The End of Average by Todd Rose REVIEW
Rose opens his book by telling us about a rash of crashes experienced by the United States in the 1930’s. The crashes were not being caused by mechanical failure and all the pilots were well trained. Investigations led to the conclusion that problem had to do with the way that pilots were not fitting into the cockpits. “How could that be?” the engineers argued. They were built to fit the average pilot perfectly. The problem was that those averages were the result of a dozen or so different measurements and what they found was that in actuality, out of 463 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all dimensions. “The average is completely useless,” Rose concludes, and in this case, fatal. “There was no such thing as an average pilot, Rose writes, “If you have designed the cockpit to fit the average pilot, you have actually designed it to fit no one.”
The author goes on to explain how many systems built for the average person have met and are meeting similar fates. Even the human brain, an organ that may look on the outside like an interchangeable part, defies averaging. One might like to assume that most people's brains should be fairly close to average. Neuroscientists certainly expected that at least some brains should be similar to the average. But studies of human brains have found that no single brain seems to even remotely resemble “the average brain.”
“The implications are hard to ignore: if you build a theory about thought, perception, or personality based on the average brain, then you have likely built a theory that applies to no one. The guiding assumption of decades of neuroscience research is unfounded. There is no such thing as an average brain.”
Uh-oh for education.
It is at this point that the author begins laying the groundwork for the radical proposals for change in education that he will conclude the book with. He begins with an excursion back in time to where the groundwork for the present system was laid. The mathematician, Adolph Quetelet (b. 1796)
In the 1840s, Queteley calculated the average chest size of a Scottish soldier and then concluded that each individual Scottish soldier's chest size represented an instance of naturally occurring error, whereas the average chest size represented the size of the true soldier – a perfectly formed soldier, free from any physical blemishes or disruptions, as nature intended a soldier to be. For Queteley, The average man was perfection itself, an ideal that nature aspired to, free from error with a capital E. He declared that the greatest men in history were closest to the average man of the place and time. Quetelet’s invention of the average man marked the beginning of what Rose calls, “the Age of Average.” Western Societies began designing systems as though the average person were the “purpose” ever since.
Here, Rose’s story turns to another mathematician, Francis Galton.
“Galton concurred with Queteley that the average represented the scientific foundation for understanding people. In fact, Galton agreed with almost all of Queteley's ideas, save one: the idea that the average man represented natures ideal. Nothing could be further from the truth, claimed Galton. For him to be average was to be mediocre, crude, and undistinguished.”
Where Quetelet would have argued that both the person 50 percent smaller and the person 50 percent bigger were “errors” of form, Galton insisted that being over average made you superior. He also believed that in almost all cases, to be superior in one trait was highly likely to make you superior in all. “The best qualities are largely correlated,” he argued in 1909. Galton is the person we owe the most to when we see ideas of “rankings” embedded into our education systems. Galton is the one who we might turn to and praise or blame when we see colleges picking Freshman classes by evaluating their SAT scores only. A school designed by Galton would focus on a curriculum designed to “sort” students into their appropriate places so that society can put them to best use – in management – on the shop floor – bagging groceries. It is a system that is built on the notion that if you are below average on a test, you are intrinsically below average in all ways.
And now, we look at the historical process by which Quetelet’s and Galton’s ideas were embedded into the system and that starts with the statistician and management “expert,” Frederick Winslow Tayler and the Educational Psychologist and author Edward Thorndike.
“There is a rock upon which many an ingenious man has stranded, that of indulging in his inventive faculty,” Taylor warned in 1918, “It is thoroughly illegitimate for an average man to start out to make a radically new machine, or method, or process to replace one which is already successful.” IN a 1906 lecture Taylor explained how he saw the relationship between workers and managers, “”In our scheme, we do not ask for the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say and do it quick.”
“In 1918, Taylor doubled down on these [averagarian] ideas, dishing out similar advice to aspiring mechanical engineers: "every day, year in and year out, each man should ask himself, over and over again, two questions: first, what is the name of the man I am now working for? And what does this man want me to do? The most important idea should be that of serving the man who is over you his way not yours.”
This argument was soon being applied in factories all over the country and would soon make its way into educational reform movements as well. Educational Taylorists insisted that the purpose of schools was to prepare average men to work in the new economy.
“I don’t want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers.” – John D Rockefeller
“In our dream we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.” – Frederick T Gates
As American business moved towards the controlled workshop floor, writer Edward Thorndike believed that the schools that prepared workers for those floors should be sorting young people
“according to their ability so that they could efficiently be appointed to their proper station in life, whether manager or worker, eminent leader or disposable outcast – and so that educational resources could be allocated accordingly. Thorndike's guiding axiom was quality is more important than equality.”
According to Rose,
“Thorndike agreed that every aspect of the educational system should be standardized around the average, not only because this would ensure standardized outcomes, as the Taylorists believed, but because it made it easier to measure each students deviation from the average – and thus made it easier to determine who is superior and who was inferior.”
“For Thorndike, the purpose of schools was not to educate all students to the same level, but to sort them, according to their innate level of talent.”
And thus the system that many of us are familiar with was born. A system that tested all to determine average and that started sorting those testers into bins from “gifted” to “useless.”
So what could be wrong with such a system? The first objection to “averagism” Rose suggests is “the Jaggedness principle.” The problem is that no one assessment can possibly be used to define a single person. There is no such thing as a person who is average on all counts.
Out of tens of thousands of players who have come through the NBA since 1950, Rose argues as an example, only five players have ever lead their team on all five crucial dimensions of determining excellence: Scoring, rebounds, steals, assists, and blocks.
Secondly, Rose argues that assessments in different contexts will always yield different results. “Behavior is not determined by traits or the situation, but emerges out of the unique interaction between the two. If you want to understand a person, descriptions of their average tendencies or essential nature are sure to lead you astray.” A kid tested on auto-mechanics through a paper test may score completely differently than a kid tested with a real car engine. A Navy Seal tested on a treadmill may not score as well when the same physical demands are placed on them underwater or while under fire. Rose uses the famous marshmellow test to demonstrate.
In the marshmallow test, young children are told that they can have a marshmallow right now or, if they are willing to wait fifteen minutes until the tester returns, they can have two. The tester leaves the room so that the child is faced with a single tempting marshmallow. The test is meant to determine which children have the executive function and fortitude to delay gratification. The results of the test can be completely skewed however by adding one small alteration. If children have been promised something that they did not receive just before they take this test, they will take the marshmallow with far greater frequency. That simple change to the experiment demonstrates that tests are always the result of an interaction between the tester and the circumstance. (By the way, I don’t even like marshmallows so I would have done well on this test.)
Rose insists in his chapter entitled “We All Walk the Road Less Traveled” that even the way we learn the most basic of skills defies uniformity. Researchers for instance, he says, have discovered there is no such thing as a normal pathway to crawling. Out of 28 different children who were meticulously observed learning to walk there were no less than 25 different pathways to success “each with its own unique movement patterns, and all of them eventually lead to walking.”
“Every baby solves the problem of movement in her own unique way.”
Rose’s central argument is that educational systems need to leave their addiction to the ideas of Quetelet, Galton, Taylor, and Thorndike behind.
“The data confirms that the pace at which any given student learns is not uniform: we all learn some things quickly other things slowly, even within a single subject.”
The author argues that students have a right not only to access an education but they also have a right to and education that fits.
It is, no doubt, in this spirit that Vermont is implementing new educational reforms that require all its students to have a personalized education plan and to be given access to flexible pathways to an appropriate education for them. The author’s message is that students should no longer be restricted by the standard curriculum and graduation requirements. He would argue for a system of multiple certificates so that students can mix and match their way to the competencies that are organic to them.
“A self-determined, competency-based credentialing system is also more closely aligned with the principles of individuality. It fulfills the jaggednes principle, since it allows students to figure out what they like, what they are good at, and what is the best way to pursue these interests. It fulfills the context principal by evaluating students competency in a context as close as possible to the professional environment where they will actually perform. And if it fulfills the pathways principal by allowing each student to learn at their own pace, and follow the sequence that is right for them.”
Question for Comment: Can a single “system” continue to meet the needs of every student when the idea of the average student begins to be regarded as a heretical idea?
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