The End of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness

by Todd Rose

it was clear to me that if you wanted to design something for an individual human being, the average was completely useless,” Daniels told me.

Any system designed around the average person is doomed to fail.

the air force initiated a quantum leap in its design philosophy, centered on a new guiding principle: individual fit. Rather than fitting the individual to the system, the military began fitting the system to the individual. In short order, the air force demanded that all cockpits needed to fit pilots whose measurements fell within the 5 percent to 95 percent range on each dimension.

the average is useless. Worse than useless, in fact, because it creates the illusion of knowledge, when in fact the average disguises what is most important about an individual.

He invented the Quetelet Index—today known as the body mass index (BMI)—and calculated men’s and women’s average BMIs to identify average health.

averagarians

the law of large numbers, a law which, according to a great mathematician’s expression, is always true in general and false in particular.”50

American factories embraced Taylor’s principles of standardization and were soon posting work rules, printing books of standard operating procedures, and issuing job instruction cards, all laying out the requisite way to get things done. The worker, once celebrated as a creative craftsman, was relegated to the role of automaton.14

not the worker, insisted Taylor. He argued that businesses should take away all planning, control, and decision making from the workers and hand it over to a new class of “planners” who would be responsible for overseeing the workers and determining the one best way to standardize an organization’s processes. Taylor adopted a recently invented term to describe this new role: “the manager.”

“Taylorism”—swept

Following Taylor’s maxim that a system of average workers was more efficient than a system of geniuses, educational Taylorists argued that schools should provide a standard education for an average student instead of trying to foster greatness.

Schools around the country adopted the “Gary Plan,” named after the industrialized Indiana city where it originated: students were divided into groups by age (not by performance, interest, or aptitude) and these groups of students rotated through different classes, each lasting a standardized period of time. School bells were introduced to emulate factory bells, in order to mentally prepare children for their future careers.30

The Taylorist educational reformers also introduced a new professional role into education: the curriculum planner.

Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.

Molenaar recognized that the fatal flaw of averagarianism was its paradoxical assumption that you could understand individuals by ignoring their individuality. He gave a name to this error: “the ergodic switch.”

the jaggedness principle. This principle holds that we cannot apply one-dimensional thinking to understand something that is complex and “jagged.”

Myers-Briggs Type

Enneagram personality test

that if they are not fast enough to finish these tasks in the allotted time, they should be appropriately penalized in the educational rankings.

When Bloom compared the performance of students in each group, the results were astounding. Students in the traditional classroom performed exactly like you would expect if you believed in the notion that faster equals smarter: by the end of the course, roughly 20 percent achieved mastery of the material (which Bloom defined as scoring 85 percent or higher on a final exam), a similarly small percentage did very poorly, while the majority of students scored somewhere in the middle. In contrast, more than 90 percent of the self-paced students achieved mastery.29

To transform the averagarian architecture of our existing system into a system that values the individual student requires that we adopt these three key concepts: • Grant credentials, not diplomas • Replace grades with competency • Let students determine their educational pathway

Despite the fact that “personalized learning” is the biggest buzzword in education today, and despite efforts of many organizations seeking change in the system, almost everything in traditional educational systems remains designed to ensure students receive the same exact standardized experience.

Finally, we can encourage local experimentation and sharing of successes and failures to accelerate discovery and adoption of cost-effective, scalable ways to implement student-driven, self-paced, multipathway educational experiences.