Chapter 8. MOVING BEYOND ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE

The college grades of the women and men studied in Fulfilling Lives predicted very little about how they turned out as adults. The woman's grades predicted only one outcome fifteen to twenty years later: high-achieving women had been less happy and productive during their early adult years than those who had received lower grades. The men's grades also predicted few outcomes: those who had earned high grades also predicted few outcomes: those who had earned high grades, for example, not surprisingly received more fellowships and honours in graduate and professional schools and published more scholarly books.

Academic grades did not predict who would and would not fulfil their adult roles successfully. By middle age, a former A student was no more likely than a former C student to be martially happy or have a happy partner, to be more sexually compatible with his or her partner and a better lover, to be a better parent and have more mature children, or to have closer friends. High grades predicted neither vocational fulfillment nor income, virtue, physical or mental health, nor happiness. The only adult outcomes that high academic grades predicted were the middle-aged men's peer judgments that they were well adapted vocationally and had high leadership potential. Although grades did not predict involvement in one's community, another study found that students who achieved high grades contributed less frequently to its welfare.

Vocational Success

College grades only modestly predict an adult's job status and possibly rate of promotion, and do not predict vocational fulfillment, in one's early years.

Vocational Eminence and Creativity

One author found that graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who later become eminent British politicians and judges had had "academic records that we would nowadays view as catastrophic." Cynics might be tempted to reply, "That's why the world is in the mess that it is." A study of three hundred of this century's most eminent political, literary, artistic, and scientific figures belies contemporary parental views that not attending college condemns a youngster to eternal failure. Sixty percent of such eminent people had disliked or even flunked out of school; only 50 percent had gone to college.

Income

A rigorous critique of the studies examining the contribution of grades to earnings found that at most "about 2.3 percent of the differences in income are explainable by differences in college grades."

Teachers' Judgments and Academic Honours as Predictors

of Adult Success

Academic grades do not always reflect the quality of a student's mind.

Harvard graduates who received honours for distinctive academic achievement were less happy ten years later than those not graced with such distinction.

David McClelland, a Harvard researcher of adult achievement, has assessed as thoughtfully as anyone the available findings about academic accomplishments. He claims that it is not A or C+ average or honours but a college degree that predicts adult outcomes. And because we have not known until now just what qualities contribute to adult success, parents, teachers, and students have exaggerated the contribution that grades and honours makes to later life.

Clearly, the popular view that academic success is the premier route to adult success and the widely accepted Terman view that high intellectual talent is a great blessing had to be qualified. Why then does academic success and high talent not guarantee success - and why might they even create negative effects that may not show up until later and that could undermine adult success in some individuals?

The Limits of Academic Success and Talent

Why might some talented youth not turn out to succeed? Why might they be interpersonally immature? Success requires a variety of personality strengths that achievement and aptitude tests just don't measure. Scholastic tests measure too few high-level intellectual and other strengths to be used as good indicators of a person's success, even in college. About 85 percent of the reasons why college freshmen's grades differ may have nothing to do with SAT scores. SAT's do not assess mind's varied strengths, such as imaginativeness, judgement, inductive skill, reflectiveness, and organisational and synthetic ability. Nor do they measure character strengths, such as curiosity, doggedness, and the maturity necessary to do well in one's work.

Too constricted a view of what is "academic excellence" destroys minds. It defeats efforts to improve our schools. It is too narrowly applied, too irrelevantly measured, and too neglectful of the rich character strengths necessary to do well not just in school but in the world outside school as well. Perceptive students know these truths. They have not made the slogan their own. Their schools are places of despair, not hope.

A Vision of Human Excellence

Teachers and parents agree about the meaning of human excellence. Whether in London, Christchurch or Melbourne, they identify the same type of gifts that they wish their students or children might some day thank them for: self-confidence, joy of learning, sense of what is right, ability to teach themselves, curiosity, sensitivity to others, and compassion. When describing the most mature, fulfilled, all-round effective adult they know - the ideal person they wish they or their children were like - they invariably identify similar strengths. Heading their list is sense of humour, followed by self-confidence; enthusiasm and high energy; interpersonal strengths such as empathy, caring, and sensitivity to and tolerance of others; motivational strengths such as curiosity and openness to challenges and change; ethical values such as integrity; and self-directing qualities such as commitment and perseverance.

Teachers also agree quite well about the five most important core strengths that students will need in their rapidly changing, technology-dominated, interdependent, less coherent communities of the future. Whether in Auckland, Sydney or Manchester, they agree that adaptability should head the list. Communication and problem-solving skills come next followed by interpersonal attitudes such as tolerance of different people and skills such as co-operatively working with others, ethical values such as honesty, and self-concept as a member of a global community.

Human Excellence

Can we really define human excellence? Yes. Its core meaning has persisted for centuries and will continue well into the future. Words such as fulfillment, success, virtue, health, and happiness surely must capture facets of its meaning.

The route to adult fulfillment is successful adaptation to our six primary roles as workers, citizens, marital partners, parents, lovers, and friends. Since youth cannot foretell their personal futures, they should develop the core strengths necessary to adapt successfully to whatever roles they eventually elect. The following list presents in rough declining order of importance the core strengths that students need to adapt to.

Award Olympian stars to students for showing strengths needed for

all six roles:

Caring, compassion, honesty, integrity, sense of humour, openness, capacity for self-disclosure, tolerance and acceptance of others, dedication, commitment, understanding of others, respect for others, empathy for others, adaptability, flexibility and self-confidence.

Award Olympian stars for demonstrating strengths needed for five roles:

Patience, shared interests, values, and responsibilities. Intelligence, knowledgeability, affection, sensitivity to others' needs, trust in others, responsibility, and reliability. Consideration of and thoughtfulness about others, ability to prioritise use of time, high energy level, fairness and treatment of others as equal and good judgement.

Award Olympian Stars for Strengths Needed for Vocational

Success:

Mind's communication, analytical, and organisational skills, good judgement, and imaginative perspective as well as disciplined knowledge and specialised skills of their chosen occupation.

Character's interpersonal skills of understanding, care, and patience, as well as motivational attributes such as commitment to working hard and ethical values such as honesty and integrity.

For self-attitudinal strengths such as self-confidence and self-directing skills such as self-discipline, reliability, and decisiveness.

Strengths Needed to Be a Good Citizen

All societies use their schools to lead their children into their ways of thinking, believing, relating to others, and assuming for and serve their communities? Again, note and reinforce the strengths needed to be sterling citizens with "Olympian star awards".

Minds strengths, such as articulate and persuasive speaking and writing, problem-solving, and organisational skills, good judgement, and informed knowledge of issues.

Charter's interpersonal strengths, such as tolerance of and caring concern for others who differ from oneself, leadership skill, and values such as energetically committing energy to persevere for a cause as well as a strong ethical character and ideals.

Self-attitudinal strengths, such as self-confidence and optimism, as well as good self-organisational skills.

A sense of humour.

Have you asked just how many of these varied strengths your school educates for and measures? Is it not now clearer why academic grades and tests don't predict complex adult outcomes, such as good citizenship, very well? Or why too exclusive reliance on them as measures of future effectiveness endangers youth's confidence about their future success?

Personality of Virtuous, Healthy, and Happy People

For the first time, we have the scientific evidence to support religions' claims that virtue - defined by ethical values such as honesty and compassion and maturity of ethical judgement - is indispensible to human excellence. More virtuous men and women are more successful in their adult roles and are healthier and happier than less virtuous ones. They are also more mature, especially interpersonally. Understanding others and being sensitive to their needs and feeling, they excel in forming co-operative relationships.

Of course, people's mental health and happiness are also relevant to their success and human excellence. Mentally healthy people are successful and happy; happy people are mentally healthy and successful. Like any important success, our well being also depends upon strengths of character and self as well as of mind. Again for the first time, scientific evidence identifies the core strengths necessary for men and women to be mentally healthy and happy. Such people are well integrated, stable, and autonomous. Their command of themselves produces the self-confidence and optimism necessary to take risks to learn how to adapt more effectively. They are also androgynous. Healthy and happy men are judged by those who know them best to be sensitive to others' needs, co-operative, and warm; healthy and happy women are rated as strong and courageous individualists who can stand up for their beliefs.

Personality Contributors to Human Excellence

A person's androgyny and psychological maturity are far more important contributors than academic measures to the widest variety of adult outcomes that describe human excellence. Why? Because they enrich a person with the strengths for adapting. Rapidly changing technology and vocation, as well as familial relationships, require youth to become as adaptable as possible. Androgynous people share many traits typical of both males and females and thus are better equipped to adapt to their future's uncertain vocational and familial demands. For both men and women, typically masculine strengths, such as assertiveness and self-reliance, contribute to making a lot of money and being leaders. Typically feminine interpersonal strengths, such as caring and empathy, make possible strong and fulfilling familial, friendship, and ethical relationships.

Autonomy

As we become more stably grounded, our growth moves toward increased self - discipline, self-regulation, and self-education, thereby bringing our potential strengths under our control. The knowledge and skills that we have learned become more mobile and thus transferable for creating new adaptations. Autonomous people command their drives and talents, discriminatingly respond to environmental seductions and manipulations, and are able to make their lives what they consciously choose. Maturing people become the agents of their growth and so of their own identities and destinies, which they fearlessly witness, if need be.

Maturing and the Goals of a Liberal Education

Because we have not listened carefully to students, we have failed to understand and assess and thus have underestimated schools' potential maturing effects on which to build a firm foundation for a vision of human excellence. Teachers devote 95 percent of their time to rearranging their liberal arts courses rather than learning how to teach them to fulfil their liberal educative potentials. Research studies show they have meager effects. Few studies assessed the gifts that teachers wished for their students or the actual growth that students report. Award Olympian stars to students for joy of learning, enhanced curiosity, self-educating desires and skills, courage, compassion, and honesty.

Maturing of Mind

The following list orders minds adaptive strengths.

Dimensions Powers of a Mature Person's Mind.

Symbolisation Imagines possibilities.

Accurately and precisely represents, comprehends, and communicated internal and external experiences.

Reflects about and induces from experience.

Other-centredness Takes multiple perspectives.

Analyses experience.

Judges realistically and objectively.

Integration Relates, synthesises, and organises knowledge.

Reasons logically and deductively.

Stabilisation Has knowledge that is accurate, precisely differentiated, broad, complexly organised, readily accessible,

resistant to stress interference, and, if temporarily disrupted or unavailable, readily recoverable.

Has skills that resist disorganization and if disrupted resiliently recover their efficiency.

Autonomy Judges appropriately, independently, and critically.

Has knowledge and skills that are mobile, readily transferable, and available for self-educating and creative purposes.

Schools of the Future are designed to discover more effective ways to prepare students for their future.

By incorporating aspects of this Guidance System into your School's Charter, you can create a competency-based and thematically organised curriculum.

High Developed Symbolising Skills

The skills of consciously articulating and manipulating our experiences symbolically provide us great adaptive powers. Philosophers more than researchers of adolescent and adult development identify such skills to describe maturing minds.

Imagining Possibilities

Imagination secures its potential adaptive power by transforming images into disciplined forms of representation, particularly numbers and words. They are the principal ingredients of conscious thought and the carriers of accumulated knowledge. Imagination then enables us to entertain many possibilities and anticipate consequences.

Evidence is sparse about how education affects imagination, possibly because few studied it developmentally. Imagination and its offshoots, originality and creativity, are not even indexed in the most comprehensive survey of studies of education's affects. But why do about two-thirds of elementary school teachers but fewer than a third of high school teachers in excellent schools describe their typical students as imaginative? Or why do only a third of students and faculty judge their schools as imaginative? Or why do fewer than 20 percent view their schools as playful, an essential component of any imaginative activity? The typical academic focus on mastering facts and developing analytical, logical, and critical modes of thought may crowd out if not squelch such growth from elementary school on. Harvard researchers believed that such repression explains why seniors were no more creative than freshmen. No wonder youth are so readily bored and depend on drugs to bring their deadened imaginative world back to life.

Representing, Comprehending, and Communicating Experience

Mastering reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic is indispensable in contemporary information-service-technologically organised societies. So is mastering oral communicative skills, which are egregiously ignored by educators and reformers. Our speech, more spontaneous than written words, directly mirrors the quality of our minds.

Few educators self consciously and systematically teach oral communication skills. Students, therefore, don't learn how to listen to and build on other's arguments, speak directly and economically, and logically organise and develop their own ideas or those of others. So they don't learn what they may really think.

Effective communication, including speaking ability, is a priority competence for Schools of the Future.

Reflecting About and Inducing from Experience

As our minds mature, we increasingly can detach ourselves from the hubbub and confusion surrounding us to observe, describe and monitor our minds. Reflection is fundamental to securing control over our minds. We have the unique ability to turn awareness back on itself, be aware that we are aware, and track consciously our own thought. Such ability is indispensable to communicating clearly and logically, regulating how we adapt moment by moment, hour by hour, and inducing from our immediate experience more general lessons about how to adapt to future situations.

The ability to represent accurately and precisely our inner and outer experiences, the possession of a richly differentiated vocabulary, and the availability of imaginative, reflective, and inductive skills are simply "basic" to a mature mind. They are the essential foundations necessary on which to develop higher-order judgement, relational, logical, and creative thought.

The mature mind is articulately discerning.

Other-Centered Cognitive Skills

Humans are inherently social. Other people enable us to survive early in life and to develop out potential more fully later in life. They provide us the language to represent our experiences and the skills to use and communicate it meaningfully to others. Those, such as autistic or schizophrenic youth, who create their own language and grammar separate themselves from others and falter in adapting. The ability to know reality as others know it immeasurably extends our ability to adapt, particularly to our social world.

Taking Multiple Perspectives

Recognising that others differ in how they view and interpret their world prepares maturing people to learn how to project themselves into the inner worlds of others and to view the outerworld through their eyes.

The ability to understand accurately how another thinks and feels is critical not only to the development of later evolving cognitive skills but also to the maturation of our values, relationships, and self-concept. Superb teachers know this. So do successful writers, advertisers, politicians, spouses, and parents. To work co-operatively with others requires understanding them well enough to anticipate how they may respond to criticism, sarcasm, or praise.

Educator after educator claims that education should teach a student the skills of empathically taking another's perspective on an issue. Award Olympian stars appropriately.

Educators are right. A liberal education can draw students out of their subjective, self-centered, and closed minded ways of looking at the world.

Consistently reported signs of developing multiple perspectives are declining in black-and-white, authoritarian, and dogmatic modes of thought.

Analysing Experience

Education does enhance analytical skills. (Start a chess club in the school premises during lunch times where students are kept in from the weather prone playground. Add free entrance to the chess club, to the reward menu, for another ten Olympian star awards. Those who win their match, have their entrance token or spangle returned, to use another day.).

Educating for analytical skill, as found in chess, as for every other skill, depends on the maturational level of students' imaginative, communicative, reflective, and other earlier developing skills. For example, Piaget found participating in arguments early in life to be a potent contributor to analytical development, as rabbis have known for centuries.

Judging Realistically and Objectively

As Dewey has told us, the development of an intellectual skill alters other attributes of mind and character. Learning how to take and analyse multiple perspectives, for example, increases open-mindedness, which for Dewey "includes an active desire to listen to more sides than one; to give heed to facts from whatever source they come; to give full attention to alternative possibilities."

Judgement has two frequently confusing meanings. Realistic and objective judgement is basically an other-centered skill. Bloom's independent, critical, evaluative judgement is basically an autonomous skill, though it must involve realistic and objective judgement to be optimally adaptive.

Relational, Synthetic, and Organisational Skills

A person may analyse superbly but synthesise dismally. Knowledge of facts is not enough. Every liberal educator agrees. To tell a student that he is educated because he knows a lot of facts, excels in Trivial Pursuit, and gets an achievement test score of 90 percent deludes him about the powers he will need as an adult. Award Olympian stars to reinforce learning how "to take human activity as a whole... and understand human endeavours not in their isolation but in their relations to one another"; to develop the "discipline of reflective synthesis"; to learn how "to connect man with man... connect the present with the past."

Schools of the Future can produce more relational, synthetic, and organised minds.

Logical and Deductive Reasoning

The ability to deduce and order ideas logically is such a powerful adaptive skill that Piaget believed that logical operations are the core of intelligence. Formal operational or logicodeductive thought emerges in late adolescence and is, for Piaget, the principal contributor to adaptations. Mastering Maths and symbolic logic - the exemplars of deductive thinking - does not necessarily improve logical thinking. Not until teachers self-consciously use maths to teach logicodeductive reasoning, rather than only maths, and then teach it for the skill's transfer and application to other, non-mathematical topics will mathematics' full liberating educating potentials be realised.

Australians should learn useful knowledge and learn how to instruct themselves.

Growth in symbolisation suggests that knowledge becomes accurate and precisely differentiated.

Increasing other-centredness suggests that knowledge becomes richer and broader. Given our social nature, individual self-fulfillment requires knowledge of what humans are and could be. "(No) man realises himself as an individual man except as he comes to understand through the breath of his knowledge his identity with all men." Most philosophers agree, as do those who believe in a common core for general education. To take multiple perspectives accurately in an ever more interdependent world, one must know, not only one's own but at least some others' history, language, culture, and psychology.

Progressive integration means that knowledge becomes more complexly organised and patterned, which makes its stabilisation easier.

Increased stabilisation enhances knowledge's ready accessibility, its resistance to interference by stress, and if temporarily disrupted or blocked, its ability to be resiliently recoverable. That knowledge and skills are dependable is essential to efficient adaption.

Growth in autonomy leads to increased mobility and transferability of knowledge so that it becomes freely available for use in any novel situation.

Autonomous Command of Mind's Skills

"To the Athenian at least, self-rule by discussion, self-discipline, personal responsibility, direct participation in the life of the polis at all points - these things were the breath of life."

From the time of Socrates to that of contemporary educators, students, and researchers, uncommon agreement exists. A mature person commands his or her own powers. Education liberates the mind from the rule of prejudice, dogmatism, and passion to be able to "weigh evidence dispassionately" and critically. It also frees the person from domination of convention and authority to be self-educating and creative.

Appropriate, Independent, and Critical Judgement

The maturing of mind leads to the creation of internal standards or criteria by which to judge.

To adapt well, independent and critical judgement must also be appropriate and must consider the perspective of others and the facts of an issue.

Research compellingly confirms that schooling can produce more autonomous minds. Compared to adolescents who did not go to college, those who did became "less stereotyped and prejudiced in their judgements, more critical in their thinking, and more tolerant, flexible, and autonomous."

Mobility and Availability of Knowledge and Skills

The maturing mind's knowledge and skills become increasingly independent and detached from the original context in which they were stabilised. They become freely available, mobile, and transferable. While stabilisation refers to strengthening habits or skills, autonomy refers to their internalisation and so their ready transferability to new situations. Consider the miracle of learning to read: the months of laboriously stabilising the skill and then its rapid transferability to every kind of material anywhere at any time. Reading has become autonomitized, no longer tied to current readers and workbooks.

Philosophers such as Newman, Whitehead, and Dewey believe that education's ultimate goal must be to secure command of our own minds. It should so enhance our control over knowledge and skills that we can freely apply them to novel or complex situations. Another of mind's miracles is its ability to use its knowledge and skills to operate on its own knowledge and skills to direct, monitor, and further its own continued growth and adaption.

For this reason, many educators value most highly the self-directing, self-educating person.

Self-Educating Minds

What is a self-educating person's mind like? It is the maturing mind that I have been describing, which is capable of using its knowledge and skills to teach itself new knowledge and skills.

The mature mind is ordered and ordering.