Category: Education

David Brooks, Part Two: Demography Is King

In his editorial Demography Is King, Brooks describes how in recent decades in the US, “some social divides, mostly involving ethnicity, have narrowed. But others, mostly involving education, have widened. Today there is a mass educated class. The college educated and non-college educated are likely to live in different towns. They have radically different divorce rates and starkly different ways of raising their children. The non-college educated not only earn less, they smoke more, grow more obese and die sooner.”

He relates how Barack Obama has won “densely populated, well-educated areas” while Hillary Clinton has carried “less-populated, less-educated areas.” “For example, Obama has won roughly 70 percent of the most-educated counties in the primary states. Clinton has won 90 percent of the least-educated counties… This social divide has overshadowed regional differences. Sixty-year-old, working-class Catholics vote the same, whether they live in Fresno, Scranton, Nashua or Orlando.”

His argument? “In this election, persuasion isn’t important. Social identity is everything. Demography is king.”

What makes the editorial interesting is how he bucks the trend of buying into popular explanations about social identity. “Over the years, different theories have emerged to describe the educated/less-educated divide. Conservatives have gravitated toward the culture war narrative, dividing the country between the wholesome masses and the decadent cultural elites. Some liberals believe income inequality drives everything. They wait for an uprising of economic populism. Other liberals divide the country morally, between the enlightened urbanites and the racist rednecks who will never vote for a black man.”

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Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture

I finally watched it–the Carnegie Mellon professor, dying of pancreatic cancer, and his words and wisdom to his friends, students, colleagues and most importantly, his young daughters. There is a reason the lecture is so popular. It made me proud to be a professor, made me consider how to teach interdisciplinary and engaged courses, made me stand up for a student who is struggling, and more. Trust the head fake.

Digital Ethnography

Michael Wesch has an on-going project Digital Ethnography with his students at Kansas State University. Looking at what they have done impressed me, and gave me ideas for things that I might do with my own classes and research. I like the engaged, participatory style and with issues like substance use or health care seeking, it proves so useful to show people what it is like. Students doing the work and then sharing that with a broader world, that is a good model.

Wesch has one popular video The Machine Is Us/ing Us, covering Internet 2.0 and the revolution in interconnected digitial communication. In many ways, I found his message about the Internet as quite similar to the message we are promoting here at neuroanthropology, that connections matter, that we drive change in our brains, that we need to rethink traditional concepts. So enjoy that.

His students came up with a great video A Vision of Students Today, which helps justify spending time on a blog rather than traditional papers (hey, students are more likely to actually read this) and also the need to teach in non-traditional but equally effective ways. And it’s just well done.

Emotional intelligence in training

Although I’m not a real big fan of some of the work on ’emotional intelligence,’ here’s an interesting short video of Daniel Goleman on Karma Tube (a positive, social change video site). As the page explains:

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, asks why we aren’t more compassionate more of the time. Sharing the results of psychological experiments (and the story of the Santa Cruz Strangler), he explains how we are all born with the capacity for empathy — but we sometimes choose to ignore it.

I’m really not sure what we gain by putting ’emotional’ with ‘intelligence’ except that it does seem to increase the importance of empathy and perceptivity for those who undersell these human capacities. That is, I think the furor of ‘EI’ is in part simply that people who normally don’t get just how crucial interpersonal savvy is suddenly notice it.

Nevertheless, Goleman is a good big picture thinker, and in this piece he points out the malleability of human empathy, a crucial consideration for neuroanthropologists. It’s important to point out training effects on these abilities so that we’re not too prone to considering them permanent ‘personality’ traits.

Social Entrepreneurship

David Brooks has an editorial today, Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders, about how rich entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Bill Drayton are turning to philanthropy and social change through a decidedly different model than a generation ago.  The old model?  “The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.” 

The new do-gooders come with a different view: “[They] have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.” 

Brooks points to the central problem of scalability.  “How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?”  In my classes and talks, I often call this the franchise model, the McDonalds of social change. 

The central assumption is still the “we can drive change” model—through knowledge, market forces, financing and scientific evidence, we can “rebuild him”—we can make a Six Million Dollar Man out of a broken social body, one involved in a terrible accident of history.  It is rather like my critique of behavioral economics in Decision Making and Emotion.  A definite step forward, but leaving too many things out.  It’s still all about the program, not the social context, not the relationships, not the world view, say of black versus white, that might also impact social change.  Find the right techniques, and we can change the world.

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