save lives. But there’s not a “hot story” in millions of Americans working together (albeit apart) for the common good.
Last time I checked, “Life” came before “liberty” in the Declaration of Independence. If we have to sacrifice a bit of the latter over a short period of time, to preserve the former, that makes sense to me. Especially when someone’s idea of “liberty” means overburdening the health care system and causing tens of thousands of needless deaths.
Rickey Dobbs explains it much more eloquently and entertainingly than I ever could, in this brilliant and hilarious post from his always-brilliant-and-hilarious blog Hitting the Trifecta. The post compares the “transmission rate” of motorcycle accidents to the transmission rate of coronavirus. Here’s an excerpt:
Here’s the thing: no one gives a White House Rose Garden rat’s ass about your “freedom” if exercising it results in a chain reaction that kills untold thousands upon thousands of people. Your freedom must be restrained, for the survival of all of us.
My personal preference, with regard to freedoms and such, is living. Further, I value keeping my grandma and mom and dad alive. I enjoy keeping my nephews and niece alive, too.
I’m willing to accept some risk in daily life. That’s why I drive a car, walk on the sidewalk, and use elevators. There’s a chance I could die from any of these endeavors, but it’s a tiny chance that is mitigated by safety measures. The risks to myself, but more importantly, to you and your kids, are tiny compared to the efficiency brought about by doing those activities.
But if it’s an actuarial certainty that your “freedom” will kill lots of nieces and nephews and grandmas, it becomes society’s obligation to make your exercise of your freedom conform to our collective, legitimate preference to remain members of CHOTSOD. (Club for Humans on This Side of the Dirt.)
So true. We have an obligation to play by the rules, for the greater good of society.
I get it, after 9 weeks in lockdown, everyone is a bit “shack wacky” as my friend Howard calls it. And I know small businesses are hurting, but they’ll suffer even more unless we stick with the plan. The health experts are saying we’re in the second inning of a nine-inning contest. We did a great job with #flattenthecurve but it’s way too soon to bail out now. Thank you for doing your part to #Stopthespike.
I can’t figure out how our youngest is 15 years old today.
Quarantine cake… and quarantine haircut courtesy of his older brother and an electric razor’s beard trimmer
Let’s see, 3 older siblings times one baby boy… carry the pumpkin seat… minus all those nights he toddled into our bedroom… divided by a million soccer games… yep, that adds up to 15.
He’s not much of a kid anymore but he’s still a great kid.
Creative individuals, by their nature, tend to defy the crowd. They resist merely thinking or doing what others are thinking or doing. Rather, they tend to go off in their own direction, seeking to propose ideas that are both novel and useful in some way. The greatest obstacle to creativity, therefore, often is not exactly strictures from others, but rather the limitations one places on one’s own thinking.
That’s an excerpt from this article (a research summary, really) from Robert J. Sternberg, a Professor of Human Development at Cornell University. It’s part of his Investment Theory of Creativity. Here’s more:
People are not born creative or uncreative. Rather, they develop a set of attitudes toward life that characterize those who are willing to go their own way… Such attitudes are teachable and can be ingrained in students through instruction that encourages students to think for themselves.
It is thus crucially important, especially in schools, to provide an environment that allows creativity to flourish—not just in word, but also in deed.
The entire summary is super-short, and well worth a read. It’s also well worth providing our kids with an environment that supports creativity. We’re all home-schooling right now, so there’s never been a better time.
Religion and politics… two topics one should never discuss in polite company. And I consider you, dear reader, to be quite polite company. But I’m gonna break the rule today. I can’t hold my tongue any longer (it’s part of the “don’t touch your face” rule). Feel free to bail out now if you’d like. I’ll be back to my usual Chuckles the Clown routine on this blog in 24 hours.
If you’re still with me, please spend 82 seconds watching this lil’ video:
Let’s review, shall we? It’s no longer one person, or 15. It didn’t “disappear, like a miracle” in April. it isn’t “totally under control.” We don’t have a vaccine.
Want more?
As of this morning, there are 713,503 confirmed cases, with 59,672 deaths. Think about that!
I could go on citing chapter and verse about the many ways our country’s president has failed the American people in a time of crisis. We needed a leader. We’re stuck with a liar.
Trump was warned about the looming pandemic in mid-January, if not sooner. On January 31st, he imposed a travel ban on foreign nationals who had been in China, because that move was right in his xenophobic wheelhouse. Then, for six crucial weeks, he did nothing other than to parrot lies.
The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
The lying about the coronavirus by hosts on Fox News and conservative talk radio is Trump’s fault: They did it to protect him. The false hope of instant cures and nonexistent vaccines is Trump’s fault, because he told those lies to cover up his failure to act in time. The severity of the economic crisis is Trump’s fault; things would have been less bad if he had acted faster instead of sending out his chief economic adviser and his son Eric to assure Americans that the first stock-market dips were buying opportunities. The firing of a Navy captain for speaking truthfully about the virus’s threat to his crew? Trump’s fault. The fact that so many key government jobs were either empty or filled by mediocrities? Trump’s fault. The insertion of Trump’s arrogant and incompetent son-in-law as commander in chief of the national medical supply chain? Trump’s fault.
For three years, Trump has blathered and bluffed and bullied his way through an office for which he is utterly inadequate. But sooner or later, every president must face a supreme test, a test that cannot be evaded by blather and bluff and bullying. That test has overwhelmed Trump. Trump failed. He is failing. He will continue to fail. And Americans are paying for his failures.
Want more? I’ve got more. Here’s an excerpt from another piece in The Atlantic, written by a lifelong Republican, Peter Wehner, who worked in the three previous GOP administrations.
And when a reporter tries to call him out on the do-nothing gap, he resorts to his usual ad hominem attacks.
Peter Wehner actually wrote something very prescient in January of 2016… he recounts it in the article above. Here’s the passage:
I hope and pray that this crisis will be “totally under control.” That can start on November 3rd of this year, and maybe by January 20th of 2021, it’ll “disappear, like a miracle.”
You done said…