Is education limited to a timeline?
Schools, as we all know, follow a timeline. As soon as a student begins school, a race against time and comparison with other students starts. The students who move fast in this timeline or perform much better than his/her peers are considered bright students. And of course, every class has one or two bright students. I have no doubt that the majority of these bright students do well in their personal lives or make good and rewarding careers. To do well in life or career one needs to follow the existing systems. The question is how many of these bright students become great humans by creating a new system that becomes mainstream and changes humanity’s direction?
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With a quick glance at what we learn in school, one realizes that learning a system is fast but creating a new system requires an intellectual “Superman” or “Supergirl” if you like. For instance, children learn abstract ideas like alphabets and numerals in the first two years of schooling. It took humanity more than 6 million years to invent these abstract systems. Why did it take humanity so long to come up with systems that children learn in a few years of mentored learning? We can find some clues in the difference between learning a language and writing. Children learn language with ease, and when they enter the school, they are already equipped with the spoken language. Learning writing, requires immense effort from the student, and his/her mentors, simultaneously. Let’s put it another way. It is very likely that humans in the stone age spoke complex languages comparable to modern languages. In 1930, Michael Leahy, an Australian Gold prospector came across the native people in the central mountains of New Guinea - the second largest island in the world - that he thought spoke in a “jabbering” language [1]. By 1960, it was learned that the native people spoke 800 different languages. The island was isolated from the rest of humanity for 40,000 years, and the languages that evolved were distinct to this island. In comparison, humans invented writing 5000 years ago. It is common knowledge that both alphabets and numerals evolved slowly in the last 5000 years. For instance, ancient Egyptians could write in hieroglyphics, and ancient Romans didn’t have the concept of zero. Noam Chomsky has an answer for the differences between language acquisition and writing skills. He proposes that all humans have an innate capacity for language and all languages follow a universal grammar [2]. The innate ability for language, even the partial innate ability explains well, why cavemen could have complex languages, and children learn language at ease even in isolated tribes.
Once students learn how to read and write, they are implicitly told that to become good at something they have to practice a lot. Phrases like, “practice makes perfect” are often quoted in a variety of ways. In recent years, round numbers such as 10,000 or 1,000,000 have become popular. It is so appealing to learn that if one spends “10,000” hours at anything, he or she can become very good at it. It is known as a 10,000 rule [3]. It takes 3-4 years of disciplined commitment to accomplish the 10,000 rule. Let’s do some simple calculations. If one spends 8 hours a day with no breaks for 3.4 years on a single task such as writing, he or she can accomplish the 10,000 hours rule. Besides, the 10,000-hour rule, there is a million-word rule [4] for becoming a good writer which agrees on the amount of time with the 10,000 rule. If a person makes a commitment to writing 1000 words every day, it will take him or her 3 years to complete the task of writing 1 million words.
In school, students spend lots of time reading and writing. If the 10,000 hours or a million hours rule is true, why do we not see a mass of good writers and speakers among high school graduates? By the time a student graduates from high school, he or she has spent more than 10,000 hours in school learning the basics of human knowledge. The 10,000 hours number comes from OECD [5] which says that a student in the U.S. spends 8,884 hours over 9 years in primary and lower secondary schools. If we add 4 more years that a student spends in high school to this number considering that the student spends 180 days per year or 1260 hours per year in school, a high school graduate has spent 13924 hours in school.
When I googled famous authors with high school education, 14 names showed up including Mark Twain, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, George Orwell, David Hume, Robert Frost, Jackie Collins, Michael Morpurgo, Frank McCourt, Roald Dahl, Dana Goldstein, Anne Ruggles Gere, and Juana Ines de la Cruz. What these famous writers had or done that millions of other high school graduates did not do? A quote attributed to Pablo Picasso may shed some light on this problem, “It took me 4 years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Picasso’s four years also agrees with the 10,000 hours or a million words rule but it adds another dimension to the debate, and that’s the personal calling. Since the 10,000 rule is a general rule, we may argue that by spending 10000 hours one can acquire the competency needed to write well or paint well, but to write something or paint something that changes the way people think or see things requires something personal - something that allows people see things beyond learned frames of thinking or organizing things, in case of Picasso seeing things like children, for instance. Just as Picasso learned to paint like Raphael, if he kept painting in that style, he wouldn’t be the Picasso we know. He had to come up with something totally different from all previous artists, something very close to the cave artists.
Do genetic and environmental variations explain the difference between good and great?
Physical performances like athletic performances are greatly influenced by genetic variations -30 to 80 percent [6]. The muscle composition like slow-twitch muscle fiber and fast-twitch muscle fiber determines the endurance versus speed of the athletes, aerobic capacity - the maximum amount of oxygen that the body can provide to muscles, and other obvious physical determinants like height and muscle mass are mostly predetermined by the genetic inheritance. Besides physical fields, genetics also have a great influence on the intellectual performances of individuals. It is no brainer to see the link between one’s ability to behave, regulate one’s emotions, and form social bonds or attachments will determine one’s performance in school, work, relationships, and quality of life, in general. These three qualities are attributed to one’s temper, and it has been shown that temper is influenced by genetic inheritance [7]. In addition to genetics, environmental influences play an enormous role in both the physical and intellectual performances of a person. There is a critical period for the acquisition of a new language or language. A child exposed to multiple languages at the age of 1 to 5 years can effortlessly become multilingual. Recent studies extended the critical period for the acquisition of new languages to 17-18 years of age [8]. Another important aspect of the environment is the development of the attachment style that a baby develops in the first year of life [9] depending on the relationship of the baby to the caregiver which will highly influence the child’s future relationship when he or she enters into adulthood.
Based on the variations in genetics and also the environment, it becomes obvious that there will be great variations among individuals just by following the 10,000 hours rule. It is also evident from the results of high school graduates. As mentioned before, students spend around 14000 hours in school to graduate high school, but only 60 to 70% of the students enrolled in colleges from 1993 to 2021 [10]. Besides, time, genetics, and environment are other factors to consider when we think about becoming good at something. Considering the accelerating rates of progress in every field, it seems a sufficient number of individuals become good at something. Considering the global talent pool at Silicon Valley that has come from gene pools across the globe and from a variety of educational institutions, one can argue that deliberate practice for around 10,000 hours may override most of the genetic and environmental variations among individuals. Becoming good enough at something is universal for most abled men and women. My argument is about going from good to great. Considering very few great men and women in each generation, I am inclined to think that going from good to great is something personal.
So, What makes someone go from good to great?
I began this article by comparing language versus writing and numerals and argued that writing and numerals were hard to invent because, unlike language, they are based on systems. Numerals as a system of thinking are still in progress. What makes an individual great is not mere time spent practicing but time spent tweaking a system to improve or change it enough that it allows the rest of humanity to see the reality whether natural or constructed with a new perspective. Most people learn -mostly from schools - the systems but very few try to change it for the better.
References
[1] Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. How the Mind Creates Language. Harper Perennial Modern Classics Edition, 2007.
[2] Tool Module: Chomsky's Universal Grammar, https://tinyurl.com/yjjm57mr
[3] Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success. Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2019.
[4] Fortier-Dubois, Étienne. “How Many Words Have You Ever Written?”, Atlas of Wonders and Monsters, 30 Dec. 2021, https://tinyurl.com/2unpd3x4
[5] “United States: Read Online.” Oecd, https://tinyurl.com/ykbd53ev
[6] “Is Athletic Performance Determined by Genetics?: Medlineplus Genetics.” MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, https://tinyurl.com/2p82uk4b
[7] Cloninger, C.R., Cloninger, K.M., Zwir, I. et al. The complex genetics and biology of human temperament: a review of traditional concepts in relation to new molecular findings. Transl Psychiatry 9, 290 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-019-0621-4
[8] “Cognitive Scientists Define Critical Period for Learning Language.” MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1 May 2018, https://tinyurl.com/mpzdrufb
[9] Li, Pamela. “Bowlby & Ainsworth Attachment Theory – How Does It Work?” Parenting for Brain, 17 Jan. 2023, www.parentingforbrain.com/attachment-theory.
[10] 61.8 Percent Of Recent High School Graduates Enrolled In College In October 2021 : The Economics Daily: U.S. Bureau Of Labor Statistics. 23 May 2022,https://tinyurl.com/3pk448ha
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