The thing about the U.S. is that it encourages competition particularly in lower levels - not within the school system entirely, but also partially despite it.
The way public school systems are set up, you get multiple social spheres that are forced to interact. You've got the sports group - the people who push away their boredom for school with a fascination for physical activity. There're the honor students, or whatever you want to call them - the people who study for hours a day, who partake in activities with Machiavellian efficiency. The ones who will do anything as long as it means a shot at the Ivies.
Those are the two ones people know and talk about. The one that ISN'T mentioned, the one that absolutely exists, is the smaller sphere of people who know what they want to do with their life. It's always a set of bright students, but students that have no seeming motivation toward school. They're just as real a group as the other two, but they have no need to announce their presence, so they're really often missed when people talk about them. They're the people, I think, that really propel innovation.
The interesting thing is that beyond a sort of personal drive, those people tend to have nothing outwardly in common. There're very nerdy people in that group and there are people as far from nerds as they come. Quiet people, loud people. They blend between the other spheres - despite a focus on things not school-related, a ton of them go to really top-notch schools. I'd put myself in this category. I very rarely put an effort into any part of school, did no work, and I'm still going to a really top-notch public school. It's not an Ivy, it's not what I've been told for a long time I ought to be striving for, but I've known for a long time what I want to do with life and I don't think that an Ivy League school can help me any more than a really good school can. Me and people like me become part of the statistic that drag schools down a lot. The sports sphere helps a lot, because the sports sphere is the sort that really shouldn't be kept in schools, because the sports sphere just doesn't care. But among the top-tiered students, it's the ones that don't care about standardized testing or academics at all that keep American schools so low.
That's also a huge boon for America, though. I can't talk about other generations, but in this generation it's entirely likely that by the time we're all going to college a lot of us have tried our hands at several things and dabbled in them. A lot of us have some semblance of "real world" experience, in other words. I tried my hand at a web start-up in my sophomore year. In my senior year I published a book. Neither thing is world-changing, but it means that as I work on web development today, when I try writing again, I've got a lot of experience as to what learns and what doesn't. A friend of mine has been learning how to code and create models for game design since something like eighth grade. A bunch of my friends have launched sites and blogs of their own; one friend was mentioned on G4 for a tutorial he wrote. This isn't a particularly exceptional school I'm at, either; nearly every school I know the name of has its share of breakthrough kids.
I can only speak for my culture, not for others. But it seems to me that paradoxically, it's America's inability to handle kids like that that makes its school system so effective in delivering innovation. When you have a culture of youth that's already experienced and capable of learning from its mistakes, you have a core generation that has an edge over even the best-taught students from the rest of the world. You get a sort of encouragement of big ideas and of youth. You grow up hearing stories about Bill Gates at 19 and Steve Jobs at 21; about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and about all the musicians who started in grade school. (Incidentally, I think that the fact that there are no real writers who made it that young corresponds to the fact that so few young people want to be writers.) We get stories about Welles making Citizen Kane at an age when most graduates are just looking for jobs. It teaches this idea that it doesn't matter what your grades are, because you could be getting things done rather than studying, and that introduces a whole new aspect on to your world.
I agree. I had brain surgery recently (small tumor), and all I could do for the week after is pretty much stare into space and think. I came upon a series of epiphanies/hasty generalizations along those lines that seem pretty correct to me now:
1. Most people don't like what they do enough to do it when nobody's asking them to do it.
2. Most people can't singlehandedly start projects that require a lot of work and have uncertain reward.
3. Among those who enthusiastically do, very few can complete those projects.
4. Institutions like schools and corporations are quite reasonably based around this assumption, and work very well for most people. They set up worthwhile hoops for people to jump through.
5. In most institutions, the way to judge someone's worth is "What nifty, pre-existing hoops that I know about did you opt to jump through?" If it's something weird like getting a book published or starting a software business, it doesn't count. The judge can't use this sort of thing in comparing one candidate to another because there are few other candidates who have done the same OR because the judge is possibly someone for whom the generalization in 1-2 applies and just doesn't get it.
I don't know a lot of other people my age who have real passion about what they do and can pull through on significant projects that they start themselves.
Thinking I was going to die for a few days before I learned of my prognosis made me realize that rather than feeling weird and timid about this distinction, I should see it as kind of a superpower and go more gung-ho on some of my more successful endeavors.
What's also cool is that there are companies and individuals that can't afford to judge people according to the criteria in #5. And that isn't to say that it's not occasionally worth jumping through other people's hoops when it's not hurting anything :)
That last thing you stated is what I consider to be the ultimate check in capitalism, the thing that makes the system work. You can't set up a corrupt entity that lasts beyond a point, because things evolve too quickly.
Also, along the lines of 2 and 3, I think that's what explains why young people tend to have such uncommon successes of such magnitude. It's not because of drive per se: people of all ages have drive. But it's because the fact that there's such an imbalance in the system that makes people move forward.
I had an epiphany recently that, next to yours, seems pretty stupid and shallow, but it's an epiphany that moved me nonetheless. It was the realization that, despite all the stuff that I'd tried to do, all the stuff I thought I could do, there were still some pretty basic social things I would be incapable of, if I kept along the route I was going. And I didn't like that. So I've started working out, eating more healthily, trying to normalize a bit in preparation for college. And what I've found is that while I'm doing that stuff, I find getting work done to be far easier, too. The two go hand-in-hand. And it's at young ages that trying to show off in shallow ways really stays a priority.
It's like the article about Zuckerberg that was on here a week ago. When he was in high school, he wasn't a typical coder: he was an active fencer in the top levels of the USFA, and he was in quite a few social clubs, too. This isn't a case of somebody who's a brilliant coder going off and writing code. That doesn't happen often at all, not even when you look at success stories in Silicon Valley. Rather, he was a very bright person who dabbled in a lot of things, who had an idea and who did whatever he could to bring that idea to fruition. I think the part of that story that fascinated me the most was the part describing how he began Facebook because his girlfriend snubbed him. What an absolutely honest start to a site: something about that story felt absolutely real to me.
Man, does this hit the proverbial nail on the head. I am a big proponent of education, however, in my experience, a formal education is not a perfect fit for all. I wish there would have been more emphasis on how to make a living doing something one enjoys and not just academic legerdemain in the form of "get a degree and you'll get plenty o' dough and be happy" when pursuing a trade would net potential millions with no crushing student loan debt. Thanks for some excellent thoughts on our school system.
It's also on Amazon; I tried publishing with Lulu and CreateSpace and CreateSpace produced a much higher-quality product by far. I think it's very good - you might like it - but my goal was to actually finish a product of great magnitude, not to worry about production or sales. So I wrote the thing, designed the pages and the cover, and after that I mentioned that I did it, I bring it up, but now I'm focused on other things.
Thanks a ton. That's what I was going for: I wasn't certain about being able to write with experience about things, so I wanted to at least do something in a book that I hadn't seen done before.
The way public school systems are set up, you get multiple social spheres that are forced to interact. You've got the sports group - the people who push away their boredom for school with a fascination for physical activity. There're the honor students, or whatever you want to call them - the people who study for hours a day, who partake in activities with Machiavellian efficiency. The ones who will do anything as long as it means a shot at the Ivies.
Those are the two ones people know and talk about. The one that ISN'T mentioned, the one that absolutely exists, is the smaller sphere of people who know what they want to do with their life. It's always a set of bright students, but students that have no seeming motivation toward school. They're just as real a group as the other two, but they have no need to announce their presence, so they're really often missed when people talk about them. They're the people, I think, that really propel innovation.
The interesting thing is that beyond a sort of personal drive, those people tend to have nothing outwardly in common. There're very nerdy people in that group and there are people as far from nerds as they come. Quiet people, loud people. They blend between the other spheres - despite a focus on things not school-related, a ton of them go to really top-notch schools. I'd put myself in this category. I very rarely put an effort into any part of school, did no work, and I'm still going to a really top-notch public school. It's not an Ivy, it's not what I've been told for a long time I ought to be striving for, but I've known for a long time what I want to do with life and I don't think that an Ivy League school can help me any more than a really good school can. Me and people like me become part of the statistic that drag schools down a lot. The sports sphere helps a lot, because the sports sphere is the sort that really shouldn't be kept in schools, because the sports sphere just doesn't care. But among the top-tiered students, it's the ones that don't care about standardized testing or academics at all that keep American schools so low.
That's also a huge boon for America, though. I can't talk about other generations, but in this generation it's entirely likely that by the time we're all going to college a lot of us have tried our hands at several things and dabbled in them. A lot of us have some semblance of "real world" experience, in other words. I tried my hand at a web start-up in my sophomore year. In my senior year I published a book. Neither thing is world-changing, but it means that as I work on web development today, when I try writing again, I've got a lot of experience as to what learns and what doesn't. A friend of mine has been learning how to code and create models for game design since something like eighth grade. A bunch of my friends have launched sites and blogs of their own; one friend was mentioned on G4 for a tutorial he wrote. This isn't a particularly exceptional school I'm at, either; nearly every school I know the name of has its share of breakthrough kids.
I can only speak for my culture, not for others. But it seems to me that paradoxically, it's America's inability to handle kids like that that makes its school system so effective in delivering innovation. When you have a culture of youth that's already experienced and capable of learning from its mistakes, you have a core generation that has an edge over even the best-taught students from the rest of the world. You get a sort of encouragement of big ideas and of youth. You grow up hearing stories about Bill Gates at 19 and Steve Jobs at 21; about the Beatles and the Beach Boys and about all the musicians who started in grade school. (Incidentally, I think that the fact that there are no real writers who made it that young corresponds to the fact that so few young people want to be writers.) We get stories about Welles making Citizen Kane at an age when most graduates are just looking for jobs. It teaches this idea that it doesn't matter what your grades are, because you could be getting things done rather than studying, and that introduces a whole new aspect on to your world.