Big Think: Why Have We Traditionally Devalued Teachers?

Zeke Vanderhoek answers the question, "Why have we traditionally devalued teachers?"

"Wendy Kopp Predicts the Future of Education"

Wendy Kopp, Founder & President of Teach for America, answers the question:

How should Americans change the way they think about education?

Jim Yong Kim, New President of Dartmouth College

Jim Yong Kim is the first Asian American to head an Ivy League Institution. Just giving props to a Korean American here :) His background is fascinating:

"... Kim co-founded the non-profit in his second year of medical school after meeting Paul Farmer, later his colleague on the HMS faculty. The two traveled throughout the world in the 1990s to Haiti, Peru, Russia and Malawi, researching global health issues.

As a result of their efforts to develop effective and affordable treatments for drug-resistant tuberculosis, Kim and Farmer were later appointed advisors to the director of the World Health Organization.

Leading Partners in Health provided Kim with fundraising experience that will be important in his role as the College’s president, he said.

In 2004, Kim was chosen to direct the WHO’s initiative to combat HIV/AIDS. Kim spearheaded the “3 by 5” program, which aimed to treat three million people suffering from HIV/AIDS by 2005.

Kim received a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2003, and was listed as one of the 100 most influential people by Time Magazine in 2006 for his work on global epidemics..."

GoingOn Social Media Platform is the Love Child of Blackboard + Facebook

The online education platform built by GoingOn, my old software company, gets a review from UPenn's student newspaper:

Open Learning Commons combines elements of Blackboard and Facebook

The love child of Blackboard and Facebook has a name - the Open Learning Commons.

The new platform prototype, launched by the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, allows interested people within and outside the Penn community to participate in classroom activities from the Web.

The first class covers global environmental sustainability and combines coursework with social networking.

Led by Political Science professor Donald Kettl, the course involves not only 14 Penn students, but also international university students and anyone interested in "a flavor of what's going on at Penn in the classroom," program developers Lisa Minetti and Jennifer Maden said.

"The students are doing a real-world, real-time project, focused on framing an American approach to the next round of climate change policy," Kettl wrote in an e-mail.

Marni Baker, the program director, originally conceived the idea after fruitlessly searching for an ideal platform to combine "private interactions with the students" with YouTube lectures, discussion forums and a blog, all open to "wider audiences."... (full article)

You can visit the Global Environmental Sustainability Collaborative site here.

"Love child of Blackboard + Facebook" is a good description for this vertical Dave, Jon and team are working hard at leading.

"A Vision for 21st Century Learning"

My friend Al is working on a new game-based education company. The video presents his vision.


Al was invited present at the first-ever TEDDIY session at TED@PalmSprings. One of twelve speakers to do a short presentation on their cause, skill, or special interest.

Follow Up On Nontrepreneur Op-ed... "Do Schools Kill Creativity?"

My old professor from Columbia University and advisor of a couple of my ventures, Michael Crow, sent me a link to the TED Talk below after reading my recent op-ed. He's now President of Arizona State University, and doing some amazing projects and programs for ASU and its community.

Anyway, check out Sir Ken Robinson's talk, "Do schools kill creativity?"


"Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining (and profoundly moving) case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it."

Coming Soon: Nontrepreneur Nation

My article went up at Insidework (defunct site now) today.

Also Daniel Primack, whose email newsletter I've been reading for years, at Private Equity HUB was nice enough to repost this article at his news site here. Some discussions going on at both sites. Join the conversation!

Coming Soon: Nontrepreneur Nation
How parenting and education are killing American entrepreneurship and innovation

Despite how U.S. students continue to lag far behind those in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan in math and science and score comparable to European students (The New York Times, 11/14/07), I was never concerned about the welfare of our nation. Even though, for more than a decade, U.S. students typically placed outside the top ten in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS).

Why wasn’t I worried? The U.S. still leads in the number of patents awarded, in its disproportionate amount of Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, and in the number of entrepreneurial ventures started each year. The U.S. rewards creativity with programs and prizes such as the MacArthur Fellows Program and numerous “entrepreneur of the year” awards. Confident about our unique culture and emphasis on creativity and entrepreneurship, I strongly believed that our national innovation engine would continue to lead in technology and entrepreneurship for decades to come.

However, recently I have begun to feel as though I am on shaky ground, confronting fears of collapse in our city on the hill. The current crop of U.S. students – what should become the next generation of scientists and entrepreneurs – shows strong characteristics that counter the unique culture of innovation on which our country built itself, and our future is at risk.

Around me, in various circles of my life, I’ve been seeing anecdotal evidence to bolster this concern.

Last week I came back from a college student conference where I serve as an adviser. The conference was started 22 years ago and typically has 500-1000 students attend each year, and I’ve been involved since 1992. Of late, we have recognized a trend among these student organizers, who are ambitious leaders on their campuses. Over the past five years there has been a change in their mentality. More and more, the student leaders were asking for guidance and hand-holding throughout the effort of organizing this conference. This was a strange experience for us, because previously the student organizers wanted more independence, and were pushing our boundaries. Today’s student organizers generally wanted to be told what to do instead of taking their own initiative – while, oddly enough, sometimes a greater degree of pretentiousness and sense of entitlement crop up.

Last year, I was speaking with a friend who is a school administrator in New York City about this trend I noticed. She agreed with my observation. In high schools, she also saw recent changes in students, where they want more guidance and reveal an increasing fear of failure. She recalled one conversation where she was talking with a student about why this student decided not to take Spanish:

“So why did you decide to not take the class?”
“Because I don’t know Spanish, so I’ll probably fail.”
“Well, that’s why you’re supposed to take it, so you can learn something you don’t know.”

My friend told me that these types of conversations with students – where uncertainty and the unknown are avoided rather than confronted – are becoming more common for her.

So I began to consider the some of the causes for this lack of entrepreneurial spirit among students. I remember raising an eyebrow when in 1996, a few years after I graduated from college, the Educational Testing Service adjusted its scoring because the national average was dropping. A 730 verbal on the old scale would be awarded a perfect 800 on the new scale, and a math score of 780 on the old scale would get 800 on the new scale. Even in today’s new SAT Reasoning Test, a “perfect” isn’t a truly perfect score. I also remember grade inflation starting to happen while I was in college, when some universities began taking “Fs” out of their system. At Harvard in the early 2000s, 90 percent or more of students graduated with honors. And in 2003, The Washington Post’s Stuart Rojstaczer noted that fully half of all grades given at Pomona, Duke, Harvard, and Columbia are “As.”

In Denise Shekerjian’s book Uncommon Genius, she searched for the essence of creativity by following 40 winners of the MacArthur Prize (also known as the “genius award”). Some of the key characteristics she chronicled: the Fellows’ ability to take risks, and how they built resiliency. Resiliency comes from facing your mistakes and failures, and learning that failure is a path to success. Being resilient and able to take risks are characteristics that are also clearly necessary for entrepreneurship, as most successful entrepreneurs have failed at least once. From numerous veterans of Silicon Valley to local hometown entrepreneurs, failure is a badge of honor.

Yet for the past decade, we have been conditioning our next generation of would-be leaders, entrepreneurs, and scientists to avoid risks by letting them opt out of classes or exams they might not ace, we’ve been protecting them from failure with grade inflation, and we’ve been inflating their self-worth with scoring adjustments.

And the result? These actions have been destructive to this generation and to our nation. There have been additional adverse effects from this risk-avoidance approach. A 2004 article in Psychology Today, A Nation of Wimps, states that in 1996, anxiety overtook relationship concerns as the major problem cited by students, and The University of Michigan Depression Center estimated that depression affects 15 percent of college students nationwide.

Just a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with my colleague Dan Wooldridge, a leadership consultant, about the recent entrants from Generation Y into the workplace. He said that companies have had to adjust because this was the first generation parented by “soccer moms” – every minute of their children’s lives have been scripted and scheduled from soccer to piano to church activities to social events.

“The kids are dropped off and picked up and taken to the next event on the schedule. They have not learned how to spontaneously organize or manage themselves, and so when they enter the workplace, they need more instruction, structure, and coddling. Also because their parents have so managed the risks they face and so trying things that might result in failure is absolutely terrifying,” he explained. He continued to state that this group’s strengths are multi-tasking, grew up in diversity, more optimistic than the previous generation, and can be very self-confident.

The parents of this generation have created a competitive frenzy for schooling and an abundance of “high achievers.” At the same time, they have promoted an environment of dependency on a parental figure, which is what I’ve been experiencing first-hand.

Today, failure is still accepted in our society. But burgeoning undercurrents from our education system and the latest parental practices are threatening this valuable idea – that failure and learning from it can lead to success – which helps fuel our national innovation engine.

I am deeply concerned about the future of innovation and entrepreneurship in our nation, which is so strongly tied to its economic growth. To reestablish ourselves, we need a closer examination of our education system – and possibly wholesale changes in testing, grading, and teaching. For every Mark Zuckerberg or Matt Mullenweg who rises up from today’s generation of students, hundreds of thousands of future entrepreneurs, scientists, and leaders are not able to overcome their conditioning of dependency and doubt. My fear is that we are creating a nation of “nontrepreneurs,” and that because of our eroding entrepreneurial spirit we are losing future contributors to not only the U.S., but to the world.

So – Americans, world citizens – what should we do about this?


UPDATE: Mike Lanza pointed me to his post on this topic, "We’re Raising a Generation of Organization Men (or Women)" and The Atlantic Monthly's David Brook's article, "The Organization Kid," from April 2001.

A indirectly related issue is discussed by George Will, "A Nation Held Back By (Lack of) Education"


education, innovation, entrepreneurship, parenting, startups, mark zuckerberg, matt mullenweg