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this rather sobering reflection on the state of education today from Richard Peck: You can teach children, or you can fear their parents, but you can’t do both. So true. When teachers pander to parents, children lose. They become spoiled, weak, vain, self-indulgent. Parents can’t always demand enough from their children — we are too close, too sympathetic. A good teacher will take a child and force them to do better than they thought they could. And it will cost the child. It will be hard. It will make them work, think, cry even. But it will make them grow.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.

When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn't find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

I taught for five to twenty hours a week, and very little of it was about the books. So, if concepts from books are easy, what’s hard?Doing it.Picking up the phone, making the plan, signing the deal. Pushing ‘publish.’ Announcing. Shipping.We spent a lot of time on this area. Every morning, each person came in prepared to push someone in the group to overcome the next hurdle. This is what growth looks like, and it was energizing to be part of.We didn’t do this at all at when I was at Stanford. We spent a lot of time reading irrelevant case studies and even more time building complex financial models. The thing is, you can now hire someone to build a complex financial model for you for $60 an hour. And a week’s worth of that is just about all the typical entrepreneur is going to need. The rest of the time, it’s about shipping, motivating, leading, connecting, envisioning and engaging. So that’s what we worked on.It amazes me that MBA students around the world aren’t up in arms. How can schools justify taking $100,000 in cash and teaching exactly the wrong stuff?