Standards, Grades And Tests Are Wildly Outdated, Argues 'End Of Average'
Todd Rose dropped out of high school with D- grades. At 21, he was trying to support a wife and two sons on welfare and minimum wage jobs.
Today he teaches educational neuroscience at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's also the co-founder of Project Variability, a new organization devoted to "the science of the individual and its implications for education, the workforce, and society."
In other words, Todd Rose is not your average guy. But neither are you.
In fact, he argues, absolutely no one is precisely average. And that's a big problem, he tells NPR Ed: "We've come to embrace a way of thinking about ourselves as people that was intentionally designed to ignore all individuality and force everything in reference to an average person."
Admissions offices, HR departments, banks and doctors make life-changing decisions based on averages. But Rose says that "works really well to understand the system or the group. But it fails miserably when you need to understand the individual, which is what we need to do."
Rose talked with us about his new book: The End Of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness.
The opening example you use in the book is that in the 1940s, when the Air Force designed cockpits based on the average measurements of the pilots, there was an unacceptable number of crashes. But when they went back and measured thousands of pilots, across 10 body dimensions, they found that zero of them even came close to the "average" on all 10. So they concluded that they had to redesign the seats and so forth to be adjustable to each person.
Body size is a very concrete example of what I call jaggedness. There is no average pilot. No medium-sized people. When you think of someone's size you think of large, medium, small. Our mass-produced approach to clothing reinforces that. But if that were true you wouldn't need dressing rooms.
So dimensions like height and weight and arm length and waist circumference ...
Yes, they're not nearly as correlated as you would think. Height is one-dimensional, Standards, Grades And Tests Are Wildly Outdated, Argues 'End Of Average' : NPR Ed : NPR: