Just a few links to some thought provoking articles about what sort of life is best for finding happiness. I like the term “life satisfaction” in the first one, and I like the discussion about anchoring difficulties in the second. Anchoring difficulty means that if you ask someone a question, you very well might influence how they answer the next question you ask. If you ask people how much they enjoy life and then ask them how their love life is, there is very little correlation between the answers, but if you ask them in reverse order, there is a strong correlation because you just reminded them of a significant factor they might judge their happiness on. This makes objective surveys about life satisfaction very difficult, because how you phrase it will very much influence how they answer.
On a side note, Kristof makes reference to his new book, “Half The Sky” which is a brilliant read about the greater effects of empowering women on poverty, happiness, technology, and politics. In it he describes a seminar that Bill Gates was holding in Saudi Arabia and 4/5th of the audience was men and the women were segregated behind a curtain. Bill Gates did his normal routine about technology and innovation and then went to the question-answer section. One man raised his hand and asked, “we hope to bring Saudi Arabia into the top 10 countries in the world for technology innovation by 2010. Do you think that is possible?” (this seminar was probably 2001 or so) to which Bill responded, “well, not if you aren’t effectively utilizing half of the talent in your country.” To which the women went into a paroxysm of cheering and a few men golf clapped.
Here are the two articles:
Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving by Nicholas D. Kristof
Economists fail at finding the source of happiness.
How do we seek out happiness? Is it within our control or does it depend on our circumstances? Should we seek happiness? Are there more important things?
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High Standards means only one thing: expecting a lot. When applied to education it takes on the additional meaning: expecting people to know and be able to do a lot. The process of applying “High Standards” to education must first quantify the outcome of education then expect that that the outcome of the arbitrary quantification be high when compared to the bell curve of world population. They are data centric and therefore time consuming, inherently arbitrary to success and productivity, and distracting/misleading because of limitations on what can be tested.
I think it is perhaps more important to define what “High Standards” are not. They are not a strategy that will lead to better teaching, the improved teaching is suppose to come from the negative reinforcement of failing to meet them. The data does not tell us whether or not a school is successful at teaching (however you define it) because there are too many other factors that go into a student doing well on a test that it becomes like correlating humidity with rain. When it’s raining it is probable humid but if it is humid then it is not necessarily raining. When district does well on tests then it is probably undergoing good instruction but if a district is undergoing good instruction then it doesn’t necessarily mean it will do well on tests.
I use this reasoning to infer that the term “High Standards” when applied to education must mean “Enabling our population to do well on tests.” This means we either need to use testing that better correlates to what we want out of education, like internship evaluations and self actualization assessments, or stop using the term “High Standards” in favor of something more applicable, like “Personalized Education” or (my favorite) “Badass 101.” But I digress.
Sorry Quinn, I posted my last comment to the wrong article. And accidently put some HTML in at the top when trying to bracket something. Could you remove it so I could fix it?
Copy and paste it over to the right article and then I will delete this version.