Averages are, by definition, measures of mediocrity. We can’t design schools and education around them.
It was serendipity that in the midst of the STOP Award, I interviewed Todd Rose on in Piazza. Rose, an educator and author, uses research to identify basic thinking and behaviors we engage in that may undermine our ability to thrive in most situations. Take his 2017 book, The End of Average, Unlocking Our Potential by Embracing What Makes Us Different. “We live in a society for the last hundred and something years [that is] deeply standardized… Whether it’s the way we think about people, [or] the way we structure our institutions like education… the assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don’t even question it. That is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.” In fact, averages are, by definition, measures of mediocrity, the lowest common denominator, the results of which can be seen in today’s education system. Rose, who formerly directed the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality at Harvard University and has since founded Populace, a think tank devoted to recognizing and focusing on the needs of the individual, not a one-size-fits-all format in education or society at large, is right. Standardization was key when this public education enterprise first began, however. Horace Mann’s vision was a structured, uniform system of education that muted all diversity of culture and thought into one, homogeneous (and protestant) world view. It was felt necessary for a newly diversifying country with hundreds of odd and different cultures emerging here at once. How do you make citizens out of people who are not taught to become one? It’s still a noble goal to do so.
