Students Are Mostly Individual, Pleasure-Seeking Calculators � The Quick and the Ed

Students Are Mostly Individual, Pleasure-Seeking Calculators � The Quick and the Ed

Students Are Mostly Individual, Pleasure-Seeking Calculators

by Forrest Hinton

Incentives matter—a lot. In fact, incentives are the driving forces of all human actions and behaviors, by definition. People would literally sit motionless and quiet if there weren’t compelling reasons to speak or to take action. Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest tends to remain at rest and an object in motion tends to remain in motion, unless acted on by another force. That force, for humans, and for other animals, is the incentive.
Some incentives encourage people to perform certain behaviors. When my body has gone without food for a period of time, a chemical reaction occurs in my stomach that tells my brain that I need victuals. This uneasy feeling inside of me causes me to move from where I am to seek out steak or apples or Starbursts. Other incentives (called disincentives) discourage me from certain behaviors. When I drive down the highway, I follow the speed limit mostly because I fear that law enforcement will pull me over and charge me a fine, causing me to

Colleges Matter

by Ben Miller

At the end of Anya Kamentez’s new book DIY U (look for a review here in the next few days), there’s a fascinating quote from Dennis Littky, a psychologist who runs 50 charter schools across the country:
“When kids drop out of high school people blame the high school. When they drop out of college they blame the high school or the kid. What about the college? Do you take any responsibility?”
Littky is getting at one of the biggest disconnects between how we think about K-12 and higher education. In the former, schools matter immensely, and student failure can be largely blamed on bad teaching and schools. In the latter case, the university matters little—low-income students fail because of their background and they are just harder to educate.
But what makes this belief even stranger is it’s not backed up by data. Research published in Crossing the Finish Line and elsewhere has concretely demonstrated that the odds of graduating for two academically identical students will vary significantly based upon the type and quality of the school in which they first choose