Best Books of the Year, 2013, Part I

In this year’s edition of best books of the year, I will try to make the books I list speak to each other in a thematic way.  The 3 listed below are all written for a mass audience. For some readers and reviewers alike this decision to appeal to the masses places them in a less serious category than a tenured academic expert writing a dense tome full of much detailed research and lots of footnotes and that, as a result, will be read by hundreds instead of hundreds of thousands   I agree there is a need for books written for other specialists, but the 3 books on my list raise important issues in education. If administrators would read these books (Dennett’s first, as he sets the frame for how to learn), then perhaps the way some classes are structured and some largely unquestioned ideological assumptions could be the subject of reasoned debate rather than passed over in silence.

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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett

 Dennett is one of my intellectual heroes. While I think a number of his previous books contain more substantive investigations of meaning and being and how we came to be, this book is useful for those hoping to employ a set of tools for investigating virtually any claim made by thinkers and pundits on almost any subject. His prose is conversational (mostly, a few chapters are pretty tough sledding), and this, for some people, automatically puts the book into the category of middlebrow at best. But this is exactly why I think this book is important. While there are plenty of specific rhetorical and thinking tools described in the book, it is Dennett’s approach to education and writing that I want to highlight. Dennett’s approach to philosophy and teaching should be held up as a model to faculty around the world. 

At Tufts, where Dennett teaches philosophy (and to whom this book is dedicated), he has created a series of classes and speakers series that offers undergraduates a chance to hear from and question some of the most prestigious thinkers in the world. He believes that any scholar should be able to put into compelling words what they do to a room of bright undergraduates. He is not an advocate for dumbing down; instead, he thinks that great thinkers are those who can explain what they do to bright people.  This approach goes a long way back. Socrates (and the sophists too) talked with young men (back then that was the way it was) in ways that tried to instill many of the same thinking tools that Dennett puts forward in updated terms and with updated issues—computers and brain science being just two of many). Unfortunately, I think most academics would disagree with him. They would, I assume, say the depths they plumb are far too deep for almost anyone but a coterie of similarly trained people. Studies show that most books published by academics are read by a coterie; only those supposedly in the know will be able to follow the 'abstruser musings'. Dennett challenges this and also provides lots of intuition pumps (thought experiments and useful metaphors for rhetorical ways to approach the world) to help the interested skeptics of the world. 

Dennett quote

Imagine if more faculties were given funds to bring in great speakers to classes who had to teach what they know in ways that would inspire undergraduates?  What a waste of their time and great minds? I certainly don’t thnk so. Dennett’s as smart as all but a few, yet he cares enough to see that teaching means communicating in ways that affect more than just a select elect. I hope that the heads of academic departments and deans of schools will read his words and decide his wisdom about wisdom is worth implementing within their schools too.

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David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell

Speaking of middlebrow, it has become a common sport these days for academics to pile on the critiques of Malcolm Gladwell. After all, he is a popularizer of studies that purport to demonstrate things like tipping points and blinks.  But he is, so some say, nothing more than a journalist. Where are his academic credentials? How does he have the right to talk about topics that he has not spent years researching? Instead, he redacts what is out in the world and uses compelling narrative to tell his tales. So this way of thinking about his thinking has been put in prose in much media in response to his newest book "David and Goliath". 

I recommend this book for one particular chapter that, it must be said, has received critiques in book reviews as prestigious as The New York Times. In telling the story of a student, pseudonymously named Caroline Sacks, Gladwell makes a point I have written about on this blog and many other places. Ms. Sacks is a star student in high school. She’s been accepted to the University of Maryland and to Brown.  For almost anyone, there is no real choice to be made. Brown is an Ivy with prestige. Maryland is a well thought of State University. She wants to major in a STEM field and, not surprisingly chooses Brown. (In my time in admission the number of people I saw who turned down an Ivy for a state school could be counted on one hand unless they received a merit scholarship).  But the students she’s in classes with at Brown are as good or better than she is. She struggles and then gives up on STEM. Gladwell says she would have been better off at Maryland where her chances of doing well would, statistically, be much better.  The critics have jumped on this typical story telling approach of Gladwell. He takes a story, makes it personal, and lets it stand for something grander. If the story of one student were all that the chapter consisted of, then I‘d agree with the critiques. But it isn’t. He provides data to show grade distribution of STEM majors across schools, from Harvard to a school most have never heard of—Hartwick. The distribution is the same, but the quality of students differs if scores and academic programs and grades in high school mean anything (and studies demonstrate they do). A student coming in at the very top of a school has a better chance of graduating the same way. It’s the big fish small/pond story that again he backs with data. 

More importantly, he ends the chapter with a review of data published in the book “Mismatch”. I named "Mismatch" one of my best books in 2012, but it has been largely ignored by those who are in positions of power in education across the US. Its findings might be summed up simply: an inconvenient truth. Under-represented students, who are given a dramatic push up in admission to law school, do not fare well. The graduation rates are low and the bar passage rate is even lower. Both Gladwell and the "Mismatch" authors question the wisdom of putting students into a very big pond who have academic rubrics which predict they will not do as well as they would in a less competitive pond. The data is clear that this is what happens, but the pressure to diversify a school so it looks good on a profile often comes at the expense of individual students. Gladwell has taken a risk by citing this data and book, but the many reviews I’ve read of the book do what educators have already done—ignore it. Instead, they cite him for telling compelling stories without any real research. I think that the scholars and critiques should look more carefully at the data on the big/little pond research and the data in mismatch. If they can prove Gladwell wrong with more than just unsubstantiated critiques I would be more than willing to listen. As deep data begins to filter into education, and people somehow get access to performance data (colleges and uiversities do not wish to give out information which would call into question policies that might make their ideological postion subjec to questions), I think many will come to agree with Gladwell. The current default thinking that attending the highest ranked school, no matter what, including going into debt rather than accepting a merit schoarship, improves life chances should be questioned. So too do the policies of pushing up students up who belong to certain groups in order to address issues of social justice rather than promoting each individual’s chance for high academic performance (schools themselves often to point to graduation rates for certain groups as proof of success, but graduating from a school is far different than exceling in a school, especially for those who wish to attend graduate school or enter STEM fields).

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To Sell Is Human, Daniel Pink

Daniel Pink’s newest book takes a fairly simple premise and makes it into a book length examination of what most of us do in our lives: sell. I say lives as the way Pink defines selling expands what the traditional definition of selling is to what it really should be seen as in the world we live in today.

Starting from a wonderful description of the last Fuller Brush salesman, Pink takes us on a journey around the world to what selling is in what many think of as a virtual world. Many think that with on line options and ubiquitous aps for everything, sales people are doomed to be a disappearing breed. But he shows, convincingly, that 1 in 9 people in the US are directly involved in sales and that this figure has not changed over the last generation. More importantly, he demonstrates, again convincingly, that the other 8 of the 9 are also involved in sales too. He does this by using data. Something as simple as looking over his personal schedule becomes the beginning of a detailed study of what people do during their days. From emails, to meeting to consulting (literally and figuratively) almost all of us are trying to get others to part with resources. These resources may not be cash or a credit card number; instead, it could be time, information or expertise, but each of these must be given and each are given as a result if not of a sales job then at least of a job that centers on persuasion. I might even go one further remove (what the philosophers called going meta) and say that really all of us should understand that what we really need to learn in life in not so much sales but rhetoric and critical thinking. 

As important, to me, is the need to learn from much of the recent brain research that has been carried out in the last decade. (For some summaries of a few of the books on this topic, go here.) We have learned a great deal about how we as a species think. In any case, we should return to the lessons of Socrates and the sophists to learn how to frame our words in ways that persuade. Looking to the present and the future, we also need to be able to use the tools that are a part of our lives: computers, deep data analytics, social media, smart phones etc. In other words, we should have one foot in the past to see that with the advent of technology, persuasion happens best when it is personal. But personal means anything from Skyping across the globe to talk face to face virtually or using analytics to target an audience by very specific bits of information. 

Anyone interested in knowing how to improve both these skills should read this book. One chapter’s focus surprised me: "ed/med". The biggest growth industries in the world today are education and medicine. The latter I understand. There are more people than ever and all need health care. And people are living longer too and that means even more care. But the huge growth in what can be called the education industry (it is indeed big business now) worldwide is something I should have known more about before having read Pink's overview. Not only are more people gong to school, there are more and more options about what this means and how people can do it. While he does not address the newest kid on the educational block, MOOCs, this option will indeed change education for millions in the next generation. The tradional campus-based schools will need to change the way they sell their product or some, if not quite a few, will face extinction. But this is the subject of another book. That book will be a part of part 2 of my list of the best books of the year. Pink’s book gives some hints about how education and any other product needs to adopt and for those who don’t have time for an MBA this book might help save time and money on a degree we might not really need if we learn enough from him here and in other books he has written. He is a clear writer who has a Gladwellian ability to take stories like the Fuller Brush guy and expand it into a tale that opens our eyes to, if not universal applications, then at least to ones that are both global and personal.