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John Burk

One Percent Education - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...one-percent-education.html

changetheworld college_process social_status best_stuff

shared by John Burk on 22 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • The emphasis on personal achievement has done more than turn the admissions process into a race to rack up résumé points; more important, to the extent that elite colleges set the pace, it is turning the educational culture into one that stresses individual perfection instead of one that stresses social improvement.
  • At the turn of the last century, the influential philosopher John Dewey saw education as a democratizing force not just in its social consequences but in its very process. Dewey believed that education and life were inextricably bound, that they informed each other. Education wasn’t just something you did in a classroom to earn grades. It was something you lived.
  • There is a big difference between a culture that encourages engagement with the world and one that encourages developing one’s own superiority.
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  • Though educators are fond of saying you learn from failure, with today’s stakes, the best students know you cannot really afford to fail. You can’t even afford minor missteps. That is one of the lessons of 1 percent education: 1 percenters must always succeed.
  • Finally, a culture that rewards big personal accomplishments over smaller social ones threatens to create a cohort of narcissists.
  • In the end, 1 percent education is as much a vision of life as it is a standard of academic achievement — a recrudescence of social Darwinism disguised as meritocracy. Where the gap at the country’s best schools was once about money — who could afford to attend? — now there is the pretense that it is mostly about intelligence and skill. Many 99 percenters are awed by the accomplishments of 1 percenters, especially as the gap between rich and poor in SAT scores and college completion widens.
  • The danger isn’t just that people who are born on third base wind up thinking they hit a triple; the danger is that everyone else thinks those folks hit triples. One percent education perpetuates a psychology of social imbalance that is the very antitheses of John Dewey’s dream.
  • John Burk on 22 Jan 12
     
    So how do you introduce these ideas to a leading private school? 
John Burk

The Art of Non-Conformity » An Academic Confession - 0 views

chrisguillebeau.com/...academic-confession

college_process College_Counseling

shared by John Burk on 20 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • It took me a long time to get away from validating my life according to something that didn’t relate to my true hopes and goals. At the time, I really did want to devote years of my life doing things that no one would notice, in hopes of obtaining letters behind my name that no one would care about. As ridiculous as I knew it was, I still wanted it! It was hard to let go of… until I finally did.
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