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

by Todd Rose

If we are looking for the institution where implementing equal fit would have the biggest immediate impact on opportunity, the place to start is clear: public education.

public education need

it’s not difficult to imagine how to introduce equal fit into education. For starters, we can require that textbooks be designed “to the edges” rather than to the average; we can require that curricular materials be adaptive to individual ability and pacing rather than fixed based on grade or age; we can require that educational assessments be built to measure individual learning and development rather than simply ranking students against one another. 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.

how to change pub ed

We can also apply the principle of equal fit to social policies that influence the workplace, such as policies that influence hiring, firing, and pay.

workplace how to

The original formulation of the American dream was not about becoming rich or famous; it was about having the opportunity to live your life to its fullest potential, and being appreciated for who you are as an individual, not because of your type or rank. Though America was one of the first places where this was a possibility for many of its citizens, the dream is not limited to any one country or peoples; it is a universal dream that we all share. And this dream has been corrupted by averagarianism.

corrupted American dream

For Adams, the Taylorist view of the world was not only altering the fabric of society, it was altering the way people viewed themselves and one another, the way they determined their priorities, the way they defined the meaning of success. As averagarianism reshaped the educational system and workplace, the American dream came to signify less about personal fulfillment and more about the notion that even the lowliest of citizens could climb to the topmost rungs of the economic ladder.

Adams v Taylor

reduces the American dream to a narrow yearning to be relatively better than the people around us, rather than the best version of ourselves.

what Averaganarianism does to Am Dream

Todd Rose et al., “The Science of the Individual,” Mind, Brain, and Education 7, no. 3 (2013): 152–158. See also James T. Lamiell, Beyond Individual and Group Differences: Human Individuality, Scientific Psychology, and William Stern’s Critical Personalism (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003).

science of individual

William Cyples, “Morality of the Doctrine of Averages,” Cornhill Magazine (1864): 218–224.

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T. M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986),

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John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (Odysseus Group, 2001),

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York: Columbia University, 1921), 236. Note: Like Galton, Thorndike was obsessed with ranking people. In his final book,

system of moral scoring that could help society distinguish

In Thorndike’s system of moral ranking, domesticated animals were assigned scores higher than human idiots.

For a history and overview of ergodic theory, see Andre R. Cunha, “Understanding the Ergodic Hypothesis Via Analogies,” Physicae 10, no. 10 (2013): 9–12; J. L. Lebowitz and O. Penrose, “Modern Ergodic Theory,” Physics Today (1973): 23; Massimiliano Badino, “The Foundational Role of Ergodic Theory,” Foundations of Science 11 (2006): 323–347; A. Patrascioiu, “The Ergodic Hypothesis: A Complicated Problem in Mathematics and Physics,” Los Alamos Science Special Issue (1987): 263–279. 9. Ergodic theory was proved by the mathematician Birkhoff in 1931: G. D. Birkhoff, “Proof of the Ergodic Theorem,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 17, no. 12 (1931): 656–660.

research ergodic theory

These two conditions are necessary and sufficient for Gaussian processes, which is what we have been discussing up to this point in the book. But they are not sufficient for general processes. Proving that a dynamic system is ergodic is exceedingly difficult and successfully carried out for only a small set of dynamic systems.

Gaussian v dynamic sets

Note that some ideal gasses are ergodic;

ergodism exists but is not universal

Also note that ergodic theory was shown empirically to hold for diffusion

diffusion

To any reader familiar with his views it will seem strange to attribute to Thorndike a one-dimensional view of intelligence, since he was consistently arguing intelligence was multidimensional (abstract, social, and mechanical) and was one of Spearman’s biggest critics. However, he did believe there was an innate component that applied to your ability to learn and that it had to do with your neural ability to form connections.

confusion and hypocracuy

“Stanford-Binet and WAIS

two main IQ tests

“Understanding the Personality Test Industry,” Psychometric Success, http://www.psychometric-success.com/personality-tests/personality-tests-understanding-industry.htm;

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Shoda et al., “Intraindividual Stability in the Organization and Patterning of Behavior.”

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Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Cambridge: MIT Press Books, 2005).

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While Bloom rightly gets credit for the ideas, it is worth noting that the seminal studies were done by two of his doctoral students, Joanne Anania (Joanne Anania, “The Influence of Instructional Conditions on Student Learning and Achievement,” Evaluation in Education 7, no. 1 [1983]: 1–92) and Arthur Burke (Arthur Joseph Burke, “Students’ Potential for Learning Contrasted Under Tutorial and Group Approaches to Instruction” [Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1983]).

who the "et al." w Bloom are

Chen-Lin C. Kulik et al., “Effectiveness of Mastery Learning Programs: A Meta-Analysis,” Review of Educational Research 60, no. 2 (1990): 265–299.

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Catharine C. Knight and Kurt W. Fischer, “Learning to Read Words: Individual Differences in Developmental Sequences,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 13, no. 3 (1992): 377–404.

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Zoho University, http://www.zohouniversity.com/; Bhagat, “A Life Worth Living.”

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Gary Hamel, “First, Let’s Fire All the Managers,” Harvard Business Review, December 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers.

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Michelle R. Weise and Clayton M. Christensen, Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution (Clayton Christensen Institute, 2014), http://www.christenseninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Hire-Education.pdf.

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Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

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Elena Silva, “The Carnegie Unit—Revisited,” Carnegie Foundation, May 28, 2013, http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/the-carnegie-unit-revisited/.

Carnegie units

“Micro-Credentialing,” Educause, http://www.educause.edu/library/micro-credentialing; and Laura Vanderkam, “Micro-credentials,” Laura Vanderkam, December 12, 2012, http://lauravanderkam.com/2012/12/micro-credentials/.

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Maurice A. Jones, “Credentials, Not Diplomas, Are What Count for Many Job Openings,” New York Times, March 19, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/03/19/who-should-pay-for-workers-training/credentials-not-diplomas-are-what-count-for-many-job-openings;

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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/education/2013/09/edx_mit_and_online_certificates_how_non_degree_certificates_are_disrupting.html.

MOOC article

Thomas R. Guskey, “Five Obstacles to Grading Reform,” Educational

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