The New York Times has a "Bits" section this morning devoted to "Big Data". It's quite a lot to absorb, and I, at least, come away from it with my biases confirmed: In general, it's better to have more data than less, but data is only as good as your interpretation of it. And if you are looking for a needle in a haystack, it's probably not a good thing to create more hay. And there's very little control over who makes hay with the hay.
And while it's one thing to have access to a lot of information; it's another to have good judgment. And of course, motive is everything. What do you want the data to tell you, and for what ends do you want to use it?
One article in this section in particular struck me, an interview with Lazlo Bock, the senior vice president for people operations at Google. ("People operations"?) I found this exchange particularly because it points, among other things, to an explanation why Snowden's didn't need a high school diploma to get the jobs he's had:
Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?
A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.
Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?
A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.
Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Snowden was a very smart kid with ADHD, who couldn't stand being in school, and taught himself enough on his own to persuade someone like Bock to give him a shot. Once given real-world challenges and an environment where he was assigned tasks that he could complete working fairly autonomously, he thrived.
But another takeaway for me from this interview was its implications for schools. When it comes to learning, it's all about motivation. School is a waste of time for kids who are not motivated. Learning is largely about acculturation--you are motivated to learn the things the people who care about you think are important. If you don't find that at home or at school, you find it on the street. That's why motivation for kids starts to plummet in Middle School.
Kids wake up to something they are interested in, maybe because a teacher introduced them to it. Maybe it was something they found online. Maybe something they saw on TV. There are any number of sources to awaken and engage kids in learning, but learning ultimately is self-driven, and it's easy now to become an autodidact in almost any subject matter if you are motivated enough to follow through. Problem is that what engages isn't necessarily healthy. In the Age of Whatever, anything goes, so long as you are passionate about it. But some things deserve our commitments, and others just don't.
So, schools, if they were to function effectively, should be places that awaken kids to things that deserve their commitments. I see schools evolving in such a way that K-8 will provide the basics in literacy, numeracy, music/art, and some basic orienting information about how the world works through basic science and social studies. (I forced my very resistant kid to take violin until he was in 8th grade, and then told him he could quit if he wanted to. But he chose to play in his high school orchestra, and had a great time using skills he would not otherwise have had.) And then there should be a broader set of programmatic learning options for kids after that, and I don't know that schools have to be the only place to get it. So if we must have a common core, limit it K-8--open things up after that.
The key for adolescents is to provide them with an environment where there are adults who care about them and who want to guide them through the learning process rather than imposing an agenda. And maybe to get some tough love when occasion calls for it. They need an environment that provides a robust alternative--or at least a supplement--to the learning that goes on in the streets or in the isolation of their room with a computer.