This is an adapted excerpt from my newest book, "What's the Big Idea? 39 Disruptive Proposals.
We deify rational thinking: We teach it relentlessly in schools. We admire our universities and think tanks. We make fun of stupidity. Yet so much of what we do is downright idiotic.
Investing
We spend billions every year, including to make every airplane passenger spend a half hour or more in line, taking off their shoes, and having their toothpaste checked to ensure it weighs less than three ounces, when even a retarded terrorist knows we do that and so would simply bomb one of the millions of unsecured targets, for example, a water reservoir in Wyoming or a Bar-Mitzvah in Brooklyn. A more sophisticated terrorist would, in the lobby of an international airport terminal, reach into a shopping bag, open a vial of highly communicable mutated smallpox virus and saunter across the terminal, infecting enough people headed all over the world to kill billions. A rational government would accept that we can't stop terrorism by policing it no matter how many billions we spend. But we're not rational.
Religion
A Google Search on the term "Surrender to God" yields 900,000 links. Countless people follow the Bible's
urging to be passive, to wait for God to provide. For example,
Philippians
4:19 Be not wise in your own eyes;
God shall supply all your need.
Proverbs 3:1: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your
own understanding.
1 Corinthians 10:17 God is
faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability,
Matthew 17:20 If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will
say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing
will be impossible for you.
What
are the odds there is an omniscient, omnipotent deity watching the seven
billion people's every move to ensure they all do okay? Forget about whether
surrendering to God will result in your landing a good job in this economy. Remember
that billions of people, including newborns have died screaming in agony. And
what about all those catastrophic earthquakes and epidemics? And if "God will provide," why do
billions of people lack basic food, water, shelter, and health
care? Could anyone with a mote of rationality "surrender
to God?"
Education as key to closing the achievement gap
We continue to bet billions and billions on education as the tool most
likely to close the achievement gap. That, despite more than a half-century and
trillions
of dollars (also
see this) spent
trying so many permutations and combinations of teaching style, curriculum,
etc. Yet the achievement gap remains as
wide as ever.
We haven't been able to do better than to tout a non-replicable superstar
teacher or pilot program: from Marva Collins (her school is now closed due to lack of
enrollment)
to Michelle
Rhee's DC non-miracle, to
bad-data KIPP, to the
latest fad, Khan Academy. Go take a Khan Academy lesson and ask
yourself if a year of that is likely to close the algebra achievement gap. They're
boring.
Only highly motivated students will learn algebra that way. Do you really
think America's
low achievers will learn algebra so much better with Khan lessons as to close
the achievement gap?
Yet
we continue to prefer to bury our heads in the sand and bet a fortune and our
children's future that the next classroom innovation du jour will close the
achievement gap. Couldn't the
enormous costs of those classroom programs, trainings, etc., be more wisely
spent? For example, mightn't it be wise to accept that we aren't close to
knowing how to close the achievement gap and so rather than spending more
trillions on unlikely-to-work classroom programs, reallocate those dollars to
foundational research on figuring out the gap's true roots and only then develop programs based on those roots, and if there's
money left, return it to the taxpayer? But we are not rational.
A
Solution
The most important thing schools and colleges should teach is how to think
rationally: how to make decisions based on an probability-based assessments of
risk, reward, cost and opportunity cost. But we're too busy teaching the periodic table of
elements, the causes of the French and Indian Wars, and how to solve quadratic equations.
