L. Todd Rose Quotes
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Right now, for instance, we resist giving people extra time on exams or for assignments, as though it's unfair to the faster students.
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Education and the workforce: I think these two things go together in terms of human potential.
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It's fine to pretend that people are one-dimensional, like in body size; the problem comes when you forget that you are just pretending.
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The Age of Average gave us a lot. Take clothing: We've all benefited remarkably from large, medium and small sizes making things affordable and available, but when it really counts - the wedding gown and the pressurized fighter pilot suit - it's bespoke all the way.
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We've become so used to the concept as a measuring and sorting tool, that it and its correlates - below-average, above-average - are everyday speech. We don't even question the language, although the challenges we face require a different mindset.
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Our biggest project is actually more in the social sciences, where we are studying mastery - how people get good at things - only we do it from an individuality perspective.
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When you start digging into things like character, though, the notion that people have high character or low character is very strong. What's crazy is that my thinking is not a new insight. The very first large-scale study of character, still one of the largest ever, was done in the early 1900s by Hugh Hartshorne, an ordained minister and a scientist.
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We need to develop people rather than process them.
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Character is incredibly jagged, and incredibly contextualized, even to the point where I still feel uncomfortable thinking about it.
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That was one of my most surprising discoveries when I dug into the history of average-ism: When you actually get the data, it rarely captures anyone. Which then begs the question, why are we using this as a reference standard for human beings?
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Talent - really, everyone agrees, it's multidimensional, and often overlooked in standard assessments. That's not hard for people to accept.
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The whole idea of timing tests is a century old, from a scientist who thought speed and ability were tightly correlated, which they are not.
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I care deeply about opportunity and fairness, because I grew up really poor.
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Historically, education has been about batch processing: standardize everything against the average, rank kids, sort them to see who gets more and who really doesn't deserve to be there. The problem, even if you're just being selfish from an economic standpoint, is we're not producing the talent we need.